Author Topic: US-China (& Japan, South China Sea-- Taiwan, Vietnam, Philippines, etc)  (Read 398042 times)




Crafty_Dog

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GPF: Chinese laser attacks on Australian helipcopters.
« Reply #803 on: June 03, 2019, 10:06:24 AM »
The South Pacific. Newly re-elected Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison told reporters this morning that the three Chinese warships that arrived at Sydney Harbor this morning were on a reciprocal four-day visit approved by his government. He cautioned that their visit should not be over-analyzed – but his pleas fall on deaf ears at GPF. Indeed, it is hard not to scrutinize the Chinese navy’s sudden visit to Sydney considering last week’s reports that Australian military helicopters were forced to land during operations in the South China Sea after laser attacks launched by Chinese militia vessels, a charge China’s Defense Ministry fiercely denied. As for the prime minister, he is currently in the Solomon Islands, making the small and strategically located Pacific island nation his first official visit after the election. There, Morrison will announce $250 million in infrastructure investments and a $250 million grant to a program designed to help island residents get work in Australia – all to make sure that Australia, not China, is the country’s international partner of first choice. The competition between the two countries is very real, even if they appear friendly on the surface.

ccp

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Finally Trump has awakened us
« Reply #804 on: June 08, 2019, 10:10:31 AM »
How the pols and policy gurus totally misread history on China:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/30-years-after-tiananmen-us-doesnt-get-china/591310/

A American friend of mine has a son who lives in
China and speaks fluent Chinese.

He would tell me a dozen yrs ago how the Chinese would laugh at how stupid the US was with regards to them.

All the while ripping us off and playing us for fools.




« Last Edit: June 08, 2019, 10:12:38 AM by ccp »

ccp

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Has, so far been wrong about China:

"Collapse of China
Chang says that China is on the brink of collapse and that the people are one step away from revolution.[7] Chang also says that China is a "new dot-com bubble", adding that the rapid growth by China is not supported by various internal factors such as decrease in population growth as well as slowing retail sales.[8] In a separate interview, he remarked that China achieved its 149.2 percent of its current trade surplus with the United States through "lying, cheating, and stealing" and that if China decided to realize its threat that had been expressed since August 2007 to sell its US Treasuries, it would actually hurt its own economy which is reliant on exports to the United States; the economy of the United States would be hurt by a sell-off of Treasuries, causing the United States to buy less from China, which would in turn hurt the Chinese economy.[9]

Chang has said that the Chinese government would collapse in 2012 and 2016.[10][11] Shen Dingli, director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University, wrote that Chang's predictions "collapse his own credibility."

I would be curious as to what he thinks at this time.
Hopefully he is NOT wrong about the prediction but only wrong about the time frame.

DougMacG

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Re: US-China, Hong Kong:extradition bill protests
« Reply #806 on: June 12, 2019, 04:49:10 PM »
The struggle going on now in HK is a BFD.  Hardly covered yet in the US press.

An estimated 1 million Hong Kong residents took to the streets over the weekend in ongoing demonstrations to protest a new bill that would allow extradition to mainland China of those suspected of criminal offenses. Hong Kong citizens fear that, if the bill is adopted, China’s notoriously repressive and corrupt criminal laws will be used against Beijing’s political opponents in Hong Kong.  (Read.It.All.)
https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2019/06/11/hong-kongs-protests-against-china-show-u-s-appeasement-of-beijing-has-failed-to-bring-reform/


Hong Kong’s young protesters back with a vengeance as all-out chaos erupts on city’s streets
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3014257/hong-kongs-student-protesters-back-vengeance-all-out-chaos
HONG KONG (Reuters) - Hong Kong police fired rubber bullets and tear gas at demonstrators who threw plastic bottles on Wednesday as protests against an extradition bill that would allow people to be sent to mainland China for trial descended into violent chaos.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-extradition/hong-kong-police-fire-rubber-bullets-as-extradition-bill-protests-turn-to-chaos-idUSKCN1TC1WR

Hong Kong police fire rubber bullets as extradition bill protests turn to chaos

https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3014210/ghosts-occupy-return-haunt-hong-kong
« Last Edit: June 12, 2019, 05:29:50 PM by DougMacG »

G M

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Re: US-China, Hong Kong:extradition bill protests
« Reply #807 on: June 13, 2019, 12:58:06 AM »
Still trying to figure out the "Orange man bad!" spin.


The struggle going on now in HK is a BFD.  Hardly covered yet in the US press.

An estimated 1 million Hong Kong residents took to the streets over the weekend in ongoing demonstrations to protest a new bill that would allow extradition to mainland China of those suspected of criminal offenses. Hong Kong citizens fear that, if the bill is adopted, China’s notoriously repressive and corrupt criminal laws will be used against Beijing’s political opponents in Hong Kong.  (Read.It.All.)
https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2019/06/11/hong-kongs-protests-against-china-show-u-s-appeasement-of-beijing-has-failed-to-bring-reform/


Hong Kong’s young protesters back with a vengeance as all-out chaos erupts on city’s streets
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3014257/hong-kongs-student-protesters-back-vengeance-all-out-chaos
HONG KONG (Reuters) - Hong Kong police fired rubber bullets and tear gas at demonstrators who threw plastic bottles on Wednesday as protests against an extradition bill that would allow people to be sent to mainland China for trial descended into violent chaos.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-extradition/hong-kong-police-fire-rubber-bullets-as-extradition-bill-protests-turn-to-chaos-idUSKCN1TC1WR

Hong Kong police fire rubber bullets as extradition bill protests turn to chaos

https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3014210/ghosts-occupy-return-haunt-hong-kong

ccp

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Re: US-China (& Japan, South China Sea-- Vietnam, Philippines, etc)
« Reply #808 on: June 13, 2019, 05:42:58 AM »
GM:

"Still trying to figure out the "Orange man bad!" spin"

maybe the "spin " is just this,

Dough wrote :

" Hardly covered yet in the US press "

Since the MSM can't think of a way to use this to make Trump look bad they simply ignore it and spend the whole day talking impeachment , Russia interference, and obstruction ,  and the rest of their propaganda to desperately get the public opinion to change so over 50 % want impeachment. 

Push the nonstop farce and ignore real events . 

I haven't seen the new yet but the tanker explosions will be easily be spun as thus:

If Trump had only kept the genius ObamaKerry deal with Iran going this would never had happened.

Orange man is leading us to war because he is not simple accepting that Iran should get nuclear bombs and missles
like the first socialist  prezident .


DougMacG

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Re: US-China, Hong Kong:extradition bill protests
« Reply #809 on: June 13, 2019, 05:54:27 AM »
Xi man bad.  Totalitarianism bad.  Coercion / Fascism bad.  One million people take to the streets desperate to save their last shred of freedom and no one in the world comes to their support.

Hong Kong rule was handed back to the ruthless Communists while Bill Clinton was President.

Nothing in this struggle fits the American MSM Trump man bad narrative.

G M

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Re: US-China, Hong Kong:extradition bill protests
« Reply #810 on: June 13, 2019, 12:41:18 PM »
Xi man bad.  Totalitarianism bad.  Coercion / Fascism bad.  One million people take to the streets desperate to save their last shred of freedom and no one in the world comes to their support.

Hong Kong rule was handed back to the ruthless Communists while Bill Clinton was President.

Nothing in this struggle fits the American MSM Trump man bad narrative.

https://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/the-sky-high-stakes-in-hong-kong/

If it were up to me, Trump would make a clear statement that unless the PRC backs off of HK, 100% tariffs on everything out of the PRC. Totally locked out of the US market. We will just see how long Xi Pooh Bear remains emperor after that.


DougMacG

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US-China, Gilder' Huawei an asset not a threat
« Reply #811 on: June 14, 2019, 06:00:43 AM »
https://www.wsj.com/articles/huawei-is-an-asset-not-a-threat-11558390913

 George Gilder goes against the crowd on this. I don't agree with him but would like to learn his viewpoint.  He seems naive on the security question but he knows the technology better than I do. I will try to find a version of this that doesn't require subscription.
—------
https://www.discovery.org/a/huawei-is-an-asset-not-a-threat/

Huawei Is an Asset, Not a Threat
Ren Zhengfei’s company should be celebrated as a triumph of the U.S.-led global trading system.
GEORGE GILDER MAY 20, 2019 ECONOMICS, TECHNOLOGY
READ AT THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Among the world’s most inspiring business voices is Ren Zhengfei, founder-philosopher of Huawei, the disruptive and now condemned Chinese telecom-equipment company. Vilified as a cat’s-paw of the Chinese government, Mr. Ren has decided to place his trust in America’s legal system and launch a court challenge to the U.S. government’s campaign against his company—and family. His daughter, Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou, is fighting extradition to the U.S. from Canada on murky charges that she helped financial institutions violate American sanctions on Iran. She has been under house arrest in Vancouver, British Columbia, since December.

The U.S. is about to learn not to underestimate Mr. Ren. In three decades he turned the equivalent of $3,000 into China’s telecom-equipment champion and a multinational colossus. Huawei boasts $105 billion in annual revenue, operates in 170 countries, and employs 180,000 people. Its finance division, run by Ms. Meng, is staffed by hundreds of graduates of Harvard, Cambridge, Wharton and Yale.

In the U.S., anxious experts and rivals have offered many explanations and alibis for the rise of Huawei. Mr. Ren, they say, is an ex-officer of the People’s Liberation Army who created his company as a Trojan horse for communist hackers and spies. Huge subsidies and heists of intellectual property allegedly account for Huawei’s ascent.

Mr. Ren’s army career, however, was routine for Chinese youths and focused on engineering. As the son of a “capitalist roader,” Mr. Ren launched one of the first fully private firms in mainland China, pioneering a U.S.-style employee stock-ownership plan. Huawei triumphed by outperforming the state-owned enterprises that had previously dominated China’s telecom industry. Huawei’s independent auditor, KPMG, reports no major state subsidies and verifies Huawei’s private ownership structure, with 98.6% owned by employees and 1.4% by Mr. Ren.

Mr. Ren is a vocal admirer of American openness. “Throughout history, China has shut itself away from the outside world for long periods of time, making it impossible to become strong,” he has said. “The U.S. is the world’s most open nation, and thus the world’s strongest.” A supply-side admirer of President Trump’s tax cuts, he says: “Benefits from increased investment can offset loss of revenue.”

The claim leveled most frequently against Huawei is that it steals. But rival technology companies necessarily imitate one another and use common components under industry standards, provoking tensions over intellectual property. In January 2003, the American router pioneer Cisco hit Huawei with a wide-ranging lawsuit alleging Mr. Ren’s company had copied Cisco’s software code and violated several of its patents. Mr. Ren saw the lawsuit as an opportunity, declaring his trust in the U.S. legal system and sending Huawei lawyers and engineers to remote East Texas to defend the company. The two firms eventually settled their dispute.

In the years since the settlement Huawei has become a prime mover in the telecommunications industry. It has paid U.S. chip maker Qualcomm more than $1 billion in royalties in recent years and last year bought $11 billion worth of chips from American companies such as Intel and Broadcom. Today, with some 2,300 patents, Huawei is the world leader in the new 5G generation of broadband wireless architecture and offers the only turnkey system that can be installed in a working network.

In recent months the U.S. government has begun backpedaling on specific claims of wrongdoing by Huawei, reverting to a more general argument that it does the bidding of Beijing, which requires Chinese companies to cooperate with its intelligence services. Anathematizing Chinese companies simply for being Chinese would cripple the world economy. The international trading system and its global supply chains have allowed America to build the world’s four most valuable companies: Microsoft , Amazon, Apple and Google. Each outsources manufacturing to China and Taiwan.

If U.S. telecom companies and network managers are worried about Huawei, they should ask to see the company’s software source codes. If consumers interpret the continual patter of software upgrades as a threat to privacy, Washington should assign the role of managing them to domestic telecommunications companies. Telecom pioneer Daniel Berninger has proposed creating a new Network Integrity Board to mitigate fears of sabotage or breakdown because of equipment flaws. Its model would be the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates plane crashes.

With a steady stream of news stories about data breaches and international hacking, people have grown understandably nervous about what the future holds for personal privacy, economic growth and national security. Easing these fears will require the development of a new and secure internet architecture. The good news is that technologists around the world are developing such a system.

Huawei isn’t a problem. It’s an opportunity to revitalize the U.S. economy and enhance its digital infrastructure. The U.S. should embrace Huawei as a triumph of the American-led system rather than push it into the arms of Chinese hard-liners who revel in autarkic dreams.

Mr. Gilder is author of “Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy.”


« Last Edit: June 14, 2019, 06:13:23 AM by DougMacG »

ccp

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Re: US-China (& Japan, South China Sea-- Vietnam, Philippines, etc)
« Reply #812 on: June 14, 2019, 07:03:59 AM »
Gilder has always decried any protectionism from China
he has always , since the 90's down played the "threat" from china.

In the 90s a remember quite well with astonishment how he said the Chinese stealing from us with but a blip and to think the Chinese would not be able to come up with the stuff anyway on their own was foolish

On these points I could not DISAGREE with GG more .

He certainly is NOT a genius on global politics .

ccp

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Gilder can pooh pah this all he wants
« Reply #813 on: June 14, 2019, 08:00:08 AM »
but thank GOD there are some politicians who don't have sons taking money through well connected business deals with China
who are looking at this with their eyes wide open:

https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/rick-scott-deal/2019/06/13/id/920267/

G M

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https://sharylattkisson.com/2019/06/organs-from-chinese-prisoners-harvested-insider-account/

https://nypost.com/2019/06/01/chinese-dissidents-are-being-executed-for-their-organs-former-hospital-worker-says/

Chinese dissidents are being executed for their organs, former hospital worker says
By Steven W. Mosher June 1, 2019 | 9:59am | Updated

China is rounding up dissidents and barbarically harvesting their organs, while profiting greatly in the process, according to reports.

Zheng Qiaozhi — we will call him George — still has nightmares. He was interning at China’s Shenyang Army General Hospital when he was drafted to be part of an organ-harvesting team.

The prisoner was brought in, tied hand and foot, but very much alive. The army doctor in charge sliced him open from chest to belly button and exposed his two kidneys. “Cut the veins and arteries,” he told his shocked intern. George did as he was told. Blood spurted everywhere.

The kidneys were placed in an organ-transplant container.

Then the doctor ordered George to remove the man’s eyeballs. Hearing that, the dying prisoner gave him a look of sheer terror, and George froze. “I can’t do it,” he told the doctor, who then quickly scooped out the man’s eyeballs himself.

George was so unnerved by what he had seen that he soon quit his job at the hospital and returned home. Later, afraid that he might be the next victim of China’s forced organ-transplant business, he fled to Canada and assumed a new identity.

First-person accounts like George’s are understandably rare. The “transplant tourists” who come to China are naturally told nothing about the “donors” of their new heart, liver or kidney. And those who are executed for their organs tell no tales.

Experts estimate that between 60,000 and 100,000 organs are transplanted annually in China. Multiply that number times the cost of a liver transplant ($170,000) or a kidney transplant ($130,000), and the result is an eye-popping $10 billion to 20 billion.

And where do these hundreds of thousands of organs come from? George was told nothing about the background of the young man whose kidneys he fatally removed except that he was “under 18 and in good health.”

‘The world is beginning to wake up to the fact that virtually every organ transplant in China costs the life of an innocent human being’
But experts like Ethan Gutmann, author of several books on the subject, believe that the vast majority are obtained by executing prisoners of conscience.

One particularly rich source of fresh organs for China’s transplant industry in recent years has been the Falun Gong, which was declared a heretical Buddhist sect in 1999 by then-Party Secretary Jiang Zemin. Hundreds of thousands — perhaps millions — of the group’s followers have been arrested and disappeared into a vast network of secret prisons, many never to reemerge — at least in one piece.

The Muslim minorities of China’s far west are apparently next in line. Over the past couple of years, between one to three million Uighur and Kazakh men have been arrested and sent to concentration camps — Beijing calls them “vocational training centers” — in the region.

Tellingly, all these prisoners of conscience not only had their blood drawn upon entry but also had their organs examined, presumably so they could be more quickly matched with those willing to pay for them. Even more ominously, dedicated organ-transplant lanes have been opened at airports in the region, while crematoria are being built nearby.

All this suggests that assembly-line harvesting of Uighur, Kazakh and Tibetan organs is already getting underway. China is not just ridding itself of troublesome minorities, it is profiting mightily in the process.

Despite China’s claims to the contrary, its transplant business is booming. And, thanks to a Western technology called ECMO — extracorporeal membrane oxygenation — it has become much, much more lucrative.

Twenty years ago, it was only possible to successfully harvest an organ or two — two kidneys, say, or a heart — from a transplant victim. The other organs, such as the lungs and liver, had to be discarded because they had been deprived of oxygen too long to be usable.

Now, the victims are put on an ECMO machine, which serves as an artificial heart and lung and keeps every last organ fresh enough to be harvested. Before ECMO, a victim’s few salvageable organs were worth maybe $250,000. Now, with ECMO, every organ can be harvested — even the skin — and the victim is easily worth two or three times as much. ECMO, which has saved countless lives in the West, has had the opposite effect in China: It has accelerated the killing of innocent people.


In recent years, China has gone to ever greater lengths to cover up these crimes from international scrutiny. In January 2015, the government announced that it would only use organs from voluntary civilian organ donors and that the use of organs from executed prisoners would be banned.

As proof, they even published statistics. These showed a straight-line increase in “voluntary” organ donations so picture-perfect it could only be fabricated. And China’s “official” number of voluntary donors had only risen to 6,000 by 2018, a number far too small to supply the many tens of thousands of organs actually transplanted that year.

Proof that the slaughter of “donors” continues is revealed by the country’s amazingly short wait times for organs. In normal countries, sick people can wait for many months or years for an organ to become available. The wait time in the UK is three years. The wait time in Canada is double that. Only in China do organ tourists receive a kidney, heart or liver transplant within days or weeks of arriving. In fact, in some cases patients have reported that their transplant surgeries were scheduled before they even arrived in China — something that could only happen as a result of forced organ harvesting.

The world is beginning to wake up to the fact that virtually every organ transplant in China costs the life of an innocent human being. That’s why countries like Israel, Spain, Italy and Taiwan have already banned transplant tourism.

In the past, primitive peoples often practiced human sacrifice in order to propitiate the gods.

But China’s officially atheistic Communist Party couldn’t care less about pleasing or displeasing a higher being. It has resurrected the practice of human sacrifice for two very practical reasons: to rid itself of troublesome minorities and to turn a huge profit.

China’s organ-transplant assembly line is not only murder for hire but may turn out to be a kind of genocide as well.

Steven W. Mosher is the president of the Population Research Institute and the author of “Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order,” out now.

DougMacG

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China's combined debt burden at all time high, House of cards?
« Reply #815 on: June 20, 2019, 04:56:28 AM »
https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/China-s-debt-mountain-scales-new-heights-on-trade-war-stimulus

The ratio of debt to gross domestic product, excluding the financial industry, totaled 248.8% at the end of March, according to a study by two government think tanks. That figure is 5.1 percentage points higher than it was at the end of December.

ccp

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Re: US-China (& Japan, South China Sea-- Vietnam, Philippines, etc)
« Reply #816 on: June 20, 2019, 06:04:33 AM »
"The ratio of debt to gross domestic product, excluding the financial industry, totaled 248.8% at the end of March, according to a study by two government think tanks. That figure is 5.1 percentage points higher than it was at the end of December."

WOW!!!   :-o
Between Trump telling us how great everything is and the DEms promising to exponentially increase consumer spending
the day of reckoning continues to get closer.


DougMacG

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Re: US-China, South China Sea, Philippines,
« Reply #817 on: June 20, 2019, 01:25:31 PM »
https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3015421/collision-highlights-need-south-china-sea-code

Chinese vessel crushes a Filipino fishing boat, leaves them for others to rescue.  Incident highlights the need for agreed rules.

Crafty_Dog

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GPF: Germany eyes the Taiwan Strait
« Reply #818 on: June 21, 2019, 09:24:19 PM »
The world retains its ability to surprise:

Germany eyes the Taiwan Strait. High-ranking German officials are discussing sending a warship through the Chinese-claimed and highly contested Taiwan Strait, which U.S. warships have been visiting with increasing frequency, according to a Politico report citing two unnamed German officials. A decision this summer is unlikely. This is interesting less for what it means for the future of the Taiwan Strait and more for what it tells us about the gradual increase in Indo-Pacific activity among European powers. In April, the Chinese navy shadowed a French frigate as it transited the strait, and last month, France deployed its only aircraft carrier group to Southeast Asia. The U.K., too, has said it may start conducting freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea. But Berlin has been much more cautious about any displays of military force. Its potential change of heart is likely motivated by a desire to prove its value as an alliance partner to the United States, which is still holding the threat of tariffs on foreign cars over the export-dependent German economy and perpetually frustrated over the meager military budgets of many of its NATO allies.

G M

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Re: GPF: Germany eyes the Taiwan Strait
« Reply #819 on: June 21, 2019, 10:07:20 PM »
So, Trump has got them to start acting like allies.


The world retains its ability to surprise:

Germany eyes the Taiwan Strait. High-ranking German officials are discussing sending a warship through the Chinese-claimed and highly contested Taiwan Strait, which U.S. warships have been visiting with increasing frequency, according to a Politico report citing two unnamed German officials. A decision this summer is unlikely. This is interesting less for what it means for the future of the Taiwan Strait and more for what it tells us about the gradual increase in Indo-Pacific activity among European powers. In April, the Chinese navy shadowed a French frigate as it transited the strait, and last month, France deployed its only aircraft carrier group to Southeast Asia. The U.K., too, has said it may start conducting freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea. But Berlin has been much more cautious about any displays of military force. Its potential change of heart is likely motivated by a desire to prove its value as an alliance partner to the United States, which is still holding the threat of tariffs on foreign cars over the export-dependent German economy and perpetually frustrated over the meager military budgets of many of its NATO allies.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: US-China (& Japan, South China Sea-- Vietnam, Philippines, etc)
« Reply #820 on: June 22, 2019, 06:28:17 PM »
Maybe we should score it under the "Promises Kept" thread  :-D

G M

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Re: US-China (& Japan, South China Sea-- Vietnam, Philippines, etc)
« Reply #821 on: June 22, 2019, 06:46:03 PM »
Maybe we should score it under the "Promises Kept" thread  :-D

Dems: it’s because of Obama’s bowing!

G M

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What the Hong Kong Protests Are Really About
« Reply #822 on: July 04, 2019, 09:13:01 PM »
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/opinion/hong-kong.html

What the Hong Kong Protests Are Really About
Chinese people in Hong Kong live better than any in Chinese history. This gives moral force to our way of life.

By Jimmy Lai
Mr. Lai is the founder and majority owner of Next Media, which publishes the Apple Daily newspaper and Next Magazine in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

July 1, 2019

Riot police firing tear gas during clashes with protestors outside the Legislature in Hong Kong, on Monday.
Credit
Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times


ImageRiot police firing tear gas during clashes with protestors outside the Legislature in Hong Kong, on Monday.
Riot police firing tear gas during clashes with protestors outside the Legislature in Hong Kong, on Monday.CreditCreditLam Yik Fei for The New York Times
阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版
When hundreds of thousands of my fellow Hong Kongers took to the streets to demonstrate last month, most of the world saw people protesting provocative legislation that would allow extraditions to mainland China.

But the Chinese government, which supported the extradition measure, had a much broader view of the protests. It recognized them as the first salvo in a new cold war, one in which the otherwise unarmed Hong Kong people wield the most powerful weapon in the fight against the Chinese Communist Party: moral force.

In much of the West, moral force is underestimated. Communists never make that mistake. There is a reason Beijing will never invite the pope or the Dalai Lama for a visit to China. The government knows that whenever its leaders must stand beside anyone with even the slightest moral legitimacy, they suffer by the comparison. Moral force makes Communists insecure.

And for good reason. As China was reminded this week, as riot police officers used pepper spray and batons on demonstrators in Hong Kong, the protests have been holding a mirror up to China. What rattles Beijing is that it sees in that mirror what the rest of the world sees: a monster.


Since his ascendancy to power in 2012, President Xi Jinping has made no secret of his goal to purge the Western influences that he believes are contaminating China. In Hong Kong, he has been working to erode the limited political freedoms and rule of law that make Hong Kong the special region of China that it is — and that have long made Hong Kong economically valuable to China, ironically enough.

Nearly all us in Hong Kong who are Chinese are refugees or the descendants of refugees from China. We have no illusions about what happens to people when they come up short in the eyes of the Communist Party. Everyone in Hong Kong knows that introducing the possibility of imprisoning us in China, as the extradition treaty does, would signal the end of life in Hong Kong as we know it.

In Beijing’s view, of course, Hong Kong’s colonial past undermines its legitimacy as a Chinese society. Never mind that the system of limited freedoms that the British introduced to Hong Kong existed long before Communism was established on the mainland. (Communism is itself a Western import to China, by the way.)

The inconvenient truth is that Chinese people in Hong Kong (and in Taiwan) live better than any Chinese in Chinese history. This gives moral force to our way of life. It also shows the extraordinary things Chinese people can accomplish when given the freedom to do so.

Hong Kong’s moral force has also been economically good for China, since the moral force of our free society cannot be separated from its prosperity. It is not likely that Beijing agreed to have the government of Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, suspend consideration of the extradition bill just because a lot of people marched against it. No doubt President Xi learned much about capital flight and jittery investors during those protests and saw how badly China still needs a prosperous and functioning Hong Kong.


This is Mr. Xi’s great weakness: If he crushes the soul of Hong Kong, he will lose the Hong Kong he needs to make China the global power he envisions.

So it is not trade with China that the West should aim to stop. China is also simply too big now as a market for and producer of goods and services. We all need to trade with China, just as we all need to trade among ourselves. It should be possible for the West and China to trade freely, while at the same time competing as opposing value systems.

People at protests against changing Hong Kong’s extradition law sat outside the Legislative Council building in Hong Kong, on June 21.
Credit
Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times


ImagePeople at protests against changing Hong Kong’s extradition law sat outside the Legislative Council building in Hong Kong, on June 21.
People at protests against changing Hong Kong’s extradition law sat outside the Legislative Council building in Hong Kong, on June 21.CreditLam Yik Fei for The New York Times

The values war is the real war. For the West to prevail, it must support the tiny little corner of China where its virtues now operate: Hong Kong. These values may be a legacy of Western rule, but for Hong Kongers who have grown up with them, they feel as natural as any part of our Chinese heritage.

Our struggle with Beijing, if successful, can help China’s leaders begin to accept the need for authority earned through the moral admiration of the world, not through the barrel of a gun. But if Beijing’s approach prevails, when China becomes the world’s biggest economy — which it inevitably will — the West will face a far greater monster.

The West’s moral authority is its most powerful weapon. Moral authority is where China is most vulnerable to humiliation, at home and abroad. Beijing has no weapons save for force, which gets harder to rely on, the more the world can see that for itself.

Jimmy Lai is the founder and majority owner of Next Media, which publishes the Apple Daily newspaper and Next Magazine in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

DougMacG

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Re: US-China, technology and patents
« Reply #823 on: July 09, 2019, 06:58:52 AM »
In 2008 Chinese authorities received 204,268 patent filings, compared with 428,881 in the US. However, by 2017 China’s State Intellectual Property Office received 1.3 million applications — more than double the number received by the US, according to statistics from the World Intellectual Property Organization, the global forum for policy in the field.
https://www.ft.com/content/8ecf7464-8d05-11e9-b8cb-26a9caa9d67b?segmentId=a7371401-027d-d8bf-8a7f-2a746e767d56

China is narrowing the gap between it and the U.S. in the race for dominance in high-technology markets, according to a recent Nikkei analysis. Chinese companies expanded their market share in nine sectors including mobile infrastructure in 2018, while the U.S. grew in eight, the analysis of data collected by various research companies showed. Of 74 high-tech products and services covered by the survey, an analysis of the top 5 shares in 25 key markets found that Chinese companies expanded their presence in mobile base stations as well as smartphones and tablets.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Business-trends/China-makes-gains-against-US-in-high-tech-markets2
« Last Edit: July 09, 2019, 07:00:43 AM by DougMacG »

DougMacG

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What impact will the Hong Kong protests have on China?
« Reply #824 on: July 10, 2019, 07:46:32 AM »
The Hong Kong protests succeeded, for the moment. The power was in the numbers. Hong Kong is part of China. One country, two systems? BS.

For the most part, Chinese people probably have no idea what happened in Hong Kong. Chinese People traveling outside of the country know. Chinese people in the US know. Chinese students studying at MIT know. Hard to keep all of this a secret.

It seems to me this has huge implications for the future of China. It seems to me that the US has huge leverage here in our ability to put out this message and others to the Chinese people. No?
« Last Edit: July 10, 2019, 07:48:39 AM by DougMacG »

Crafty_Dog

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Re: US-China (& Japan, South China Sea-- Vietnam, Philippines, etc)
« Reply #825 on: July 10, 2019, 10:50:01 PM »
Wouldn't that be contrary to President Trump's policy of not meddling in the internal affairs of other countries with human rights stuff?

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Re: US-China (& Japan, South China Sea-- Vietnam, Philippines, etc)
« Reply #826 on: July 10, 2019, 11:04:27 PM »
Wouldn't that be contrary to President Trump's policy of not meddling in the internal affairs of other countries with human rights stuff?

The PRC would agree that both HK and Taiwan are internal matters. Both HK and Taiwan would not.

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Re: US-China, implications of the Hong Kong protests
« Reply #827 on: July 11, 2019, 04:54:07 AM »
Wouldn't that be contrary to President Trump's policy of not meddling in the internal affairs of other countries with human rights stuff?

True.  My thought is that reelection is his highest priority, it will define whether his Presidency was a success or failure. The  China trade war directly threatens that. A new deal with China is the planned centerpiece of his reelection campaign. He risks much to have his negotiating adversaries see him as an undisciplined loose cannon. Short of invasion or military action, he always seems willing to escalate until he gets the concessions he seeks.

Separate from involvement of Trump or the US, is the success of the HK protests a potential model for mainland dissent?

Sadly, I don’t think so. The PRC isn’t willing to go full Tiananmen on HK just yet. However, similar protests in the PRC would be crushed. As in literally, under tank treads.


DougMacG

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Re: US-China, implications of the Hong Kong protest
« Reply #828 on: July 11, 2019, 08:46:00 AM »
"Sadly, I don’t think so. The PRC isn’t willing to go full Tiananmen on HK just yet. However, similar protests in the PRC would be crushed. As in literally, under tank treads."

G M,  I think you have that exactly right. Still I think that is the greatest fear of the ruling party. The ruling party has now seen it happen in Hong Kong beyond their control or at least beyond their willingness to act.

The leader in 1989 during the Tiananmen Square uprising was Deng Xiaoping and he eventually brought out tanks to crush unarmed protesters.  Xi Jinping was a party secretary at the city level at that point in his career. As leader of China now, he has been untested in this regard and taken every step possible to remain untested.  He very much does not want to be a leader who had to crush his dissenters with military force.

Like Putin, like Maduro, Xi wants to rule with the perception that he has the support of the people.  That illusion is gone if he has to crush major protests with force.

President Trump has been unable to seal a deal with China that at one point seemed to be within his reach. The policy mix is appease and escalate with unconventional warfare.

DougMacG

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Re: US-China, South China Sea-
« Reply #829 on: July 11, 2019, 09:44:31 AM »
Under President Xi Jinping, China has more forcefully asserted its claims to more than 80% of the South China Sea, building runways and military facilities on territory claimed by other nations. It has also raised a navy of more than over 300 ships, eclipsing the U.S. to become the largest in the Asia Pacific. China’s investments in patrolling the South China Sea have given it a leg up in the race to secure energy and fishing resources that account for about a tenth of the global catch. In addition, China has utilized less conventional means to clear the sea of its maritime adversaries—a so-called maritime militia of well-equipped vessels numbering in the hundreds—disguised as fishing vessels that patrol, surveil, resupply, and sometimes, provoke.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-south-china-sea-silent-war/

Crafty_Dog

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WSJ: Arms sale to Taiwan
« Reply #830 on: July 13, 2019, 02:45:57 PM »

By The Editorial Board
July 12, 2019 6:45 pm ET
An U.S. made F-16V fighter jet lands on the freeway in Changhua county, central Taiwan during the 35th Han Kuang drill on May 28. Photo: sam yeh/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Deterring Chinese military dominance in the Indo-Pacific is a top U.S. strategic goal, and the Trump Administration made progress this week with a tentative $2.2 billion arms sale to Taiwan. The next sale should be F-16V fighter jets, which is the island’s most pressing defense need.

The Pentagon on Monday notified Congress of the sale of 108 M1A2T Abrams tanks, 250 Stinger missiles, and transport vehicles. Lawmakers have 30 days to object to the deal, but that’s unlikely given the near-unanimous backing of pro-Taiwan legislation in Congress in recent years.
Acosta Resigns and Pelosi vs. Progressives
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Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang called on the U.S. to “immediately cancel” the deal, and on Friday China said it will sanction U.S. companies that participate in the arms sale. That’s mostly symbolic since China doesn’t buy arms from the U.S.

But what Beijing has never understood is its starring role in consolidating Washington’s cooperation with Taipei. Last month’s voyage of the Chinese Liaoning aircraft carrier through the Taiwan Strait is the type of saber-rattling that increases American support for the island’s democracy, as Taiwanese want little more than to preserve their freedom.

Beijing’s latest power play in Hong Kong is turning even Taiwan’s pragmatic politics further against China. Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen’s approval rating rose 10% this spring after rebuking Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” model, and she looks prescient after Beijing’s gambit last month to pass a bill in Hong Kong allowing extradition to Mainland China. Some two million city residents marched against it, and Chief Executive Carrie Lam on Tuesday declared “the bill is dead.”

The extradition fiasco has even changed the pro-Chinese tune of Taiwan’s opposition Nationalist Party (KMT). Han Kuo-yu, a populist star of the KMT running for president in the island’s 2020 election, has campaigned on expanding economic ties to China. But he vowed last month never to allow “one country, two systems,” which Taiwanese would accept “over my dead body.”

This shifting political mood gives Mr. Trump an opportunity to sell Taiwan some 60 fourth-generation F-16V fighters, which Taipei requested in February. The U.S. is obligated under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act to help the island defend itself, and the need is dire. Taiwan’s fleet of fourth-generation fighters, which date to the George H.W. Bush Administration, are outnumbered more than four-to-one by Chinese counterparts. A fighter sale, which China has called a “red line,” has been moving through the federal bureaucracy.

Selling F-16Vs would set off rhetorical fireworks in Beijing, and Mr. Trump might be reluctant given his focus on China trade. The same thinking may be why he hasn’t publicly supported Hong Kong’s protesters. But Hongkongers and Taiwanese know China takes Western silence or accommodation for weakness. Asia’s U.S. friends are counting on Mr. Trump not to defer to China as his presidential predecessors did.

Crafty_Dog

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Stratfor: Vietnam vs. China over the Spratleys
« Reply #831 on: July 14, 2019, 05:24:02 PM »


What Happened: Chinese and Vietnamese coast guard vessels have reportedly been engaged in a weeklong standoff in the Spratly Islands after a Chinese survey ship entered waters around the Vanguard Bank to conduct a seismic survey, the South China Morning Post reported July 12.

Why It Matters: Although information on the incident remains sparse, China previously deployed survey ships and oil rigs to the region and unilaterally announced exploration bids to limit other countries' activities in disputed areas. Both China and Vietnam did not publicly announce the standoff, which suggests that neither side is currently interested in escalating the situation.

Background: China and Vietnam last clashed in 2014 after Beijing deployed an oil rig near the Parcel Islands.

DougMacG

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China reports lowest economic growth report in 27 years
« Reply #832 on: July 15, 2019, 06:06:32 AM »
Even with exaggerated data, this is the lowest growth report in recent history.
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3018580/china-economy-reports-lowest-gdp-record-second-quarter-us

Highest debt, lowest growth, if they cared about their people, maybe leaders of an export based economy would sign a trade agreement with the world's largest economy.
------
quarterly growth in 27 years as the trade war drags on
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/15/china-economy-beijing-posts-q2-gdp-amid-trade-war-with-us.html
« Last Edit: July 15, 2019, 06:19:29 AM by DougMacG »


Crafty_Dog

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Re: US-China (& Japan, South China Sea-- Vietnam, Philippines, etc)
« Reply #834 on: July 22, 2019, 11:35:59 AM »
I don't want to register or subscribe.  Any chance you could post the whole article?

DougMacG

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Re: US-China (& Japan, South China Sea-- Vietnam, Philippines, etc)
« Reply #835 on: July 22, 2019, 12:27:33 PM »
I don't want to register or subscribe.  Any chance you could post the whole article?

It didn't come up for me right now either. I will summarize for now and post it when I can.

Nikki Haley gets it in terms of the seriousness of the threat of China and offers details and examples of that. She also offers some details in terms of size of our military and strength of our required to address the threat. I think she even mentions the number of ships we need which is one indicator of Naval strength. She is pro free trade in general but also recognizes that it is different when you face a threatening adversary. If I remember correctly, she even quotes Adam Smith on that. Then the article abruptly ends without addressing the title of it, specifically how to deal with the threat of China. More to come I hope.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: US-China (& Japan, South China Sea-- Vietnam, Philippines, etc)
« Reply #836 on: July 22, 2019, 12:30:34 PM »
TY.

Very much looks like she is preparing for 2024.


DougMacG

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US warship sails through strategic Taiwan Strait
« Reply #838 on: July 24, 2019, 07:57:56 PM »
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3019995/us-warship-sails-through-strategic-taiwan-strait-amid-period

US warship sails through strategic Taiwan Strait amid period of heightened military and economic tension

China on Wednesday warned that it is ready for war if there was any move toward Taiwan’s independence.

Crafty_Dog

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Chinese Smart Jails; Cheng: Xi changed my mind about Trump
« Reply #839 on: July 25, 2019, 07:32:19 AM »


https://www.theepochtimes.com/welcome-to-xi-jinpings-smart-jails-a-secret-text-revealed_3014660.html?utm_source=Epoch+Times+Newsletters&utm_campaign=2ac66ae928-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_07_25_11_33&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4fba358ecf-2ac66ae928-239065853

===========================================


Xi Changed My Mind About Trump
The president defends not only U.S. sovereignty but the entire world order.
By Gordon G. Chang
July 24, 2019 6:40 pm ET
Chinese President Xi Jinping proposes a toast in Beijing, April 26. Photo: Nicolas Asfouri/Getty Images

At first I had no idea why President Trump talked so much about sovereignty. I’ve changed my mind. To be more precise, Xi Jinping changed it. Mr. Trump is the only thing that stands between us and a world dominated by China.

“We do not expect diverse countries to share the same cultures, traditions, or even systems of government,” Mr. Trump told the United Nations General Assembly in September 2017. “But we do expect all nations to uphold these two core sovereign duties: to respect the interests of their own people and the rights of every other sovereign nation.”

Mr. Trump mentioned sovereignty 21 times in that speech. Why? Everyone knew America was a sovereign state, one of nearly 200 in the world. The idea of sovereignty has been firmly established for more than three centuries. Mr. Trump’s defense of it seemed unnecessary.

Yet for more than a decade, President Xi has been dropping audacious hints that China is the world’s only sovereign state. As a result, I have come to believe that Mr. Trump’s defense of sovereignty is essential to maintaining international peace and stability.

The world is full of “experts” who will tell you China and the U.S. are locked in a contest for dominance. Technically, that’s true. The idea that the two nations are struggling for control, however, falsely implies that America is jealously guarding its position atop the international system. That’s Beijing’s narrative. Chinese leaders disparage the U.S. by implying it is in terminal decline and accusing it of attempting to prevent China’s legitimate rise.

In reality, America is preserving more than its role in the international system. It is trying to preserve the system itself—which Mr. Xi is working to overthrow by promoting imperial-era Chinese concepts.

The idea that underpinned the imperial tributary system was that states near and far were obligated to acknowledge Chinese rule. Chinese emperors claimed they had the Mandate of Heaven over tianxia, or “All Under Heaven.”

China repudiated tianxia in the first half of the 20th century and played it down in the second half. But in the 21st century it is making a comeback. “Tianxia is a long Chinese political tradition of practice and ideal that is being revitalized and re-energized in today’s People’s Republic,” Fei-Ling Wang, author of “The China Order: Centralia, World Empire and the Nature of Chinese Power,” told me last week. “The Chinese dream of tianxia, or the China Order, assumes a hierarchical world empire system.”

Mr. Xi’s signature concept is the “Chinese Dream,” or “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” “Rejuvenation” evokes restoration of the imperial system, and echoes of tianxia could be heard in the slogan for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, which Mr. Xi managed as a member of the Communist Party’s Politburo Standing Committee. “One World, One Dream,” at least to scholars employed by the party to study the application of tianxia, equates Chinese dreams with dreams for the world.

Since the Olympics, Mr. Xi has used more direct tianxia language. “The Chinese have always held that the world is united and all under heaven are one family,” he declared in his 2017 New Year’s Message.

He made sure his revolutionary message was understood by having Foreign Minister Wang Yi explain it in Study Times, the influential Central Party School newspaper, in September 2017. “Xi Jinping thought on diplomacy,” Mr. Wang wrote, “has made innovations on and transcended the traditional Western theories of international relations for the past 300 years.” A “thought” in party lingo is an important body of ideology, such as “Mao Zedong Thought.”

Mr. Wang is almost certainly referring to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which established the current international order by recognizing states as sovereign. When he says “transcended,” he hints that Mr. Xi aspires to a world without sovereign states—in other words, a unified world ruled by the Chinese.

As the Hudson Institute’s Charles Horner told me by email last week, many world leaders are nationalistic, but Mr. Xi is the only one whose “officially propounded nationalism takes the form of a global imperial vision.” That is consistent with his lawless behavior: treating neighbors as vassals, taking territory, closing off the global commons and intimidating leaders around the world.

“Tianxia,” Fei-Ling Wang notes, “inevitably and even necessarily makes the People’s Republic view and treat its neighbors and eventually all other states as essentially nonequals and lesser entities, to be influenced, controlled and subjugated with force, money, favor, ruse and fear.”

China is not, as some believe, a “trivial state” that seeks nothing more than to preserve its regime and defend its territory. With Mr. Xi pursuing tianxia ambitions, the world could use more of Mr. Trump’s defense of sovereignty, and even a little more “America First.” These concepts are not, as I once thought, unnecessarily provocative. They are a necessary defense of the centuries-old international order against an existential threat.

Mr. Chang is author of “The Coming Collapse of China.”


Crafty_Dog

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Stratfor: Vietnam vs. China
« Reply #841 on: July 25, 2019, 05:45:56 PM »
Vietnam, China: Hanoi Stands Up to Beijing on Drilling in the South China Sea
(Stratfor)

The Big Picture

The rich energy resources in the South China Sea have long driven conflict among the countries that have staked frequently overlapping territorial claims over its waters. China, which has laid claim to wide swaths of the sea, has taken an aggressive stance, using various tactics to defend its interests and deter those who have rival claims from drilling and exploration operations. Some countries, such as the Philippines, have settled their disputes with China by choosing to work with Beijing. However, Vietnam has adopted the opposite approach, maintaining a harder-line stance and bringing in third parties to conduct energy exploration as it resists China.

What Happened

A quiet standoff has been brewing in the South China Sea since May over a joint energy exploration effort between Vietnam and Japan around the energy-rich Vanguard Bank in waters that both Hanoi and Beijing claim as their own. The potential for the dispute to grow louder, however, is increasing. On July 25, Vietnam announced it would allow a Japanese exploratory oil rig to continue operations in waters it and China each claim beyond an originally planned completion date of July 30. The decision came after Beijing reportedly asked Vietnam to withdraw the rig in exchange for China withdrawing the survey ship it sent into the region, along with its accompanying flotilla of coast guard and other vessels. Social media reports suggest that Vietnam would deploy more ships to the area.

Why It Matters

If neither side backs down, and more vessels are indeed dispatched to the scene of the dispute, the risk of a serious escalation akin to the skirmish between China and Vietnam in 2014, similarly over energy exploration, will climb. Significantly, Vietnam's decision to dig in its heels noticeably departs from its previous practices, when it responded to Chinese threats by either halting its exploratory operations or backing away from its decision to explore. Vietnam's response now leaves China with several options. It could decide to reinforce its own survey activities and send in additional escort forces, it could escalate its tactical actions at sea designed to intimidate Hanoi, or it could choose to reduce its own activities in the waters.
This map show the numerous overlapping territorial claims in the South China Sea

A mid-July visit to China by Vietnam National Assembly Chairwoman Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan as tensions over the dispute spiked and ongoing consultations between Beijing and Hanoi had suggested that neither side was willing to escalate the dispute, given the high stakes. After all, for Beijing, a more serious standoff would weaken its carefully managed conciliatory approach to Southeast Asia as it attempts to insulate itself from increased U.S. pressure. In Vietnam, greater tensions over the disputed waters could fan nationalistic fervor, generating an anti-China backlash that grows beyond government control, putting the country's recent investment momentum at risk.

But by extending the contract, Hanoi appears to be more willing to take those risks, banking on the growing focus on the South China Sea by outside powers to bolster its resistance to China's desires and force Beijing to alter its course. Specifically, China must calculate the risks of closer security relations between Hanoi and Washington. An escalation of the current dispute could well strengthen anti-China sentiment inside the Vietnamese Communist Party, sparking a call for increased security relations with the United States — a path Hanoi has so far been reluctant to take. In fact, last year Vietnam abruptly canceled dozens of military engagement activities it had scheduled with the United States. In addition, if China were to step up tactics of intimidation, it could push Vietnam to submit their maritime disputes to the International Court of Justice, putting a further strain on their relationship.

Background

The deployment of the Japanese oil rig in Block 06-1 in mid-May under contract to Rosneft Vietnam B.V. near the oil-rich Vanguard Bank, a region of the South China Sea that both countries claim as their own, prompted China to deploy its own Haiyang Dizhi 8 survey ship to the area in early July. China also hinted that it might go so far as to drill in the area itself if Vietnam did not withdraw. The U.S. State Department issued a statement of concern on July 20, terming China's activity coercive.


DougMacG

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Re: US-China (& Japan, South China Sea-- Vietnam, Philippines, etc)
« Reply #843 on: July 30, 2019, 07:11:47 AM »
Headwinds at home push Xi to show progress in US trade talks

https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Trade-war/Headwinds-at-home-push-Xi-to-show-progress-in-US-trade-talks

Who knew dictators face political pressures?!

DougMacG

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US plans new naval base in Australia to thwart Chinese
« Reply #844 on: July 30, 2019, 07:17:45 AM »
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/world/us-plans-new-naval-base-in-australia-to-thwart-chinese-tcphn5t5t

The United States is planning to bolster its military presence in the Pacific and counter Chinese expansionism by building a naval base in northern Australia.

At least $211 million has been allocated for “new military construction” near Darwin, which already has a base for thousands of US Marines and their equipment.

The planned new facilities, about 25 miles northeast of the city, in an area known as Glyde Point, would be big enough to accommodate amphibious warships and larger vessels.

Map showing bases in the region: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/imageserver/image/methode%2Ftimes%2Fprod%2Fweb%2Fbin%2F0357960e-b240-11e9-878e-18f1a6738204.png?crop=3000%2C2000%2C0%2C0&resize=1200

Crafty_Dog

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Stratfor: Hong Kong
« Reply #845 on: July 30, 2019, 07:11:35 PM »
Why the Fate of Hong Kong's Protests Will Come Down to Beijing
By Ben West
Global Security Analyst, Stratfor
A burning cart is seen during a demonstration in the area of Sheung Wan on July 28, 2019, in Hong Kong.
(H.C. KWOK/Getty Images)


Highlights

    The size, frequency and duration of street demonstrations alone do not determine the success of a protest movement.
    Major cracks are beginning to form among Hong Kong's "pillars of power" — the major stakeholders in any society as identified by the social scientist Gene Sharp — suggesting that protesters could make greater headway.
    One critical stakeholder, Hong Kong's business community, will ultimately support the force that will bring more stability to the territory.
    But even if protesters succeed in eroding support for the government, Beijing will step in as the ultimate backstop so as to preserve Hong Kong's status within the People's Republic of China.

Not all protests are created equal. So far this year, popular uprisings in Sudan, Algeria and Puerto Rico have successfully overthrown their leaders — some of whom were authoritarian figures entrenched in power for decades. But perhaps some of the most geopolitically consequential protests of the year are still raging in Hong Kong, four months after they started over a controversial bill that would permit Hong Kong to extradite criminal suspects to mainland China. Protesters successfully blocked that legislation in June, but over the past six weeks, they have expanded their demands by agitating for the resignation of Hong Kong's leader, Carrie Lam, among other calls.

The Big Picture

In assessing Hong Kong's protest movement, it is important to look beyond the demonstrators in the street to the segments of society that act as pillars in holding up the government and its mandate. In Hong Kong's case, key institutions like the education system, civil society groups, the media and religious figures are all leaning in favor of the protesters, while others are sitting on the fence. In the end, however, Beijing will be the final arbiter of what happens in Hong Kong.

See China in Transition

On the surface, the protests center on the extradition bill and the current government that sought to pass it. But the underlying issues are much more deeply seated in Hong Kong's status as a unique autonomous region of China, sensitivities among both Hong Kongers and Beijing about territorial integrity in the respective jurisdictions and, ultimately, the special jurisdiction's place within the People's Republic of China. Hong Kong's protests have not been nearly as violent as those in Sudan, where over 200 died in the uprising, nor as peaceful as those in Algeria, where police rarely engaged in violent clashes with protesters. They've also been much larger than those in Puerto Rico, where a few thousand protesters managed to force the governor from power with just a handful of rallies. The disparity in the nature of all of these protests and their outcome begs a more comprehensive analysis of the Hong Kong protests. Doing so might provide better clues as to the future of Hong Kong's demonstrations — even if there is one power looming over the city that will ultimately make the final determination.

Looking at the Pillars of Power

While protesters on the street make the most noise and garner the most attention, they alone do not compel a government to accept their demands given the constellation of other forces present in a society. In assessing the level of support (or opposition) to protesters' demands, it's necessary to consider all the stakeholders that determine a government's support — something that becomes possible when applying the "pillars of power" model that political science researcher Gene Sharp outlined in his theories on civil disobedience. Such stakeholders, or "pillars," include civil society, the education system, religion, the media, business leaders, bureaucracies, security forces and, ultimately, the government and its executive leaders. Looking at how each of these segments of society lean, as well as watching for indications that they are solidifying in favor of — or crumbling in opposition to — the government, provides a better barometer of where a protest movement like Hong Kong's is going.

The Education System

Students are leading the more radical protest actions, including the July 1 assault on the Legislative Council complex, and have been engaged in some of the more violent clashes with police. Education administrators tried to condemn the students' more aggressive tactics, but the University of Hong Kong's (HKU) vice chancellor was forced to climb down from a statement criticizing students' actions after thousands of the institution's students, alumni and staff signed a petition, while hundreds more showed up in person outside his residence requesting he retract his criticisms.

Civil Society

The Civil Human Rights Front (CHRF), which has been leading some of the largest protests thus far, is an umbrella organization overseeing around 50 civil society and pro-democracy groups. The CHRF has been mobilizing Hong Kongers for pro-democracy rallies since the British handed the city over to China in 1997, but its most recent marches have attracted some of the largest turnouts the group has ever recorded. Estimates vary, but CHRF organizers claim that some of its marches have drawn over 2 million people — 27 percent of Hong Kong's 7.3 million population. And recent surveys indicate that some of the protesters' grievances are supported by other citizens: In May, an HKU survey found that just 27 percent of respondents were satisfied with Hong Kong's leadership, while nearly half were not. In late June, another survey determined that those proud to be a Chinese national had dropped from about 38 percent to 27 percent since 2018; in contrast, pride in being considered a "Hong Konger" remained high. When it comes to winning over the hearts and minds of Hong Kongers, Beijing is thus facing an uphill struggle.

While protesters on the street make the most noise and garner the most attention, they alone do not compel a government to accept their demands.

The Media

Major Hong Kong news outlets like the South China Morning Press and the Hong Kong Free Press have remained nominally neutral, although reporting tends to favor the protesters' narrative that they are victims of police abuse. Few Hong Kong outlets have toed Beijing's official line that the demonstrations stem from external meddling and Western interference. These forces set the tone for the confrontation both locally in Hong Kong and for international audiences that have largely supported the protesters.

Religious Figures

Because of Hong Kong's religious freedom and comparatively cosmopolitan makeup, the territory is home to a variety of faith communities, including Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus and Christians. So far, however, Hong Kong's Roman Catholic diocese is one of the only major religious groups to express official support for the protesters through its condemnation of the violent attacks on demonstrators in Yuen Long on July 21. At the same time, other Christian groups sang hymns in support of protests during protests in early June. Although Hong Kong enjoys more religious freedoms than the mainland, faith leaders must still walk a fine line between politics and spirituality. Ultimately, religious groups are likely to continue calling for peace and appealing to both sides to de-escalate tensions.

Business Leaders

Hong Kong's business leaders opposed the extradition bill amendment in June, yet they have not backed the protests as fervently since the government abandoned the amendment. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some business leaders believed the violence at the Legislative Council on July 1 went too far, thereby jeopardizing stability in a city that has long been more of an economic than a political hub. Workers in the travel and health sectors have gone on strike and staged protests in opposition to the government, but Hong Kong's business elite are more tepid in their support. Nevertheless, the head of Hong Kong's stock exchange recently said China's People's Liberation Army should not become involved in Hong Kong and should leave the issue to local police to handle — a statement that didn't back the protesters but that conspicuously urged Beijing to remain on the sidelines. In the end, Hong Kong's business community is interested in maintaining stability, meaning it will be a crucial factor in determining how the protests play out. Its ultimate support will depend on which side it perceives as a bigger threat to stability: anti-government protesters or pro-government forces. 

Bureaucracy

Perhaps most concerning for Hong Kong's government are the cracks emerging in Hong Kong's civil service. Upward of 1,000 state employees are planning a demonstration on Aug. 2 after the South China Morning Post reported that over 600 civil servants from 44 departments had filed a petition against the government's handling of the protests and its unwillingness to establish an independent commission to investigate police responses. Civil servants have threatened to escalate their protest action to work stoppages and strikes by mid-August if the government fails to address their concerns. These grievances not only demonstrate divisions within Hong Kong's government but also threaten to disrupt government services. And depending on the severity of disruptions to government services, such a development could compel a response from Beijing. 

Security Forces

As Hong Kong's police have been at the front line in containing protests and protecting government property, they have borne the highest physical toll, with dozens of officers suffering injuries during the protests, including one whose finger was bitten off while trying to restrain a protester. Despite protest leaders' claims of police violence, the force has demonstrated a great deal of restraint and discipline. Police forces have been present for nearly all of the 27 separate demonstrations, which drew approximately 4.8 million people between March 31 and July 21. Dozens have been injured on both sides, some seriously, but no deaths directly linked to protests have occurred — a distinction that is unlikely to last long if the protests continue to escalate. Police have used nonlethal protest suppression tactics that are common throughout the world, firing tear gas and rubber bullets and leading baton charges in a few extreme scenarios.

Nevertheless, protesters have directed their ire toward the police, demanding investigations into their responses so far. This greatly reduces the chances that police will defect to the protesters' side, while also subjecting the force to a great deal of pressure. The Junior Police Officers' Association has expressed concern about officers' safety, noting that it is exploring "legal action" to protect officers that could disrupt Hong Kong's reliance on local police to contain protests. In such a situation, signs of strain could develop within the police department amid protesters' efforts to coopt them or, more likely, coerce them to uphold their duty less fervently.

Beijing remains the ultimate backstop — one which will not tolerate a protest movement overwhelming the city and turning it completely against China.

The Legislative Council and the Executive Leadership

The pan-democrat camp of the Legislative Council generally supports the protests, but they only hold 25 of the chamber's 70 seats. By contrast, the majority pro-Beijing camp holds 43 seats and has rejected the demonstrators' demands. Crucially, Beijing gets a say in who can serve in the Legislative Council, ensuring that it can preserve its interests — albeit while inflaming tensions in the process, as such privileges already attracted demonstrators' ire during the 2014 Umbrella Movement. Next year's legislative elections will provide another opportunity for that grievance to resurface, but Beijing will ensure that the council remains a political ally that opposes protesters' demands. 

Beijing reportedly rejected Lam's resignation earlier this month, implying that it was up to her to clean up the mess that began on her watch. Her resignation would satisfy one of the protesters' key demands, but Beijing is concerned that such a concession would only embolden protesters instead of placating them — leading to demands for freer elections in Hong Kong, which would be intolerable for Beijing. For now, Lam is effectively acting as a firewall between popular unrest and Beijing's control over Hong Kong, suggesting that it is unlikely that she will leave before the 2020 elections. Whoever replaces her, however, will similarly be pro-Beijing given China's ability to mold the council.

The Ultimate Arbiter

At present, the police, Legislative Council and Executive's Office are the only institutions in Hong Kong that unequivocally oppose the protesters. The others either support the protesters or are wavering in their convictions, indicating that demonstrators are retaining broad support, staying on message and maintaining coordination — in spite of their leaderless model. Naturally, the situation is in flux, as the business community could come down against the protesters if it believes that they are endangering Hong Kong's stability. Moreover, increasing violence on the part of protesters could alienate other pillars of the community, especially the religious community.

In the end, Beijing remains the ultimate backstop — one which will not tolerate a protest movement overwhelming the city and turning it completely against the People's Republic of China. That's why, even if all other pillars fall, Beijing retains the right the deploy the People's Liberation Army to instill order. Such a development would be a worst-case scenario that would likely involve waves of arrests affecting a broad cross-section of society and result in the suppression of public gatherings, thereby harming Hong Kong's reputation as a global hub for business — yet it is a move that Beijing would ultimately rely on to prevent an uprising and maintain its territorial integrity. And as more pillars of Hong Kong's establishment fall, the more likely that scenario becomes.

Crafty_Dog

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Stratfor: Vietnam begins skewing West
« Reply #846 on: July 31, 2019, 08:23:34 AM »
Vietnam's Balance Between Great Powers May Start Skewing West
A garment worker prepares shirts for shipment in a factory in Hanoi, Vietnam, on May 24, 2019.

Highlights

    The U.S.-China trade war has escalated Vietnam's move up the industrial value chain in recent years by more deeply integrating Hanoi's economy with manufacturers seeking refuge from the fallout.
    But with the sixth-largest trade surplus with the United States, Vietnam now risks becoming the target of the White House's next trade salvo, which will force Hanoi to make concessions to evade tariffs that could thwart its economic progress.
    Fears of complicating relations with China have so far kept Vietnam from taking the action needed to adequately ease its growing trade imbalance with the United States, such as upping its arms purchases.
    However, rising tensions in the South China Sea could provide an opening for Hanoi to take a stronger stance against Beijing after decades of delicately balancing between the two great powers.

For the past two decades, Vietnam has leveraged its strategic location as the gateway to Indochina to become one of the biggest success stories in the Asia-Pacific. This position has allowed it to largely remain neutral among great power competitions over the years, which continues to serve to its benefit today as now the top export "safe haven" from the U.S.-China trade war. This, however, has come at the cost of ramping up its trade deficit with the United States, which has threatened to retaliate should Hanoi not increase its purchases of American goods and services — a warning the U.S. trade representative reiterated on July 29, noting the "host of unfair trade barriers" that U.S. businesses face upon entering the Vietnamese market.

Desperate to avoid coming under the siege of a trade salvo, Vietnam has used every opportunity to remind Washington of its value as a foil to China. Such words, however, hold only so much weight when Hanoi's actions are constantly stiffened by its desire to also keep on good terms with Beijing. But with its own maritime relations with China now on the rocks, there's a chance Hanoi could finally start inching toward the United States' side.

The Big Picture

Once a low-end manufacturing hub, Vietnam is now an increasingly sought-after destination for global tech companies' production lines. This momentum has aided Hanoi's push to further enmesh its economy with global markets in the hopes of gaining more value-added investments and exports — both of which are crucial to buffer the country's sustained growth from heightened regional competition. But just how much further Vietnam can progress is increasingly uncertain, as it struggles to address U.S. demands to reduce its trade deficit in a way that doesn't irk neighboring China.

See Asia-Pacific: Among Great PowersSee Southeast Asia: Burdened by Consensus
Vietnam's Coming of Age

Vietnam's economic surge has been a long time coming. Home to a large and low-cost labor pool, stable political environment and pro-investment policies, Hanoi has established itself as a low-end manufacturing powerhouse in sectors such as garments and textiles. This has, in turn, made it an alluring alternative to China's rising manufacturing costs. And as a result, Vietnam's economy has kept an average growth rate of 6.17 percent for the past 19 years — putting it well ahead of some of the region's other middle-powers such as Thailand and Malaysia.
 
To integrate closer with the global supply chain, Vietnam has also embarked on one of the most ambitious free trade quests in the Pacific Rim. Hanoi has recently signed 11 trade agreements, including a bilateral deal with the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union. Last year, the country also joined the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTTP), and most recently signed on to another separate trade agreement with the European Union on June 30.

The high standards set forth by both CPTTP and the European Union will require Hanoi to undertake extensive regulatory overhauls and politically sensitive labor union reform. Doing so could threaten the operations of its bloated state-owned enterprises and political authority, which is a large reason why Hanoi is the only developing country to have signed deals with both trade blocs and serves as a testament to Vietnam's desire to break out of its low-end manufacturing status.

Gaming the Trade War

But Vietnam's deepening integration with the rest of the world has also made it more vulnerable to volatility in global markets, given Hanoi's still-evolving economic foundation. Like its Southeast Asian neighbors, Vietnam has not been immune to the ripple effects of the global and Chinese economic slowdown. Indeed, its domestic economy de-escalated to 6.8 percent in the first half of 2019, slowing from a robust 7.5 percent during the same period in 2018. And foreign investment has also declined year-on-year by 9.2 percent.

Despite these dips, however, Vietnam's economic ascendance has remained relatively intact in recent years, thanks in large part to the U.S.-China trade war. The country's close proximity to Beijing — combined with years of carefully integrating with its neighbor's supply chain — has paid off amid global supply chain revamps prompted by the uptick in Beijing and Washington's trade tensions, as companies increasingly seek refuge in Hanoi to escape U.S. tariffs.

Vietnam is now actively being courted by multinational companies and East Asian manufacturers seeking to diversify their electronic and tech production lines away from China. As a result, Vietnam has been able to more deeply integrate itself into the supply chains of Asian giants, as companies like Japan's Nintendo and China's TCL seek to move part of their production to the country. This has not only strengthened Vietnam's overall trade and financial position, but it has also granted Vietnam once largely denied access to the know-how of these regional heavyweights to then pass down to its still lagging domestic tech companies.

Balancing Between Great Powers

The gains that Vietnam has been able to garner from the trade war is largely the product of the balancing act Hanoi has maintained between great powers over the past 20 years. Hanoi's transition toward value-added industries requires a strong investment in infrastructure, technological capacity and greater development of domestic industrial capabilities. Within this context, Vietnam's close proximity to China and longtime maritime disputes with its powerful northern neighbor has placed it in a uniquely delicate position compared with the rest of its Southeast Asian peers. And as a result, Hanoi has focused on diversifying its economic and strategic partnerships with major powers such as the United States, Japan, South Korea and Russia, while avoiding any disruption to its relations with Beijing and the trade and economic benefits that relationship yields.

For the United States and its regional allies, Vietnam has become key to the maritime security and freedom of navigation to fend off China's expansion in the South China Sea, distinguishing Hanoi from the other more muted Southeast Asian claimants. Vietnam, for example, quietly excluded China's Huawei from its domestic 5G rollout, while its neighbors (including even staunch U.S. allies such as South Korea and Thailand) kept their cooperation.

At the same time, Vietnam carefully treads the evolving strategic balance against China — its longtime rival and formidable northern neighbor. Thus, despite being singled out by the White House as a potential security partner, Hanoi has still kept itself at an arms-length distance from Washington's regional initiatives for fear of complicating its relations with China. Even though Hanoi has its own reservations about Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), it has yet to outwardly align itself with U.S. efforts to check against China's maritime expansionism. Instead, Vietnam has opted to embrace its place in Beijing's BRI and the subsequent influx of Chinese investments. And relatedly, while Hanoi generally supports Washington's infrastructural initiatives in the region, it has also shied away from talk of including a potential security bloc.

From Beneficiary to Potential Victim

But as the great power competition between the United States and China continues to escalate, Hanoi's tried-and-true method of remaining "neutral" has become an increasingly precarious act. Vietnam's emerging role as a place to dodge tariffs has exacerbated U.S. concerns over Hanoi's growing trade deficit, which is currently the sixth-largest the United States has with any country. In early July, Washington threatened to impose duties of up to 456 percent on Vietnamese steel imports that originated in either Taiwan or South Korea, shortly after Trump referred to Hanoi as "almost the single worst [trade] abuser of everybody."

The latest flare-up in the South China Sea could prompt Vietnam to adopt a more confrontational stance against Beijing elsewhere.

The timing of the threats could not be worse for Hanoi, which is pushing for the United States to change its current nonmarket economy designation (which has made Hanoi more susceptible to Washington's anti-dumping tariffs over the years) before it expires in 2019. Should Vietnam's trade surplus continue to widen, there's also a chance that the White House could reach for the same legal weapon it's used to impose greater tariffs on China by claiming a Section 301 case. Should the White House impose a 25 percent tariff on Vietnamese shipments as it's done on Chinese exports, Hanoi's export revenue would be immediately cut by 25 percent and its gross domestic product cut by 1 percent. Such a tariff hike risks stalling or significantly slowing Vietnam's economic trajectory, due to the country's heavy reliance on exports and export-related foreign investments to source its economy and value-added industries.

As a result, Hanoi has sought to dodge this threat by increasing its purchases of U.S. energy products and agricultural products in recent months. Washington has also long pushed Hanoi to reduce its purchases of Russian weapons and, in turn, increase its purchases U.S. arms. Doing so is currently the safest bet to reduce — or at least, delay — the prospect of becoming the victim of Washington's next trade salvo by helping reduce its trade surplus. But progress has been slow on this front. In October, Vietnam abruptly canceled a dozen defense activities with the United States, including military exchanges, likely in an effort to show Beijing (and Moscow) that it was holding strong against U.S. pressure to buy American military equipment.

Inching Away From China?

However, renewed tensions with Beijing over energy exploration in the South China Sea may reduce Hanoi's previous reservations about fostering closer security relations with the United States. Since May, Chinese and Vietnamese vessels have been engaged in a confrontation in the disputed waters of the oil-rich Vanguard Bank. After the two countries' last maritime flare-up in 2014, Hanoi had trodden lightly in the region, careful to keep its oil and gas activities discreet from Beijing. However, China's continued harassment of Vietnam’s energy operations could prompt Hanoi to take a more confrontational stance in the South China Sea — an approach that may very well bleed into its position against Beijing elsewhere.

This development — combined with the threat of being the next target of the United States' trade salvo, and the subsequent toll it would take on Vietnam's economic progress — could make Hanoi more willing than ever to step up its resistance against China and more directly side with the United States. Such a move would free Vietnam to commit more fully to U.S. demands to reduce its trade deficit, such as buying more U.S. arms purchases. But as tensions between Washington and Beijing continue to rise, doing so carries the risk of warranting Chinese retaliation — whether it be in the form of reduced BRI investments, or more violent clashes in the South China Sea.

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ccp

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China building up nukes missles warheads and near
« Reply #848 on: August 07, 2019, 08:11:17 AM »

deploying hypersonic missiles

if not for Trump we would still be trying to make nice to them all the while they rip us off:

https://freebeacon.com/national-security/stratcom-china-rapidly-building-up-nuclear-forces/

were too busy worrying about identity politics here
or offending someone with an insult - now some of the worst crimes against humanity

DougMacG

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Conrad Black: President Trump faces down China
« Reply #849 on: August 08, 2019, 01:03:18 PM »
Some good points in here:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/trump-faces-down-china-threat/
Trump Faces Down the China Threat
By CONRAD BLACK
August 8, 2019 6:30 AM
 
President Donald Trump attends a bilateral meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping during the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, June 29, 2019. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
He knows their weaknesses and isn’t afraid to apply pressure.
Of much greater importance to the political and strategic course of the United States than the shabby attempt to portray President Trump as a racist is the developing showdown between the United States and China. The febrile Democratic effort to unseat the president by unconventional means is no longer the result of the shock of Trump’s having defeated the entire political class nearly three years ago. It is in some measure a credit to his invulnerability in most policy areas, especially the economy, in moving to reduce illegal immigration, and in strengthening the country’s strategic position. The overt attempt by the media and Democrats to build, in the ashes of the nasty fairy tales of Russian collusion and obstruction of justice, the semi-discarded fraud that he is a racist is pitiful, as well as contemptible. This was the Siamese twin of the misogyny fraud, which seems to have vanished into the ether, leaving behind only the pink pussy headgear of the post-inaugural demonstrators.

The racism claims got early traction from the controversy over suspension of entry rights for people from terrorism-plagued or -exporting countries. The left-wing West Coast judges the Democrats shopped around for were all overturned in serious higher courts, and Democratic Senate leader Schumer is no longer warning us that the Statue of Liberty is blubbering, as he himself did in a passable piece of improvised histrionics on the Senate floor. The other starting pistol for the racist charges was one of the greatest frauds perpetrated by Trump’s enemies since the Clinton-Steele dossier, that he had defended Nazis and Klansmen at Charlottesville. He said that the people legitimately debating what to do with the statue of General Lee were good people, but the media managed to deform this so severely into the whitewashing of Nazis and the Klan that Carl Icahn and other eminences retired from various White House committees whose existence was unknown outside their memberships. The president also made the point that Antifa, which was being defended by social commentators such as Chris Cuomo, is no better than the Nazis. It was odd even for the terminal sufferers of Trump dementia to link Trump to the Nazis, given that almost half his family is Jewish. Perhaps Senator Elizabeth Warren, whose qualifications to discuss racism are blurred by her fraudulent claim to be a native American Indian, reached the most absurd extreme in this area last week by accusing the president of “environmental racism.” This is where the Democrats have arrived: at what Kafka called “nameless crimes.”

What Trump is doing, adapted to different times, regimes, and circumstances, is what Mr. Churchill urged when he opposed the appeasers in the 1930s. China is not a threat as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were, has not overcommitted to an arms race with an entirely command economy, and is not as overtly threatening as Hitler, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev were. But China is explicitly aiming to become the world’s greatest power and is, accordingly, a very serious challenge. Being the world’s most powerful country means different things to different countries and different regimes. Under President Carter and President Obama, there was some embarrassment about America’s preeminence, and both men thought the United States was as much part of the problem as it was the solution of the world’s ailments. Obama apologized for the high-handed manner in which Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill conducted the war effort, and for President Truman’s use of the atomic bomb, and for President Eisenhower’s role in overthrowing the Iranian government of Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. The three presidents mentioned were among the most distinguished in American history and far more accomplished than their apologist.

China’s conduct in Myanmar (Burma), where they were so heavy-handed that they were eventually pushed out, and in parts of Africa where they are large investors, and their attempt to reduce the South China Sea to Chinese territorial waters all demonstrate China’s will to dominate and exact exaggerated deference, unlike anything in America’s international behavior. This is the time to have a nonviolent showdown, which will require reform, at least insofar as they apply to the U.S., of Chinese practices in “forced technology transfer and cyber theft, intellectual property rights, services, currency, agriculture and non-tariff barriers to trade.” China purported to agree on all this in April but declined to consider any enforcement mechanism. This is a familiar Chinese method of negotiating, which has been imitated by the North Koreans. If there is a reason for optimism in the present raucously antagonistic American political atmosphere, it is that the Democrats have generally supported the president in these positions, indicating that the old adage that “partisanship ends at the water’s edge” retains some applicability.

Yet the stock response of the president’s reflexive media critics is an absurd solicitude for their country’s principal rival, a chronic cheat in world trade matters by universal agreement. China is a poor country with few resources while the United States, with a year to retool and reorient itself, would not have to import any necessities except perhaps small quantities of rare earths. China still has 300 million people who live pretty much as they did 2,000 years ago, a 40 percent command economy, no institutions that command any respect except the People’s Army; and not a word or figure it publishes about its economy can be unreservedly believed. It is trying an end run around the entire world economic system at the same time that it asserts itself with conjoined military and economic expansionism in susceptible areas. Of course this president will save China’s “face” if that’s what it comes to, but in contrast to all the havering ninnies in The Economist and like-minded places, the strongest cheering section President Trump enjoys in the execution of his China policies consists of China’s neighbors: Vietnam, India, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia. They are a ready group of important states to resurrect a refined containment policy slightly modeled on the North Atlantic alliance but with more emphasis on economic issues.

The booming American economy that defies all the prayerful warnings and expectations of Trump’s enemies can steadily eliminate Chinese imports and compensate the agricultural sector that sells to China — it can resupply those countries that replace U.S. agriculture sales to China, as there is no great surplus of food in the world that would make American production superfluous. Loss of the American export market would be a heavy blow to China, as would the continued reduction of the value of its currency (renminbi). Chinese manufacturing, much of which migrated to it from Japan via South Korea, is already moving on to Vietnam, India, and Mexico (now America’s biggest trading partner). China cannot force its way into the U.S. market, or replace it as an export market. The much-vaunted threat to sell their 1 trillion dollars of U.S. debt is a paper tiger — it is only 7 percent of the outstanding total of U.S. federal debt, and China would take a loss on its position, which could easily be absorbed in the world bond market.

The United States is finally expanding its sphere of substantial economic integration to Mexico (and moving to regularize the demographic flow on its southern border) and is in preliminary economic discussions with the new Brazilian government, and provisionally with post-Brexit Great Britain. Such a grouping, including Canada, would have a population of 750 million people and a GDP of $30 trillion, with room to expand in Latin America and Australasia as conditions recommend, and to remove the potential Chinese advantage of a comparatively immense population. It would dwarf both China and a truncated, post-Brexit European Union. This is intelligent grand strategy. He may have to wait for the historians to get any credit for it, but President Trump has an excellent natural judgment of the weaknesses of interlocutors and of negotiating techniques. He is dealing with national irritants, including Iran, patiently, firmly, and from strength. He will succeed where his post-Reagan predecessors did not.
« Last Edit: August 08, 2019, 01:06:41 PM by Crafty_Dog »