Tag Archives: Chinese government

China: The World’s First Technate – Part 2 (with link to Part 1), by Iain Davis

Western governments don’t stand in opposition to the Chinese government; they want to emulate it. From Iain Davis at iaindavis.com:

In Part 1, we discussed the historical background of Technocracy Inc. that briefly found popularity in the US in the 1930s during the turmoil of the Great Depression. Technocracy was rooted in socioeconomic theories that focused upon the efficient management of society by experts (technocrats). This idea briefly held the public’s attention during a period of sustained recession, mass unemployment and growing poverty.

The technological capabilities required for the energy surveillance grid, essential for the operation of a Technate (a technocratic society), were far beyond the practical reach of 1930s America. Consequently, for that and other reasons, public interest in the seemingly preposterous idea of technocracy soon subsided.

However, in recent decades, many influential policy strategists—most notably Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger—and private philanthropic foundations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, recognised that advances in digital technology would eventually make a Technate feasible. As founding and leading members of the Trilateral Commission, a policy “think tank,” they saw China as a potential test bed for technocracy.

We will now consider their efforts to create the world’s first Technate in China.

These articles build upon the research found in my 2021 publication Pseudopandemic, which is freely available to my blog subscribers.

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China in Five Tweets, by 2nd Smartest Guy in the World

China, as SLL has said before, is simply the preview of coming attractions in the West. From 2nd Smartest Guy in the World at 2ndsmartestguyintheworld.substack.com:

This is what the One World Government has in store for the West, with China simply being their longterm testing grounds:

And wow does one land in one of these soon to be operational bioterror concentration camps?

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Why China Sucks: It’s A Beta Test For The New World Order, by Brandon Smith

China has reliably served as a preview of coming totalitarian attractions for the West. From Brandon Smith at alt-market.com:

 

For over a decade there has been an open globalist obsession with the Chinese governmental model – A love affair, if you will. Many top proponents of global centralization including Henry Kissinger and George Soros have praised China in the past and hinted that the communist country is burgeoning into a major player within the New World Order. Soros expressed this exact sentiment way back in 2009, around the time that China began courting the IMF and issuing trillions in Yuan based treasury debt in order to join their global currency initiative.

Several years later, China was inducted into the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights basket. The CCP now avidly supports the creation of a new global currency system with the IMF in control.

This is a reality I have been writing about for many years: China does NOT stand in opposition to global centralization under the control of western oligarchs. All they want is a prominent seat at the table when the “Great Reset” kicks off and total centralization begins. But the above information only suggests an economic relationship between China and the globalists. Does the alliance go even further than that?

Recently, Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum gave an interview to the Chinese government controlled CGTN at the APEC Summit. In that interview, Schwab praises China as a role model for many other nations. This might shock some people considering China’s economy is faltering, with their global exports plunging in 2022 and their housing market in shambles. This decline is in large part due to global stagflation, but also due to their insane “zero covid” policy which has kept the nation under pandemic lockdown for years.

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forcing the brave to stand alone, by el gato malo

The truth cannot be ignored. The government of China is a totalitarian dictatorship. From el gato malo at boriquagato.substack.com:

western silence (or worse, praise) for china’s government is shameful

as this is a PG-13 publication, i will slightly water down the classic axiom and state that

“china is not a place where you want to “screw around and find out.”

china is nasty as hell to dissidents and has been setting up for absolute savagery for years now.

and the west sits silent.

and at a certain point, that silence becomes complicity.

and past a certain point, active plaudits and praise for “the chinese system” becomes morally intolerable.

and i would argue that we’re well over the rubicon.

china has become a dystopian movie.

the chinese government is a brutal dictatorship whose leader just basically appointed himself strongman for life.

and the west does not care.

they have been rounding up ethnic minorities by the millions for a decade and putting them in “re-education camps” and forcing them into what amounts to slave labor.

and the west managed a couple tepid news stories about uyghurs then forgot.

and then they started building massive internment camps all over the country where anyone can be sent at the push of a button that turns your covid QR code red and where you can be held indefinitely (and at your own expense) until they decide to let you go.

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China Restricts Movement Across iPhone City, by Tyler Durden

Maybe the Chinese aren’t as docilely accepting of state authority as many of those touting China’s “development model” claim. The twitter videos speak for themselves. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Update (1100ET):

China’s Zhongzhou, home to Foxconn’s massive iPhone factory, will begin to enforce mobility restrictions across eight districts in main urban areas on Friday. The reason, well, authorities blame it on ‘rising Covid infections,’ though we should note that the new restrictions come as massive unrest has erupted at the factory of more than 200,000 workers.

Zhongzhou authorities posted a statement on its WeChat page on Wednesday about mobility restrictions from Friday through Sunday.

“At present, the epidemic situation in our city is still severe and complicated,” the statement said. Health officials will conduct daily mass PCR tests and request that residents in high-risk areas stay within their homes.

You can find more about the chaos unfolding at the iPhone factory below…

* * *

On Wednesday, unrest broke out at Foxconn’s massive iPhone factory in Zhengzhou, central China, reported Bloomberg. Videos on social media showed hundreds of workers, if not more, clashing with security personnel after a month of strict Covid restrictions.

Manufacturer Foxconn confirmed the outbreak of “violence” and said it would work with local authorities to quell further violence. It released a statement that said workers were furious about pay and living conditions.

“Regarding any violence, the company will continue to communicate with employees and the government to prevent similar incidents from happening again,” the world’s largest producer of iPhones wrote in a statement. 

As Covid infections increased across Zhengzhou and iPhone factory, Foxconn adopted a “closed loop” system for employees in October. Workers were forced to live on campus and were prohibited from physical contact with the outside world – including family members.

Then by late October, strict Covid restrictions for workers sparked minor unrest at the facilities of about 200,000 workers — all were banned from eating in public and forced to eat meals back at their dorms.

By early November, while Beijing ramped up its zero Covid policy by locking down the surrounding metro area — workers began to flee the factory.

Now in videos posted on Weibo and Twitter that AFP and Reuters have verified, all hell appears to have broken out as hundreds of workers clash with security guards and people in hazmat suits.

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China’s Housing Market Slump Becomes A Real Issue, by Daniel Lacalle

You can’t “central plan” your way out of a devastating housing market slump. From Daniel Lacalle at zerohedge.com:

A few months ago, I wrote that the Chinese slowdown was much more than COVID-19 related and pointed to the challenges coming from the excessive weight of the real estate sector in the economy.

A research paper by Kenneth Rogoff and Yuanchen Yang (pdf) estimated that the real estate sector constitutes 29 percent of China’s GDP.

The problems coming from the slow-motion deterioration of the property sector have extended to the financial challenges of China’s local governments and may create a relevant fiscal problem for the nation’s public accounts.

“Sales at China’s largest housing developers fell 43 percent in June from a year earlier, according to China Real Estate Information Corp,” Bloomberg reported, creating an alarming funding gap for local governments, where finances are heavily dependent on land sale revenues, and a significant problem for the financial sector and the government. China’s central bank has promised to mobilize a $148 billion bailout to complete unfinished real estate projects as anger rises among property buyers that haven’t received their homes after advancing significant payments.

The size of the real estate sector in the economy is enormous, and the impact on gross domestic product (GDP) of a slump in sales may be impossible to offset with other sectors. According to S&P Global, China’s property sales will probably drop by about 30 percent this year due to the increasing number of homebuyers’ mortgage payment suspensions. This could be worse than in 2008 when sales fell by roughly 20 percent, Esther Liu at S&P Global Ratings told CNBC. There’s no sector in China that can mitigate the impact of such a drop in tax revenues and output.

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President Xi Faces An Impossible Dilemma In Shanghai As COVID Outbreak Worsens Despite Lockdown, by Tyler Durden

The dilemma is not impossible, it’s just that the solution requires the Chinese government to admit it was wrong. That’s something governments rarely do. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

In the span of just over a week, CCP authorities have gone from denying plans for a citywide lockdown of Shanghai to announcing what was supposed to be a two-part staggered lockdown – to simply locking down the entire city and sending in the military and a contingent of medical workers as locals accuse the government of violating its social compact to put the people’s interests first.

Now, as the entire city of roughly 26 million faces what’s already shaping up to be the most punishing lockdown in China since the original three-month Wuhan lockdown nightmare, Nikkei reports that Beijing has found itself in an incredibly difficult position.

On Sunday, Shanghai counted 9,006 mainly asymptomatic infections, more than two-thirds of the national tally.

The reason the situation in Shanghai presents such a difficult conundrum is that backing down from its lockdown in Shanghai would mean admitting that the “Zero COVID” approach has been an abject failure.

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Elon Musk and the Chinese Temptation, by Peter Schweizer

The Chinese market and China’s government pose huge dilemmas for Elon Musk and other U.S. entrepreneurs. From Peter Schweizer at gatestoneinstitute.com:

  • “Other American CEOs have close relationships to the [Chinese Communist] Party. But [Elon] Musk is the only one who loudly praises Beijing while running a space company with incredibly sensitive and powerful defense applications.” — Isaac Stone Fish, Barron’s, November 13, 2020.
  • Musk’s dilemma is not unique. The close technology-sharing relationship between Tesla and SpaceX poses national security risks to his adopted home country, but so do Google’s and Microsoft’s work with China on artificial intelligence. U.S. government policy is predictably slow in catching up to the speed of hard-charging, globe-spanning enterprises like Musk’s, and the Chinese are only too happy to increase that gap.
  • At some point, however, companies such as SpaceX, Google and Microsoft, and the individual Americans who own, direct, or invest in them, will face a similar choice between their obligation to America and their pursuit of more profits abroad.

“Other American CEOs have close relationships to the [Chinese Communist] Party. But [Elon] Musk is the only one who loudly praises Beijing while running a space company with incredibly sensitive and powerful defense applications.” — Isaac Stone Fish, author of America Second: How America’s Elites Are Making China Stronger. Pictured: Musk meets with China’s Premier Li Keqiang in Beijing on January 9, 2019. (Photo by Mark Schiefelbein/AFP via Getty Images)

Elon Musk has fans all over the ideological spectrum. People on the Left love him for popularizing electric cars with his Tesla company, or maybe for openly smoking pot on podcaster Joe Rogan’s show. Conservatives love him for his entrepreneurial dash and penchant for standing up to politicians and Big Tech censorship of the internet. And everyone loves Musk for responding to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and severing of its communications links by making his Starlink satellite broadband internet service available in Ukraine and donating Starlink terminals to Ukrainians. The Starlink connectivity, according to one report, may even be helping armed Ukrainian drones target Russian military vehicles.

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Doug Casey on the Rise of China… And What it Means for the World

Is China topping out? From Doug Casey at internationalman.com:

Rise of China

International Man: Lee Kuan Yew, the former leader of Singapore, once said:

“The size of China’s displacement of the world balance is such that the world must find a new balance.

It is not possible to pretend that this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of the world.”

What is your take?

Doug Casey: China has united 1.4 billion people into a single political entity, so of course they have a lot of weight. But simply having masses of people under your political control doesn’t mean as much as it used to.

China would still be a poverty-stricken non-entity if it hadn’t been for the reforms that Deng Xiaoping made starting in 1980. Masses of uneducated, desperately poor peasants are more of a liability than an asset in the modern world. Deng transformed China’s economy into something that functions pretty much like those in the West. But now, Xi Jinping seems to be returning to the philosophy of Chairman Mao, with much more centralized control. That’s very negative for the country.

Secondly, China’s demographics are horrible. The average woman today only has 1.4 children. Low reproduction rates are to be expected when a society urbanizes. But China also had a draconian one-child policy starting in 1980 that only ended in 2015. That, and the fact the Chinese prefer males for cultural reasons, compounded the phenomenon.

Few people in the West realize that as a result of these things, the Chinese population is in steep decline. UN projections—which aren’t worth much but are still interesting—find that by the end of this century, their population could collapse to 600 or 700 million. And they’ll mostly be old people, so it’s not going to bounce back quickly.

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Will China Pop the Global Everything Bubble? Yes, by Charles Hugh Smith

China will pop the global everything bubble because to China’s leaders, the only worse alternative would be to allow it to persist and grow ever-larger. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

The line of dominoes that is already toppling extends around the entire global economy and financial system. Plan accordingly.

That China faces structural problems is well-recognized. The list of articles in the August issue of Foreign Affairs dedicated to China reflects this:

Xi’s Gamble: the Race to Consolidate Power and Stave Off Disaster

China’s Economic Reckoning: The Price of Failed Reforms

The Robber Barons of Beijing: Can China Survive its Gilded Age?

Life of the Party: How Secure Is the CCP? (Chinese Communist Party)

These are thorny, difficult issues: a demographic cliff resulting from the one-child policy, soaring wealth-income inequality, pervasive corruption, public health issues (diabesity, etc.), environmental damage and a slowing economy.

What the conventional analysts do not fully grasp, in my view, are 1) the existential threat to the CCP and China’s economy posed by its unprecedented, metastasizing credit-asset bubble and 2) its incipient energy crisis.

As I explained in a recent blog post, What’s Really Going On in China?, the CCP and the government informally institutionalized moral hazard (the disconnection of risk and consequence) as a core economic policy.

Every financial loss, no matter how risky or debt-ridden, was covered by the state (via bail-out, refinancing debt, new loans, etc.) as a “cost of rapid development,” a reflection of the view that some inefficiency and waste was inevitable in the rapid development of industry, housing, infrastructure and a consumer economy.

What China’s leaders did not fully understand was this implicit guarantee of bail-outs–the equivalent of “The Fed has our backs”–incentivized debt-funded speculation as the lowest-risk, highest-return “investment,” especially when compared to low-profit, risky investments in low-margin export industries. (Recall the average profit margins of Chinese exporting enterprises is 1% to 3%.)

This is the hidden driver of China’s sagging productivity and economy: debt in all sectors is skyrocketing to fund speculation, not productivity.

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