Tag Archives: China

What is China Buying in the Biden Administration? by Peter Schweizer

You don’t have to do too much sleuthing to unearth a lot of questionable dealings and financial arrangements between China and the Biden administration, starting with Joe and Hunter. From Peter Schweizer at gatestoneinstitute.org:

  • The simple fact is that there are large, powerful donors to the Biden campaign that have big financial stakes in these green energy companies. It is a wealth transfer to Biden’s biggest bundlers, and that is a huge and massive problem.
  • For those companies with inside connections to the Biden campaign, it is American taxpayer money that is truly “shovel-ready.”
  • Former congressmen and senators, and former US ambassadors are being paid large sums of money by governments such as China, or by firms directly linked to those governments, which do not have America’s best interest at heart. They are lobbying in Washington to get their paymasters’ voices heard.
  • If you invest a couple of million dollars, let us say, in lobbying, or you invest a couple of million dollars in campaign contributions, often you can get benefits that are worth ten times that.
  • For Wall Street and Silicon Valley, the prospect of doing deals in China is mesmerizing. To do those deals in China, as they have learned, you must play nice with the regime, speak well of them, feather their nests…. It is no less tempting for American politicians…. Of greatest concern are the deals that actually advance Chinese state interests.
  • There is no other way to state this. The only way we can correct this situation is by exposing these people and showing U.S. citizens exactly what they are doing in our society.
  • [J]ust before the 2020 election, the [New York Times ran a piece by its “media reporter” bragging about their role as gatekeepers that would not pursue the Hunter Biden story.
For Wall Street and Silicon Valley, the prospect of doing deals in China is mesmerizing. To do those deals in China, as they have learned, you must play nice with the regime, speak well of them, feather their nests…. It is no less tempting for American politicians…. Of greatest concern are the deals that actually advance Chinese state interests. Pictured: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken (second from right) speaks while facing Yang Jiechi (second from left), director of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission Office, and Wang Yi (left), China’s Foreign Minister at the opening session of US-China talks in Anchorage, Alaska on March 18, 2021. (Photo by Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)

What is China buying in the Biden Administration? A look to the recent past may provide some answers.

If you go back to 2009-10 and look at the “shovel-ready” stimulus package that President Barack Obama pushed through, as most people now know, there were huge amounts of money in the form of direct grants and loan guarantees that went to Solyndra and other “green energy” companies that failed. Yet, the question remained: Where did all that taxpayer money go for green energy?

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Escobar: The Long & Winding Multipolar Road

Pepe Escobar parses out the distinction between a rules-based order and a law-based order. From Escobar at The Asia Times via zerohedge.com:

The West’s “rules-based order” invokes rulers’ authority; Russia-China say it’s time to return to law-based order…

We do live in extraordinary times.

On the day of the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), President Xi Jinping, in Tiananmen square, amid all the pomp and circumstance, delivered a stark geopolitical message:

The Chinese people will never allow foreign forces to intimidate, oppress or subjugate them. Anyone who tries to do this will find themselves on a collision course with a large steel wall forged by more than 1.4 billion Chinese.

I have offered a concise version of the modern Chinese miracle – which has nothing to do with divine intervention, but “searching truth from facts” (copyright Deng Xiaoping), inspired by a solid cultural and historical tradition.

The “large steel wall” evoked by Xi now permeates a dynamic “moderately prosperous society” – a goal achieved by the CCP on the eve of the centennial. Lifting over 800 million people out of poverty is a historical first – in every aspect.

As in all things China, the past informs the future. This is all about xiaokang – which may be loosely translated as “moderately prosperous society”.

The concept first appeared no less than 2,500 years ago, in the classic Shijing (“The Book of Poetry”). The Little Helmsman Deng, with his historical eagle eye, revived it in 1979, right at the start of the “opening up” economic reforms.

Now compare the breakthrough celebrated in Tiananmen – which will be interpreted all across the Global South as evidence of the success of a Chinese model for economic development – with footage being circulated of the Taliban riding captured T-55 tanks across impoverished villages in northern Afghanistan.

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From the Notebook: The New State of Play Post Biden/Putin, by Tom Luongo

You may not always agree with Tom Luongo, but he’s always interesting and original. From Luongo at tomluongo.me:

From the Notebook posts are expansions of ideas first published for my Patrons. This one was published on June 18th.

Sometimes the significance of events doesn’t hit you until far after the event took place. One of the hardest parts of this job is knowing when not to write about a subject and let it sink in for a bit rather than burp out the first thing that comes to mind. It also helps to spend that time considering what others say on the subject.

The Saker’s thoughtful post on the outcome of the Biden/Putin summit is worth your time.  He rightly points out that the main outcome was a signal from Biden’s team, and handlers, that the hyper-aggressive war against Russia going on since 2013 is now over.

… what Biden did and said was quite clearly very deliberate and prepared. This is not the case of a senile President losing his focus and just spewing (defeatist) nonsense. Therefore, we must conclude that there are also those in the current US (real) power configuration who decided that Biden must follow a new, different, course or, at the very least, change rhetoric. I don’t know who/what this segment of the US power configuration is, but I submit that something has happened which forced at least a part of the US ruling class to decide that Obama’s war on Russia had failed and that a different approach was needed. At least that is the optimistic view.

I have some ideas about who actually ordered this shift in tone which has become readily apparent in the weeks since the meeting. More on that in a bit.

This summit was the signal of the major shift in policy.  Kissinger is no longer the driving force intellectually for U.S. foreign policy.  Divide and conquer hasn’t worked.

As Alex Mercouris brought up in my talk with him recently, the likely main offer made on Biden’s behalf by Jake Sullivan to his Russian counterpart, was to cut Russia in on the infrastructure deals in Africa if Russia would loosen ties to China. China is the new pivot for U.S. foreign policy.

If that offer was made then it was a calculated move to tell Putin that the U.S. was unserious about changing the dynamic between them.  I think there was a lot more said than just this. But Putin didn’t say it directly to Biden. This summit was a ceasefire in the war against Russia, a typical move to retrench and rethink options after a major defeat. That defeat was not ginnng up a war in the Donbass.  The two events are intimately connected.

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Human Rights Groups Are Quitting YouTube Over Its Pro-China Censorship, by Tyler Durden

Remember when Silicon Valley liked to pretend it was anti-authoritarian? Now, even the pretense is gone. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

In yet another glaring example of Google willingly doing China’s bidding, YouTube this month agreed to take down multiple videos posted by a well-known China-related human rights organization.

As Reuters recently reported, YouTube initially tried to pressure the group called Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights to censor its content in several videos documenting disappeared Uyghur citizens in China’s Xinjiang province, which YouTube interpreted as a violation of its anti-harassment policy given personally identifiable information was present.

Despite the group’s videos essentially including detailed news reporting, the Google-owned platform said it had too many strikes against it related to people featured showing their IDs. The organization was asked to blur the IDs.

The IDs were shown on the videos to verify that interviewees were indeed relatives of those believed to be missing inside Xinjiang’s vast ‘reeducation camp’ prisons. Instead of continuing to allow the videos to garner millions of views, spotlighting the ongoing crackdown against the Chinese Muslim minorities, YouTube instead “disappeared” the videos. The controversy began within the past years as follows:

Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights’ channel has published nearly 11,000 videos on YouTube totaling over 120 million views since 2017, thousands of which feature people speaking to camera about relatives they say have disappeared without a trace in China’s Xinjiang region, where UN experts and rights groups estimate over a million people have been detained in recent years.

On June 15, the channel was blocked for violating YouTube’s guidelines, according to a screenshot seen by Reuters, after twelve of its videos had been reported for breaching its ‘cyberbullying and harassment’ policy.

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The Deficiencies of Sinophobia, Bannon & the End of Geopolitics, by Joaquin Flores

A subtle and incisive analysis—absent moralizing cant—of geopolitics going forward, from Joaquin Flores at strategic-culture.org:

Globalization is being wound down so that western elites can reinforce control over their current zone of hegemony, Joaquin Flores.

The 47th G7 summit held on 11-13 June 2021 in Cornwall carried the motto ‘Build Back Better World’ (B3W), the mantra of the IMF’s ‘Great Resetist Regime’.

What ‘Build Back Better’ amounts to is a Globalist gambit to retain power amidst vastly changing conditions. It recognizes, as does Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum, in his text ‘Covid19: The Great Reset’, that globalization will be curtailed as a consequence of the political response to Covid.

The G7 summit gave new meaning to ‘Building Back Better’, which was posited as an alternative to the Chinese Belt and Road initiative.

This revealed that the planned demolition to economies and global trade, and supply-lines of the western economies, was also a move to unwind the globalization project by disconnecting from China.

As we have written for over a year, the Great Reset is about pushing forward on two directions which at first pass seem contradictory: the end of Globalization as we have known it, but an end being carried out by the Globalists themselves despite their own wishes.

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California Proposes Another Absurd Bailout Program, by Simon Black

Simon Black’s weekly tally of the absurd, at sovereignman.com:

Are you ready for this week’s absurdity? Here’s our Friday roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, risks to your prosperity… and on occasion, inspiring poetic justice.

China says Wuhan Lab Scientists Deserve Nobel Prize

China’s government-run media outlets are reporting that, instead of being blamed for leaking the coronavirus, the Wuhan Virology lab scientists should be awarded the Nobel Prize for being the first to sequence the virus.

Naturally it’s only a matter of time before the World Health Organization throws its weight behind this recommendation…

Or for the Big Tech companies to censor anyone who says this is a completely absurd idea…

Or for the Twitter mob to accuse anyone who doesn’t support China’s Nobel Prize push as an anti-Asian racist.

Click here to read the full story.

LinkedIn censors China experts at request of China

Speaking of China, the Microsoft-owned networking and resume website LinkedIn has been helping China censor intellectual dissidents.

One academic, Jojje Olsson, who has written five books on China, received a message from LinkedIn stating that if he did not edit his profile, it would be blocked in China.

That was because it mentioned a graduate thesis he wrote on the Tiananmen Square massacre.

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Happy Birthday, Global Warming: Climate Change at 33, by Rupert Darwall

Global warming has feathered many nests, evoked many apocalyptic warnings, none of which have come to pass, and led to the passage of treaties and accords that mostly don’t cover the world’s biggest contributors to greenhouse emissions but will cripple Western economies. From Rupert Darwall at realclearenergy.org:

This month, climate change celebrates its 33rd birthday. On June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified that the greenhouse effect had been detected. “Global Warming Has Begun,” The New York Times declared the next day. Indeed, it had. A year older than Alexander the Great when he died, climate change took less than one-third of a century to conquer the West.

Four days earlier, the Toronto G7 had agreed that global climate change required “priority attention.” Before the month was out, the Toronto climate conference declared that humanity was conducting an uncontrolled experiment “whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war.” In September, Margaret Thatcher gave her famous speech to the Royal Society, warning of a global heat trap. “We are told,” although she didn’t say by whom, “that a warming of one degree centigrade per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope,” an estimate that turned out to be a wild exaggeration. Observed warming since then has been closer to one-tenth of one degree centigrade per decade. Two months later, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) held its inaugural meeting in Geneva.

The tendency to catastrophism was present at the outset of global warming. The previous year, at a secretive meeting of scientists that included the IPCC’s first chair, it had been recognized that traditional cost-benefit analysis was inappropriate, on account of the “risk of major transformations of the world of future generations.” The logic of this argument requires that climate change be presented as potentially catastrophic—otherwise, the cure would appear worse than the putative disease.

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Japanese Pot Calls European Kettle Black, by Doug Bandow

What Japan and the Europeans really want is to outsource their defense to somebody else, that is, the United States. From Doug Bandow at theamericanconservative.com:

Tokyo wants Europe to do more about China. But neither Japan nor the E.U. pull their own weight.

Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi told European leaders that they should increase the continent’s military presence in Asia to help Tokyo put “tremendous pressure” on the People’s Republic of China. In return Kishi proposed sending two armored divisions to Europe to help face down a revived Russian Federation.

Hah, hah, hah! Only kidding about the latter. Japan isn’t in the armored division business. Or inclined to send Japanese troops overseas. Or even to do that much to constrain Beijing. After all, Tokyo believes that confronting China is primarily America’s job. However, the minister would like Europe to join America in helping to defend Japan. Such a deal!

 

Kishi testified before the European Parliament’s committee on security and defense. He urged the European Union to “continue and expand” security cooperation with Japan in the “Indo-Pacific region.” He advocated cooperation “against authoritarianism,” telling the panel that “I highly commend the point that the EU strategy sets out the strengthening of presence and action in the Indo-Pacific.” An unnamed Japanese official told the South China Morning Post: “Japan hopes to use this opportunity to get more involvement from the EU in the region.”

Apparently, Tokyo isn’t satisfied with the defense welfare that it receives from the U.S. Now it hopes the Europeans, who have been as shameless as the Japanese in forever cheap-riding on Washington, to “visibly increase their military presence” in the Indo-Pacific. If Europe went along with his proposal, Japan would become a double-dipper, a notable achievement since it long has devoted less effort to the military even than the Europeans!

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It’s Beginning to Look Like Enemy Action, by John Green

Prudence dictates that the US keep an eye on China. From John Green at thebluestateconservative.com:

Jennifer Van Laar recently published a piece on RedState about a Chinese Defector who is working with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).  His identity is reported to be Dong Jingwei, the Vice Minister of State Security in the Chinese Ministry of Defense.  Before defecting, he was responsible for the counterintelligence efforts in China.  He was in a position to know about all things “espionage” in China and is perhaps the highest-level Chinese defector the US has ever had.  Even though the legacy media is playing it down, this is a big deal.

Sources have provided Van Laar with an overview of some of the information that Dong is providing.  When viewed in conjunction with events associated with the Obama administration, the COVID-19 pandemic, the media, and education, a very disturbing picture is emerging.

It speaks volumes that the man who knows the identity of all the Chinese spies in our country chose to defect to the DIA and only the DIA.  Further, it’s reported that the DIA is not sharing the information it’s receiving with the FBI or CIA.  Now why would that be?

Dong provided details of meetings between US officials, Chinese spies, and Russian SVR agents.  He also provided details about how the Chinese government gained access to CIA communications, which resulted in the death of dozens of CIA assets.  Anonymous sources are also reporting that members of the federal law enforcement community (i.e. FBI) are “scared s**tless” about Dong’s information.

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A Sovereign Iran Will Move Closer to Russia-China, by Pepe Escobar

Iran is becoming an important participant in China and Russia’s Eurasian axis. From Pepe Escobar at unz.com:

Iran’s president-elect will ‘Look East’ while seeking to exit ‘strategic patience’ when dealing with the US

Iran’s new President-elect Ebrahim Raisi holds a press conference in Tehran on June 21. Photo: AFP / Shota Mizuno / The Yomiuri Shimbun
Iran’s new President-elect Ebrahim Raisi holds a press conference in Tehran on June 21. Photo: AFP / Shota Mizuno / The Yomiuri Shimbun

In his first press conference as President-Elect with 62% of the votes, Ebrahim Raesi, facing a forest of microphones, came out swinging and leaving nothing to the imagination.

On the JCPOA, or Iran nuclear deal, the dossier that completely obsesses the West, Raeisi was clear:

  • the US must immediately return to the JCPOA that Washington unilaterally violated, and lift all sanctions.
  • The JCPOA negotiations in Vienna will proceed, but they do not condition anything in terms of Iran’s future.
  • The Iranian ballistic missile program is absolutely non-negotiable in the framework of the JCPOA, and will not be curbed.

Asked by a Russian journalist whether he would meet President Biden if a deal was struck in Vienna and all sanctions lifted – a major “if” – Raeisi’s answer was a straight “No”.

It’s crucial to stress that Raeisi, in principle, favors the restoration of the JCPOA as its was signed in 2015 – following the guidelines of Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. But if the Vienna charade goes on forever and the Americans keep insisting on rewriting the deal towards other areas of Iranian national security, that’s a definitive red line.

Raeisi acknowledged the immense internal challenges he faces, in terms of putting the Iranian economy back on track, getting rid of the neoliberal drive of outgoing Team Rouhani, and fighting widespread corruption. The fact that election turnout was only 48.7%, compared to the average 70% in the prior three presidential contests will make it even more difficult.

Yet in foreign policy Iran’s path ahead is unmistakable, centered on the “Look East” strategy, which means closer cooperation with China and Russia, with Iran developing as a key node of Eurasian integration or, according to the Russian vision, the Greater Eurasia Partnership.

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