Tag Archives: China

China Is Issuing The Same “Red Line” Warnings About Taiwan That Russia Issued About Ukraine, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on July 29, 2022 | Leave a comment

Mostly what comes out of the Biden administration is hubristic fluff and bullshit. They can’t understand people like Putin and Xi who mean what they say. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has continued to pour gasoline on the foreign policy dumpster fire that is her planned visit to Taiwan next month, now reportedly encouraging other members of congress to come along for the ride.

“Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has invited a small group of lawmakers on her official trip to Taiwan, including the top Democrat and Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee,” NBC News reports.

This trip, which Beijing perceives as an egregious transgression of Washington’s longstanding one-China policy, is already so incendiary that the Pentagon is now planning to send in fighter jets and other war machinery to protect Pelosi’s plane in case of attacks by the Chinese military.

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Shrinking Population Is Another Problem For China’s Housing Market, by Ye Xie

Posted on July 19, 2022 | Leave a comment

A shrinking population has both short and long-term consequences for the Chinese economy. From Ye Xie at zerohedge.com:

The wave of mortgage-payment boycotts has spurred China’s regulators into action. Beijing may be able to prevent the issue from morphing into a bigger crisis. In the bigger picture, however, the housing downturn will be a multi-decade process amid a shrinking population.

After a growing number of homebuyers refused to pay mortgages on stalled home projects, regulators have moved to restore market confidence. Mitigating measures being considered include allowing homeowners to temporarily halt mortgage payments and urging local governments and banks to provide more funding to developers, Bloomberg reported.

The authorities may quell this latest disruption in the beleaguered property market since the number of affected mortgages remains small, for now. But it’s clear that this housing downturn will remain a drag on the economy for years to come. The high-turnover, pre-sale model relied upon by developers has been severely impaired, while households are already deep in debt.

Moreover, demographic headwinds have been gathering momentum since the pandemic. The United Nations’ new population forecast released earlier this month — the first in three years — suggests that China is poised to cede the status as the world’s most-populous nation to India next year. The UN projected that China’s population will peak this year, instead of in 2031 as previously estimated. The population is forecast to shrink by 90 million – more than the current population of Germany today — by 2050.

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China On Verge Of Violent Debt Jubilee As “Disgruntled” Homebuyers Refuse To Pay Their Mortgages, by Tyler Durden

Posted on July 14, 2022 | Leave a comment

They may get a bad mark on their Social Credit scorecards. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

While US snowflakes are all too happy to talk the talk (which remains free, even despite Biden’s hyperinflation), Chinese residents are increasingly walking the walk. First, it was the violent outcry against mandatory covid vaccines that put an end to Beijing’s desire to forcibly innoculate all Beijing residents in just 48 hours – a feat not all of America’s armed militias have been able to achieve, and now it’s a grassroots push for what appears to be a debt jubillee as millions of homeowners suddenly stop paying their mortgages, a shocking move that has sent shockwaves across China’s capital markets and has sparked panic within China’s political leadership circles.

As Bloomberg reports overnight, a rapidly increasing number of “disgruntled Chinese homebuyers” are refusing to pay mortgages for unfinished construction projects, exacerbating the country’s real estate woes and stoking fears that the crisis will spread to the wider financial system as countless mortgages default.

According to researcher China Real Estate Information, homebuyers have stopped mortgage payments on at least 100 projects in more than 50 cities as of Wednesday, up from 58 projects on Tuesday and only 28 on Monday, according to Jefferies Financial Group Inc. analysts including Shujin Chen.

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NATO: By Making China the Enemy, the Alliance Is Threatening World Peace, by Jonathan Cook

Posted on July 11, 2022 | 1 comment

Remember the good old days when NATO was a defensive alliance against the Soviet Union? Now it’s a tool of U.S. wet dreams of global hegemony. From Jonathan Cook at antiwar.com:

As the saying goes, if you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The West has the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a self-declared “defensive” military alliance – so any country that refuses its dictates must, by definition, be an offensive military threat.

That is part of the reason why NATO issued a new “strategic concept” document last week at its summit in Madrid, declaring for the first time that China poses a “systemic challenge” to the alliance, alongside a primary “threat” from Russia.

Beijing views this new designation as a decisive step by NATO on the path to pronouncing it a “threat” too – echoing the alliance’s escalatory approach towards Moscow over the past decade. In its previous mission statement, issued in 2010, NATO advocated “a true strategic partnership” with Russia.

According to a report in the New York Times, China would have found itself openly classed as a “threat” last week had it not been for Germany and France. They insisted that the more hostile terminology be watered down so as to avoid harming their trade and technology links with China.

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Posted in Eurasian Axis, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Imperialism, Military, Politics, Propaganda, War

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Why China Is Subsidizing Cheap Surveillance Cameras, by Dr. Joseph Mercola

Posted on July 5, 2022 | Leave a comment

Way back when, hidden cameras were the province of pervert voyeurs and Allen Funt (search engine Candid Camera). Nowadays totalitarians are putting them everywhere. From Dr. Joseph Mercola at theburningplatform.com:

china hikvision cameras

Story at-a-glance

  • Hikvision began as an entity of China, and its largest shareholder remains the state-owned China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), a defense-industrial firm
  • Hikvision receives generous support from China’s Communist leaders, allowing the company to offer low prices and expand abroad rapidly, outpacing much of its competition
  • Hikvision cameras are used to surveil prisoners in “re-education” camps in China’s Xinjiang region, raising significant human rights concerns
  • In the U.S., federal agencies were ordered by Congress to remove Hikvision cameras by August 2019 due to national security concerns

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You’re either with us or you’re a “systemic challenge”, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on July 1, 2022 | Leave a comment

Ultimately the world will not be defined by whether countries are with or against the U.S. or any other wanna-be empire. For the next few years, chaos and collapse will probably be the themes. What emerges from that? Who knows? Pepe Escobar, as he frequently does, tries his hand at predicting the future. From Escobar at thesaker.is:

After all we’re deep into the metaverse spectrum, where things are the opposite of what they seem.

Fast but not furious, the Global South is revving up. The key takeaway of the BRICS+ summit in Beijing,  held in sharp contrast with the G7 in the Bavarian Alps, is that both West Asia’s Iran and South America’s Argentina officially applied for BRICS membership.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry has highlighted how BRICS has “a very creative mechanism with broad aspects”. Tehran – a close partner of both Beijing and Moscow – already had “a series of consultations” about the application: the Iranians are sure that will “add value” to the expanded BRICS.

Talk about China, Russia and Iran being sooooo isolated. Well, after all we’re deep into the metaverse spectrum, where things are the opposite of what they seem.

Moscow’s obstinacy in not following Washington’s Plan A to start a pan-European war is rattling Atlanticist nerves to the core. So right after the G7 summit significantly held at a former Nazi sanatorium, enter NATO’s, in full warmongering regalia.

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Posted in Economics, Economy, Eurasian Axis, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Politics

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The Neocon’s Dream – Decolonize Russia, Re-colonize China, by Moon of Alabama

Posted on June 23, 2022 | Leave a comment

Multipolarity is turning into the neocons’ nightmare. From Moon of Alabama at moonofalabama.org:

On March 26 U.S. President Joe Biden called for regime change in Russia:

Speaking in Warsaw, Poland, on Saturday, President Biden said of Russian President Vladimir Putin: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

The White House immediately rushed to talk back that call for regime change and a day later Biden himself denied that he was calling for regime change:

President Joe Biden told reporters on Sunday he was not calling for a regime change in Russia when he said a day earlier that Russian President Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power,” a surprising comment the White House quickly tried to walk back Saturday.When a reporter asked if he was calling for Putin’s removal from office, Biden replied “no” as he walked out of church Sunday afternoon, according to Bloomberg pool reporter Courtney Rozen.

However, other parts of the U.S. government makes unmistakeably clear that its aims in Russia go even much than regime change. Tomorrow the US Government’s Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) will hold a briefing on the “Moral and Strategic Imperative” that makes it necessary to “Decolonize Russia”.

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What Difference Does a War Make?, by Alfred McCoy

Posted on June 22, 2022 | Leave a comment

The rise of China dooms U.S. designs on the Eurasian “center of the world.” From Alfred McCoy at tomdispatch.com:

The Geopolitics of the New Cold War

From his first days in office, Joe Biden and his national security advisers seemed determined to revive America’s fading global leadership via the strategy they knew best — challenging the “revisionist powers” Russia and China with a Cold War-style aggressiveness. When it came to Beijing, the president combined the policy initiatives of his predecessors, pursuing Barack Obama’s “strategic pivot” from the Middle East to Asia, while continuing Donald Trump’s trade war with China. In the process, Biden revived the kind of bipartisan foreign policy not seen in Washington since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Writing in the December 2021 Foreign Affairs, a group of famously disputatious diplomatic historians agreed on one thing: “Today, China and the United States are locked in what can only be called a new cold war.” Just weeks later, the present mimed the past in ways that went well beyond even that pessimistic assessment as Russia began massing 190,000 troops on the border of Ukraine. Soon, Russian President Vladimir Putin would join China’s Xi Jinping in Beijing where they would demand that the West “abandon the ideologized approaches of the Cold War” by curtailing both NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe and similar security pacts in the Pacific.

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Posted in Collapse, Economics, Eurasian Axis, Foreign Policy, Governments, History, Military, Politics, Propaganda, War

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The ‘New G8’ Meets China’s ‘Three Rings’, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on June 16, 2022 | Leave a comment

Much of the world is not just turning its back on the U.S., it is constructing an alternative order. From Pepe Escobar at thesaker.is:

The coming of the new G8 points to the inevitable advent of BRICS +, one of the key themes to be discussed in the upcoming BRICS summit in China.

The speaker of the Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, may have created the defining acronym for the emerging multipolar world: “the new G8”.

As Volodin noted, “the United States has created conditions with its own hands so that countries wishing to build an equal dialogue and mutually beneficial relations will actually form a ‘new G8’ together with Russia.”

This non Russia-sanctioning G8, he added, is 24.4% ahead of the old one, which is in fact the G7, in terms of GDP in purchasing power parity (PPP), as G7 economies are on the verge of collapsing and the U.S. registers record inflation.

The power of the acronym was confirmed by one of the researchers on Europe at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Sergei Fedorov: three BRICS members (Brazil, China and India) alongside Russia, plus Indonesia, Iran, Turkey and Mexico, all non adherents to the all-out Western economic war against Russia, will soon dominate global markets.

Fedorov stressed the power of the new G8 in population as well as economically: “If the West, which restricted all international organizations, follows its own policies, and pressures everyone, then why are these organizations necessary? Russia does not follow these rules.”

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Posted in Banking, Business, Economics, Economy, Energy, Eurasian Axis, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Politics, Science, Technology, Trade

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Bilderberg does China, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on June 4, 2022 | Leave a comment

The Bilderberg worthies ponder the rise of China. From Pepe Escobar at thesaker.is:

When Davos and Bilderberg messenger boys look at The Grand Chessboard, they realize that their era of perpetual free lunch is over.

Discreetly, as under the radar as a looming virus, the 68th Bilderberg meeting  is currently underway in Washington, D.C. Nothing to see here. No conspiracy theories about a “secret cabal”, please. This is just a docile, “diverse group of political leaders and experts” having a chat, a laugh, and a bubbly.

Still, one cannot but notice that the choice of venue speaks more volumes than the entire – burned to the ground – Library of Alexandria. In the year heralding the explosion of a much-awaited NATO vs. Russia proxy war, discussing its myriad ramifications does suit the capital of the Empire of Lies, much more than Davos a few weeks ago, where one Henry Kissinger sent them into a frenzy by advancing the necessity of a toxic compromise named “diplomacy”.

The list of Bilderberg 2022 participants is a joy to peruse. Here are just some of the stalwarts:

James Baker, Consigliere extraordinaire, now a mere Director of the Office of Net Assessment at the Pentagon.

José Manuel Barroso, former head of the European Commission, later the recipient of a golden parachute in the form of Chairman of Goldman Sachs International.

Albert Bourla, the Pfizer Big Guy.

William Burns, CIA director.

Kurt Campbell, the guy who invented the Obama/Hillary “pivot to Asia”, now White House Coordinator for Indo-Pacific.

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