China never deliberately pursued a trade surplus and is willing to be "the world's market", Vice Premier He Lifeng told the World Economic Forum on Tuesday, after the manufacturing giant logged a record surplus that will further unnerve its trade partners.
www.reuters.com
.....
Starmer risks becoming another Westerner who has swallowed yesterday’s story of China
The Prime Minister should not be misguided – Beijing is already in economic decline
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
International Business Editor
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is the International Business Editor of The Telegraph
Sir Keir Starmer is late to the Chinese
economic miracle.
Hyper-growth was already on borrowed time as far back as 2010, undermined by debt saturation and the insidious long-tail effects of the global financial crisis.
China’s share of world GDP has fallen for the last four years at market exchange rates. Capital Economics expects it to fall again this year, touching lows seen almost a decade ago.
China’s output has already fallen back from three quarters to two thirds of US levels. It will not surpass the US over the next half century – assuming that Congress and the American people act in time to halt the dangerous buffoonery and predatory wag-the-dog wars of Donald Trump. Talk of a superpower sorpasso is now just a relic of past hubris.
....communist China is pursuing a mercantilist policy of
strategic autarky and one-way trade in much the same way as the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) before it*. China’s trade surplus hit a record $1.2tn (£870bn) last year.
Goldman Sachs says the surplus has reached 1pc of global GDP, the highest ever by any nation in known economic history. It is an even larger percentage than during the China Shock 1.0, which so destabilised the world economy in the early 2000s and so pauperised blue collar workers in Western democracies.
Retail sales slowed and investment contracted compared to previous years as Chinese policymakers aim to make domestic demand a top priority in 2026.
www.euronews.com
.... US response?
"We will deter China in the Indo-Pacific through strength, not confrontation."
Translation?
We will outcompete China economically?
.....
Beijing accused of failing to stem flow of raw materials for ecstasy and meth to criminal gangs
www.telegraph.co.uk
Drug experts from the EU have told The Telegraph how traffickers conceal Chinese chemicals in containers labelled “electronic goods” or innocuous shipments of goods such as PVC plastic. They then exploit legitimate land, air and sea routes to send them to the gangs.
Specialist fraudsters are deployed to bypass customs and export checks at the borders with doctored paperwork, sources said.
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* The Qing Dynasty was the dynasty that caused the Century of Humiliation that exercises Xi so much.
Europe became addicted, literally, to tea. They bought all the necessary paraphernalia as well, tea cups, pots, matching sugar bowls and milk pitchers, blue willow crockery.....
And Europe went broke because China would only accept silver.
So Britain stole their tea plants and started growing it themselves in India and started selling opium to the Chinese to recover the silver they had spent on their tea addiction.
Now China seems bent on swapping fentanyl for opium.
....
More from AEP
China is doubling down on its worst pathologies. A full two decades after the regime promised to curtail extreme over-investment – and instead let the Chinese people enjoy the fruits of their labour – it is still building more excess plant and manufacturing capacity that the world cannot absorb.
This has pushed its investment ratio off charts to 40.5pc of GDP. Other Asian tigers never came close to this level.
“Economic growth is being powered almost entirely by investment, despite diminishing returns and escalating debt,” says Mark Williams, head of Asia at Capital Economics. He expects China’s true rate of trend growth to fall to 2pc by the late 2020s.
Documents from the Communist Party School leave no doubt that the purpose of this maniacal industrial strategy is to mobilise technological change to overthrow the capitalist global order – but while this goal is rooted in modern Marxist doctrine, we could almost be talking about the early 1840s.
As America’s John Quincy Adams wrote at the time – in defence of Britain – the First Opium War was not about opium but rather about the refusal of China to “hold commercial intercourse with the rest of mankind upon terms of equal reciprocity”.
China was exporting but refusing to import, sucking the world’s silver currency into a deflationary black hole. Sound familiar?
