THINGS WHICH FOLLOW: PART C FOR CHINA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REc6uRQRnV0
(Personal note: I have been using a lot of worldly references in this section nd other places because I suspect this will get read by some after the leaving. Those not saved now will know the references, will have a touchpoint. at the same time, all this referencing and checking out the various sources hasn't done meany Spiritual good, so I am really backing off. I apolofgize if this has made anyone else uncomfortable.)
The King of the East has a good deal more to lose than anyone when the war breaks out. He has been the picture of the financial giant striding into the outside world beginning with President Xi Jinping's Belt and Road initiative, a restart of the old Silk Road that made China an economic juggernaut centuries ago.
https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2017/05/economist-explains-11
May 15th 2017
by J.P. | BEIJING
OVER the weekend Xi Jinping welcomed 28 heads of state and government to Beijing for a coming-out party, which continues today, to celebrate the “belt and road” initiative, his most ambitious foreign policy. Launched in 2013 as “one belt, one road”, it involves China underwriting billions of dollars of infrastructure investment in countries along the old Silk Road linking it with Europe. The ambition is immense. China is spending roughly $150bn a year in the 68 countries that have signed up to the scheme. The summit meeting (called a forum) has attracted the largest number of foreign dignitaries to Beijing since the Olympic Games in 2008. Yet few European leaders are showing up. For the most part they have ignored the implications of China’s initiative. What are those implications and is the West right to be sanguine?
The project is the clearest expression so far of Mr Xi’s determination to break with Deng Xiaoping’s dictum to “hide our capabilities and bide our time; never try to take the lead”. The Belt and Road Forum (with its unfortunate acronym, BARF) is the second set-piece event this year at which Mr Xi will lay out China’s claim to global leadership. (The first was a speech against protectionism made at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January). In 2014, Wang Yi, the foreign minister, said the initiative was Mr Xi’s most important foreign policy. Its ultimate aim is to make Eurasia (dominated by China) an economic and trading area to rival the transatlantic one (dominated by America).
Behind this broad strategic imperative lie a plethora of secondary motivations—and it is the number and variety of these that prompts scepticism about the coherence and practicality of the project. By investing in infrastructure, Mr Xi hopes to find a more profitable home for China’s vast foreign-exchange reserves, most of which are in low-interest-bearing American government securities. He also hopes to create new markets for Chinese companies, such as high-speed rail firms, and to export some of his country’s vast excess capacity in cement, steel and other metals. By investing in volatile countries in central Asia, he reckons he can create a more stable neighbourhood for China’s own restive western provinces of Xinjiang and Tibet. And by encouraging more Chinese projects around the South China Sea, the initiative could bolster China’s claims in that area (the “road” in “belt and road” refers to sea lanes). The trouble is that some of these ambitions contradict others: is a dodgy project in central Asia a better place to invest than American government securities? And with different motivations go conflicting interests. There is infighting between the most important Chinese institutions involved, including the ministry of commerce, the foreign ministry, the planning commission and China’s provinces. To make matters worse, China is finding it hard to identify profitable projects in many belt-and-road countries (Chinese businessmen in central Asia call it “One Road, One Trap”). To cap it all, China is facing a backlash against some of its plans, with elected governments in Sri Lanka and Myanmar repudiating or seeking to renegotiate projects approved by their authoritarian predecessors.
As a result the forum—on the face of it a celebration of the initiative—will in reality find Mr Xi seeking to contain a backlash against it. That may seem to justify Europeans in their decision to stay away. But the suspicion that the project will fail could be misguided. Mr Xi needs the initiative because he has invested so much in it. China needs it because it provides an answer of sorts to some of its economic problems. And Asia needs it because of an unslakeable thirst for infrastructure. The belt and road initiative has plenty of problems but Mr Xi is determined to push ahead with it.
From Time:
Nov 13, 2017
Vol 190 No 20
WORLD CHINA
How China’s Economy Is Poised to Win the Future
Ian Bremmer @ianbremmer Nov. 2, 2017
President Xi Jinping told delegates at the party congress that it was time for China to take “center stage”
President Trump has plenty of work to do during his 10-day tour of Asia in November. In Japan and South Korea, he must reassure nervous allies that an “America first” foreign policy does not mean the U.S. has ceded regional dominance to China. In Vietnam and the Philippines, he has to communicate deep U.S. interest in balancing China’s influence in Southeast Asia.
But the most important stop will be in Beijing, where Trump will meet President Xi Jinping for the first time since the Chinese leader heralded a “new era” in global politics at his pivotal party congress in October. Trump will try to project strength while calling for closer cooperation on North Korea and on resolving trade disputes. But he arrives at a moment when China, not the U.S., is the single most powerful actor in the global economy.
The Chinese authoritarian-capitalist model wasn’t supposed to survive in a global free market, let alone thrive. As recently as five years ago, there was consensus that China would one day need fundamental political reform for the state to maintain its legitimacy and that China could not sustain its state capitalist system. Today China’s political and economic system is better equipped and perhaps even more sustainable than the American model, which has dominated the international system since the end of World War II. While the U.S. economy remains the world’s largest, China’s ability to use state-owned companies to boost the party’s domestic and foreign influence ensures that the emerging giant is on track to surpass U.S. GDP in 2029, according to the Center for Economics and Business Research.
The U.S. is hardly irrelevant. The dollar remains the global reserve currency, an exorbitant privilege that will likely last for years to come. Wealthy Chinese continue to invest in U.S. real estate and send their kids to U.S. schools.
But the pillars of U.S. power–its military alliances, its trade leadership and its willingness to promote Western political values–are eroding.
At the same time, the leaders of other emerging powers–not just Russia but also democracies like India and Turkey–are following China’s lead in building systems where government embraces commerce while tightening control over domestic politics, economic competition and control of information. This process has been in motion for many years, but China now has its strongest leader in decades, and the U.S. has its weakest. Americans and Europeans have always assumed that the long arc of human development bends toward liberal democracy. What if they’re wrong?
There’s an old, likely apocryphal story that, during a visit to China several decades ago, economist and free-market fundamentalist Milton Friedman visited a site where workers were building a canal. When he asked his host why the workers were using shovels and wheelbarrows rather than modern equipment like tractors, he was told that the project’s purpose was to create jobs. If it’s jobs you want, Friedman asked, why not give the workers spoons instead of shovels?
Times have changed since then, but not all that much–the reality remains that it is far easier for Xi to command Chinese officials to create and protect jobs than, for example, it was for Barack Obama to persuade Republican lawmakers to bail out the U.S. auto industry in the wake of the U.S. financial crisis. Beijing offers direct financial and political support for its strategic industries, 365 days a year. The government protects Chinese companies charged with stealing the intellectual property of foreign firms. It provides direct funding for strategic sectors. It writes laws designed specifically to help them grow. And it engages in industrial espionage and cyberattacks against foreign competitors.
This level of protection is especially important in an age when the most important variables globally will be the pace and scale of technological change. Automation has already upended labor demographics in the developed world; 87.8% of manufacturing jobs lost in the U.S. between 2000 and 2010 were the result of automation and improved technology, according to a 2015 study by Ball State University. Technological upheaval is now poised to displace hundreds of millions of workers in the developing world, including many who have only recently risen from poverty. But the Chinese government’s finer control of its economy will help absorb some of the shock that will have bigger effects elsewhere.
( The conflict has always been that capitalism is there to profit the leader class but can only function with a powerful middle class. Yet the greed behind much of it leads to the desire of the leader class to have more and more of the profits for themselves and leave less for others. They come to regard themselves as superior by virtue of wealth, and need more and more adornments of that wealth to enforce their notions, so suppress others who want to achieve a comfortable life for themselves. THAT is from the spirit of ANTICHRIST. Marx understood that and adopted a humanist model to combat human greed. despising the church that he saw as an oppressor. Even though it was Christ who has ALWAYS BEEN THE LEADER IN CONCERNS FOR HUMANITY AND HUMAN BEINGS THEMSELVES, NOT IN PHILOSOPHIES OR INSTITUTIONS. But the modern leaders of "former" communist countries realized that it was the banks and not Ronald Reagan or the arms race that crashed the Soviet model. "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" led them to adopt those models but take total government control of the situation to solve the "problem" of humans acting human. W.)
Take China’s big three oil companies. CNOOC, PetroChina and Sinopec have each benefited from large infusions of cash from the state via state-owned banks. Similarly, the heavily indebted state-owned chemical giant ChemChina was able to acquire Swiss firm Syngenta and its biotech assets for $43 billion only because the Chinese government made clear that food security in China is a strategic priority–and that the state would guarantee ChemChina’s financial stability. Private firms benefit too. Telecoms firm Huawei is poised to dominate the global deployment of fifth-generation mobile infrastructure, particularly in developing countries, thanks to a hefty credit line from China Development Bank, which lends in support of the Chinese government’s policy agenda. Trump can only envy the Chinese government’s ability to use policy and subsidy to decide which companies will win and which will lose–and the power that that reflects on the ruling party.
But jobs and industry are not the only ways that China’s leaders ensure political unity. They also use technology to bolster the ruling party’s political control in ways that Western governments can’t. As we embark on the world’s biggest social experiment ever–entire generations interacting with society primarily through smartphones–we’ll see enormous power for institutions that have the means to control those interactions and the data they produce.
In the West, companies use algorithms to expand profitability, while citizens use them to become better-informed consumers. In China, companies use algorithms at the behest of the government to ensure that citizens remain within the rules of order set by the political leadership. There is no better example of this than the “social credit system” that China is developing, a system that allows state officials to assess a person’s financial data, social connections, consumption habits and respect for the law to establish the citizen’s “trustworthiness.”
Imagine a credit report that reveals whether you’ve ever committed a crime, been caught cheating on a test, been drunk in public, missed an alimony payment, been fired from a job, signed a petition, visited undesirable websites, been photographed at a protest or written something on the Internet that led administrators to question your loyalty to the state. A good social credit score could lead to a promotion, a raise, a better apartment, admission to a good school, access to state-approved dating websites, better stores, better doctors, the right to travel, a more generous pension and important opportunities for your children. A bad score could put you in jail.
The potential for intrusion into 1.4 billion personal lives is unprecedented. Published information on the plan by China’s State Council says it is intended as a safeguard against, among other things, “conduct that seriously undermines … the normal social order” and “assembling to disrupt social order [and] endangering national defense interests.” The plan’s ultimate purpose, according to Chinese officials, is to “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.” For Westerners, this is a shocking abuse of state power and an unthinkable invasion of personal privacy. In China, these are the tools officials will use to build a more “harmonious society.” China’s largest dating site, Baihe, already allows users to display their credit scores in their dating profiles.
(Now imagine that with microchip imbedding in the hand and with the acid test being any Christian influences. W)
But China’s most important ambitions are in artificial intelligence. This is the space race of the 21st century, but one with a much more direct impact on the lives and livelihoods of citizens. The biggest technological breakthroughs in AI will demand the kind of planning and investment that the U.S. once poured into the Manhattan Project or the race to the moon. However, the U.S. government no longer has the political will to muster this kind of sustained long-term commitment and has outsourced innovation to Silicon Valley. U.S. tech firms will have the advantage if the race to develop AI depends mainly on experimentation and innovation in multiple areas at once. But China is the better bet to win if the decisive factor is depth of commitment to a single goal and the depth of pockets in pursuing it. The one certainty here is that Washington–and the representative democracy and free-market capitalism it champions–is not in the race.
To argue that China’s system is better able to withstand the shocks of today’s world is not to claim that it’s better for those who live within it. Political repression and the lack of rule of law in China create injustice at every level of society. As local governments and companies in China struggle with debt, the state’s ability to bail them out is not inexhaustible. Despite its investments in new technologies, automation and machine learning will displace large numbers of Chinese workers over time, creating long-term risks of social unrest. But for the foreseeable future, China is likely to remain strong and stable. Its international presence will continue to grow, and it is not short of ambition. In October, Xi said it was time for China to “take center stage in the world.”
The China striding into that spotlight is not guaranteed to win the future. In this fragmenting world, no one government will have the international influence required to continue to set the political and economic rules that govern the global system. But if you had to bet on one country that is best positioned today to extend its influence with partners and rivals alike, you wouldn’t be wise to back the U.S. The smart money would probably be on China.
And by Charlie Campbell, same issue:
Today, the ground of Khorgos is mud,” says Guo Jianbin, deputy director of the Khorgos Economic Development Zone administration committee, accenting his words with a booted stamp. “But soon it will be paved with gold.”
Khorgos is a linchpin in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative. Formerly known as One Belt One Road, it’s a rekindling of the ancient Silk Road through a staggeringly ambitious plan to build a network of highways, railways and pipelines linking Asia via the Middle East to Europe and south through Africa. The economic land “belt” takes cargo, in large part via Khorgos, through Eurasia. A maritime “road” links coastal Chinese cities via a series of ports to Africa and the Mediterranean. A total of 900 separate projects have been earmarked at a cost of $900 billion, according to the China Development Bank. There’s the $480 million Lamu deep-sea port in Kenya, which will eventually be connected via road, railway and pipeline to landlocked South Sudan and Ethiopia and right across Africa to Cameroon’s port of Douala. A new $7.3 billion pipeline from Turkmenistan will bring China an extra 15 billion cubic meters of gas annually. Not since the hordes of Genghis Khan galloped west in the 13th century have such sweeping transnational ambitions emanated from China, though instead of ashes and sun-bleached bones, this time the invaders plan to leave harbors, pipelines and high-speed rail in its wake.
“Exchange will replace estrangement, mutual learning will replace clashes, and coexistence will replace a sense of superiority,” Xi told the opening of the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing in May.
(Sounding like the French president from last week. The field for the office of Antichrist is, as I said then, crammed.W.)
It’s a vision of inclusive globalization that bolsters Chinese leadership credentials at a time when the U.S. is wavering on its international commitments. Belt and Road spans some 65 countries, covering 70% of the planet’s population, three-quarters of its energy resources, a quarter of goods and services and 28% of global GDP—some $21 trillion. Beijing’s rationale is clear: these are large, resource-rich nations within its reach, with a severe infrastructure deficit, which China has the resources and expertise to correct. By boosting connectivity, China can spur growth in the short term, gain access to valuable natural resources in the mid term and create new booming markets for its goods long into the future.
The vision Xi expresses is viewed as the ultimate goodness of the capitalist notion. That everyone can profit from the expansionist dreams. The notion that the poor colonies profit from providing the natural resources that power the empire that invades them is hardly new and has been disproven time and again. That will always be the positive view that an empire presents to its media. We can ask Puerto Rico about debt loads and development curbed by its "parent" nation.
But China's investment in foreign securities, especially American ones, make it vulnerable to disaster in the USA. The ice age means almost as large a disaster for them as the Americans. I makes many of their plans iffy though their other reserves help buffer the loss. Nuclear war finishing any USA's possible recovery means a major loss for th Chna as well.
The King of the East feels this loss deeply when his "minute cousin" in NK launches the nuclear war. He had a set of assassins to eliminate the "cousin" if he became "unmanageable", but discovered only the morning of the attack that his killers had been unveiled and eliminated and that the "cousin" blames the US for the plot. His paranoia led him to act and now the King of the East is leveraged into action he would just as soon not take. He knows that the nuclear weapons being used will destroy his dreams for the east of his country. He must act to end it and he contacts his military after the US President ignores him.
Something else lies on the background. Another horseman gallops along with the Chinese and has been haunting them for decades. Their attempts at food control emphasize that ghostly horsemen: The memory of the great Chinese famine lingers.
From 1958 to 1962. the Mao regime presided over a massive loss of life by starvation. It began because Mao had to have control of everything, even the food supply. The ruler demanded a centralized food distribution system, gathering all the harvests, locating them in one main bank and then distributing them equally so all could eat. A great idea, except that the Mao regime was knee deep in corruption. in Tombstone, authir Yang Jisheng records in great detail the way middle managers seized food for themselves and their friends and family along the way to control and how they punished any who disagreed or resisted them.
During this time, Mao's Little Red Book was an anthem to hippie and far left resistance in the USA especially while the Vietnam war was raging and resistance rose:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34932800
"Let's quote from Mao" is not a remark that's commonly heard in the House of Commons, but McDonnell said he did so as a joke to draw attention to sales of British assets to the Chinese government. Picking it up, the chancellor replied mockingly that it was his shadow's "personal signed copy".
It's an icon of China and communism as well as a work of propaganda. More than a billion copies have been published, making the book, often wrapped in its distinctive vinyl cover, one of the most widely produced of all time. During China's "Cultural Revolution" it became virtually mandatory to own and carry one.
While that was circulating on US campuses in the 1960s along with the anitwar movement, China was recovering from major mismanagement of the food supply. According to Yang's research, between 36 and 45 million lives were lost in the famine. Some died of hunger while others were killed by the punishments administered to those who resisted the "Great Leap Forward." Mao initiated many industry aimed plans and ordered that they be carried out no matter what.
Does this sound familiar? Mao claimed that his country would surpass England in steel production and then ordered the statement be accomplished, Communes were opened to reach industrial heights. People who were farmers were taken from their lands and impressed into factory labor. Food production was redirected for exports to impress the rest of the world while workers in smaller communes were moved into huge communes Mao believed the larger communes to be superior so they were , whether evidence showed it or not. Mao and the Central Committee which was the "congress" were at odds but Mao's will always overpowered. Middle managers were given incredible power and little oversight. Uprising in the communes occurred as food was given as a reward for work. Some middle managers blamed the policies of collectivization and the state monopoly on grain purchasing and marketing for the starving deaths in Guangxi in 1957. The military supressed any revolts and imprisonment and physical punishment rose to the extreme.
Chinese leadership artfully misled media and political visitors by showing the more successful aspects and bringing forward witnesses who testified to the grand success of the plan.
Even as it starved millions of their people.
From the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/dec/07/tombstone-mao-great-famine-yeng-jisheng-review
In 1958, China was a state still nervous about its place in the world – isolated from the capitalist countries and with its USSR alliance starting to fray. Mao Zedong pushed hard for a new programme that would boost China's economy at a stroke. His colleagues supported him in a drive that would become known as the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to increase agricultural and industrial production to levels never before seen in human history. Within a year, however, it became clear that the plans were going horribly wrong. In China's countryside, food became ever scarcer. Hugely exaggerated reports of grain harvests were taken seriously at high levels, and food was moved from the countryside to the cities while millions of farmers started to die of starvation and its associated diseases. The death toll has never been fully calculated, but Frank Dikötter's powerful Mao's Great Famine puts the number of dead at some 45 million between 1958 and 1962.
What Yang found is worth knowing. One of the most devastated provinces was Henan, in central China. Henan had known famine before; the province was at the centre of the horrific hunger that struck during the second world war in 1942-43, killing some 3 to 4 million people. The policies of the Great Leap led to a new desolation in the province. Reports uncovered by Yang make evident a cycle of starvation and violence: a file from 1959 tells of one farmer who was "harshly beaten" because a small piece of beef was found in his home; he died six days later. A woman who was found cooking grain was "subjected to group struggle" for stealing; bound up and soaked in cold water, she too died shortly afterwards.
For a while, it was possible to think that the leadership had not understood the full level of the catastrophe in the countryside. The shattering of such illusions came at the Lushan conference of 1959. Peng Dehuai, one of the great marshals of the Chinese civil war against the nationalists, was a strong supporter of the Leap. But the discovery that people from his own home area were starving to death prompted him to write to Mao to ask for the policies to be adapted. Mao was furious, reading the letter out in public and demanding that his colleagues in the leadership line up either behind him or Peng. Almost to a man, they supported Mao, with his security chief Kang Sheng declaring of the letter: "I make bold to suggest that this cannot be handled with lenience." Peng was sent off into political obscurity. While there were minor adjustments to the Leap policies, the fundamental flaws were not addressed, and millions more continued to die until the formal abandonment of the programme in 1962.
Yet these qualifications should not obscure the main indictment. Famines are political, from the Irish potato famine to the Bengal famine of 1943 to Ethiopia in the 1980s. As Amartya Sen has argued, the problem is not absolute lack of food but the systemic flaws or decisions that prevent food getting to the people. During the Great Leap Forward, Mao and his leadership colleagues took specific decisions that led to mass starvation. They perpetuated a system that encouraged people to tell lies about grain production and discouraged transparency, making starvation worse. When the whole leadership (not just Mao) was confronted with Peng's criticisms, they rounded on the critic and allowed the policy to continue for another two years. That was the moment at which the leadership lurched into criminal irresponsibility. It may not have been murder or genocide but it was an unconscionable decision nonetheless, because – unlike, say, the Henan famine, which took place in the middle of a war – there were no external circumstances that could be used to excuse it. Yang Jisheng's book is not just a tombstone for his father and other famine victims, but for the reputation of the Communist party's leadership at a time when they should have acted – and failed to do so.
China's current success in the capitalist market has hidden a few minor details. They have again had people living in communes working long hours, paid little or nothing so the leadership can obtain contracts for the least bid. And impress the capitalist world with its "success." It has been a practice for "criminals" often political prisoners, to be killed for their organs so China can rise in the organ supply market.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/china-still-gathering-organs-executed-prisoners
For decades, China obtained human organs such as kidneys and livers from executed prisoners, a practice condemned by human rights activists and medical ethicists. China says they no longer do this and have built a new system for organ transplants that now relies on volunteers, not prisoners.
...
Because of his age and rare blood type, he says he would have died before reaching the top of the waiting list for a new kidney. So, urged by family and friends, he went to China’s capital, Beijing, in 2006. Within one week, he received a new kidney. He says he paid $10,000 for the transplant.
In Canada, it would have been free, since the government pays for health care. In the U.S., the average hospital charge for a kidney transplant is $150,000. Traveling to another country for this kind of surgery is called transplant tourism.
....
Dr. Jacob Lavee, Transplant Surgeon:
Back in 2005, a patient of mine came to me one day and told me, doc, I’m fed up waiting here in Israel for a suitable heart donor to become available, and I was told — that’s what he told me — by my insurance company that I should go to China because they have scheduled me to undergo heart transplantation. And he specified a specific date two weeks ahead of time.
Hari Sreenivasan:
Heart surgeon Dr. Jacob Lavee is president of the Israel Society of Transplantation. While kidney transplants can involve obtaining a kidney from a living donor, that is not the case with a heart transplant.
Dr. Jacob Lavee:
If a patient was promised to undergo a heart transplant on a specific date, this could only means that the — those who promised that knew ahead of time when his potential donor would be dead.
Hari Sreenivasan:
Human rights investigator Ethan Gutmann and lawyer David Matas have testified before Congress about China’s transplant system.
David Matas, Human Rights Lawyer:
It is unconscionable to kill a healthy, innocent person so that a sick person can live.
I am suggesting that authoritarian capitalism has little difference from authoritarian socialism, that the leadership with total power is still the leadership with no restraining force to stop it. That human beings have proven they are evil enough to do anything for their own satisfaction or to protect their pride, from the beginning of time until this moment. You can go back from the beginning of this blog chain and read all the bible passages about our ungodly behavior.
Famine will ride in as food and water become more valuable than gold , as the ice age or the flooding or foolish political choices crash the American Dream for good and take down the power of the East and North. Some suggest that war always leads to famine, but that is more often the result of scorched earth policies as armies retreat. Peace time famines come from the wrong policies and the wrong decisions made by people with too much power and too much pride to admit mistakes. And the origin of pride is the king of pride.
Isa 14:12 How great is your fall from heaven, O shining one, son of the morning! How are you cut down to the earth, low among the dead bodies!
13 For you said in your heart, I will go up to heaven, I will make my seat higher than the stars of God; I will take my place on the mountain of the meeting-place of the gods, in the inmost parts of the north.
14 I will go higher than the clouds; I will be like the Most High.
(BBE)
When you believe you are God you don't leave a lot of room for criticism.
The US sub launches two more missiles before the King of the East decides to act. The North Korean defenses were depleted by the the first hit. ABMs hit the first and the second is blasted of course. One of it pretargeted warheads misfires and lands in the middle of Vladivostok. And part a major port city of Russia disappears in nuclear flash.
Now the King of the North becomes involved.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REc6uRQRnV0
(Personal note: I have been using a lot of worldly references in this section nd other places because I suspect this will get read by some after the leaving. Those not saved now will know the references, will have a touchpoint. at the same time, all this referencing and checking out the various sources hasn't done meany Spiritual good, so I am really backing off. I apolofgize if this has made anyone else uncomfortable.)
The King of the East has a good deal more to lose than anyone when the war breaks out. He has been the picture of the financial giant striding into the outside world beginning with President Xi Jinping's Belt and Road initiative, a restart of the old Silk Road that made China an economic juggernaut centuries ago.
https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2017/05/economist-explains-11
May 15th 2017
by J.P. | BEIJING
OVER the weekend Xi Jinping welcomed 28 heads of state and government to Beijing for a coming-out party, which continues today, to celebrate the “belt and road” initiative, his most ambitious foreign policy. Launched in 2013 as “one belt, one road”, it involves China underwriting billions of dollars of infrastructure investment in countries along the old Silk Road linking it with Europe. The ambition is immense. China is spending roughly $150bn a year in the 68 countries that have signed up to the scheme. The summit meeting (called a forum) has attracted the largest number of foreign dignitaries to Beijing since the Olympic Games in 2008. Yet few European leaders are showing up. For the most part they have ignored the implications of China’s initiative. What are those implications and is the West right to be sanguine?
The project is the clearest expression so far of Mr Xi’s determination to break with Deng Xiaoping’s dictum to “hide our capabilities and bide our time; never try to take the lead”. The Belt and Road Forum (with its unfortunate acronym, BARF) is the second set-piece event this year at which Mr Xi will lay out China’s claim to global leadership. (The first was a speech against protectionism made at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January). In 2014, Wang Yi, the foreign minister, said the initiative was Mr Xi’s most important foreign policy. Its ultimate aim is to make Eurasia (dominated by China) an economic and trading area to rival the transatlantic one (dominated by America).
Behind this broad strategic imperative lie a plethora of secondary motivations—and it is the number and variety of these that prompts scepticism about the coherence and practicality of the project. By investing in infrastructure, Mr Xi hopes to find a more profitable home for China’s vast foreign-exchange reserves, most of which are in low-interest-bearing American government securities. He also hopes to create new markets for Chinese companies, such as high-speed rail firms, and to export some of his country’s vast excess capacity in cement, steel and other metals. By investing in volatile countries in central Asia, he reckons he can create a more stable neighbourhood for China’s own restive western provinces of Xinjiang and Tibet. And by encouraging more Chinese projects around the South China Sea, the initiative could bolster China’s claims in that area (the “road” in “belt and road” refers to sea lanes). The trouble is that some of these ambitions contradict others: is a dodgy project in central Asia a better place to invest than American government securities? And with different motivations go conflicting interests. There is infighting between the most important Chinese institutions involved, including the ministry of commerce, the foreign ministry, the planning commission and China’s provinces. To make matters worse, China is finding it hard to identify profitable projects in many belt-and-road countries (Chinese businessmen in central Asia call it “One Road, One Trap”). To cap it all, China is facing a backlash against some of its plans, with elected governments in Sri Lanka and Myanmar repudiating or seeking to renegotiate projects approved by their authoritarian predecessors.
As a result the forum—on the face of it a celebration of the initiative—will in reality find Mr Xi seeking to contain a backlash against it. That may seem to justify Europeans in their decision to stay away. But the suspicion that the project will fail could be misguided. Mr Xi needs the initiative because he has invested so much in it. China needs it because it provides an answer of sorts to some of its economic problems. And Asia needs it because of an unslakeable thirst for infrastructure. The belt and road initiative has plenty of problems but Mr Xi is determined to push ahead with it.
From Time:
Nov 13, 2017
Vol 190 No 20
WORLD CHINA
How China’s Economy Is Poised to Win the Future
Ian Bremmer @ianbremmer Nov. 2, 2017
President Xi Jinping told delegates at the party congress that it was time for China to take “center stage”
President Trump has plenty of work to do during his 10-day tour of Asia in November. In Japan and South Korea, he must reassure nervous allies that an “America first” foreign policy does not mean the U.S. has ceded regional dominance to China. In Vietnam and the Philippines, he has to communicate deep U.S. interest in balancing China’s influence in Southeast Asia.
But the most important stop will be in Beijing, where Trump will meet President Xi Jinping for the first time since the Chinese leader heralded a “new era” in global politics at his pivotal party congress in October. Trump will try to project strength while calling for closer cooperation on North Korea and on resolving trade disputes. But he arrives at a moment when China, not the U.S., is the single most powerful actor in the global economy.
The Chinese authoritarian-capitalist model wasn’t supposed to survive in a global free market, let alone thrive. As recently as five years ago, there was consensus that China would one day need fundamental political reform for the state to maintain its legitimacy and that China could not sustain its state capitalist system. Today China’s political and economic system is better equipped and perhaps even more sustainable than the American model, which has dominated the international system since the end of World War II. While the U.S. economy remains the world’s largest, China’s ability to use state-owned companies to boost the party’s domestic and foreign influence ensures that the emerging giant is on track to surpass U.S. GDP in 2029, according to the Center for Economics and Business Research.
The U.S. is hardly irrelevant. The dollar remains the global reserve currency, an exorbitant privilege that will likely last for years to come. Wealthy Chinese continue to invest in U.S. real estate and send their kids to U.S. schools.
But the pillars of U.S. power–its military alliances, its trade leadership and its willingness to promote Western political values–are eroding.
At the same time, the leaders of other emerging powers–not just Russia but also democracies like India and Turkey–are following China’s lead in building systems where government embraces commerce while tightening control over domestic politics, economic competition and control of information. This process has been in motion for many years, but China now has its strongest leader in decades, and the U.S. has its weakest. Americans and Europeans have always assumed that the long arc of human development bends toward liberal democracy. What if they’re wrong?
There’s an old, likely apocryphal story that, during a visit to China several decades ago, economist and free-market fundamentalist Milton Friedman visited a site where workers were building a canal. When he asked his host why the workers were using shovels and wheelbarrows rather than modern equipment like tractors, he was told that the project’s purpose was to create jobs. If it’s jobs you want, Friedman asked, why not give the workers spoons instead of shovels?
Times have changed since then, but not all that much–the reality remains that it is far easier for Xi to command Chinese officials to create and protect jobs than, for example, it was for Barack Obama to persuade Republican lawmakers to bail out the U.S. auto industry in the wake of the U.S. financial crisis. Beijing offers direct financial and political support for its strategic industries, 365 days a year. The government protects Chinese companies charged with stealing the intellectual property of foreign firms. It provides direct funding for strategic sectors. It writes laws designed specifically to help them grow. And it engages in industrial espionage and cyberattacks against foreign competitors.
This level of protection is especially important in an age when the most important variables globally will be the pace and scale of technological change. Automation has already upended labor demographics in the developed world; 87.8% of manufacturing jobs lost in the U.S. between 2000 and 2010 were the result of automation and improved technology, according to a 2015 study by Ball State University. Technological upheaval is now poised to displace hundreds of millions of workers in the developing world, including many who have only recently risen from poverty. But the Chinese government’s finer control of its economy will help absorb some of the shock that will have bigger effects elsewhere.
( The conflict has always been that capitalism is there to profit the leader class but can only function with a powerful middle class. Yet the greed behind much of it leads to the desire of the leader class to have more and more of the profits for themselves and leave less for others. They come to regard themselves as superior by virtue of wealth, and need more and more adornments of that wealth to enforce their notions, so suppress others who want to achieve a comfortable life for themselves. THAT is from the spirit of ANTICHRIST. Marx understood that and adopted a humanist model to combat human greed. despising the church that he saw as an oppressor. Even though it was Christ who has ALWAYS BEEN THE LEADER IN CONCERNS FOR HUMANITY AND HUMAN BEINGS THEMSELVES, NOT IN PHILOSOPHIES OR INSTITUTIONS. But the modern leaders of "former" communist countries realized that it was the banks and not Ronald Reagan or the arms race that crashed the Soviet model. "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" led them to adopt those models but take total government control of the situation to solve the "problem" of humans acting human. W.)
Take China’s big three oil companies. CNOOC, PetroChina and Sinopec have each benefited from large infusions of cash from the state via state-owned banks. Similarly, the heavily indebted state-owned chemical giant ChemChina was able to acquire Swiss firm Syngenta and its biotech assets for $43 billion only because the Chinese government made clear that food security in China is a strategic priority–and that the state would guarantee ChemChina’s financial stability. Private firms benefit too. Telecoms firm Huawei is poised to dominate the global deployment of fifth-generation mobile infrastructure, particularly in developing countries, thanks to a hefty credit line from China Development Bank, which lends in support of the Chinese government’s policy agenda. Trump can only envy the Chinese government’s ability to use policy and subsidy to decide which companies will win and which will lose–and the power that that reflects on the ruling party.
But jobs and industry are not the only ways that China’s leaders ensure political unity. They also use technology to bolster the ruling party’s political control in ways that Western governments can’t. As we embark on the world’s biggest social experiment ever–entire generations interacting with society primarily through smartphones–we’ll see enormous power for institutions that have the means to control those interactions and the data they produce.
In the West, companies use algorithms to expand profitability, while citizens use them to become better-informed consumers. In China, companies use algorithms at the behest of the government to ensure that citizens remain within the rules of order set by the political leadership. There is no better example of this than the “social credit system” that China is developing, a system that allows state officials to assess a person’s financial data, social connections, consumption habits and respect for the law to establish the citizen’s “trustworthiness.”
Imagine a credit report that reveals whether you’ve ever committed a crime, been caught cheating on a test, been drunk in public, missed an alimony payment, been fired from a job, signed a petition, visited undesirable websites, been photographed at a protest or written something on the Internet that led administrators to question your loyalty to the state. A good social credit score could lead to a promotion, a raise, a better apartment, admission to a good school, access to state-approved dating websites, better stores, better doctors, the right to travel, a more generous pension and important opportunities for your children. A bad score could put you in jail.
The potential for intrusion into 1.4 billion personal lives is unprecedented. Published information on the plan by China’s State Council says it is intended as a safeguard against, among other things, “conduct that seriously undermines … the normal social order” and “assembling to disrupt social order [and] endangering national defense interests.” The plan’s ultimate purpose, according to Chinese officials, is to “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.” For Westerners, this is a shocking abuse of state power and an unthinkable invasion of personal privacy. In China, these are the tools officials will use to build a more “harmonious society.” China’s largest dating site, Baihe, already allows users to display their credit scores in their dating profiles.
(Now imagine that with microchip imbedding in the hand and with the acid test being any Christian influences. W)
But China’s most important ambitions are in artificial intelligence. This is the space race of the 21st century, but one with a much more direct impact on the lives and livelihoods of citizens. The biggest technological breakthroughs in AI will demand the kind of planning and investment that the U.S. once poured into the Manhattan Project or the race to the moon. However, the U.S. government no longer has the political will to muster this kind of sustained long-term commitment and has outsourced innovation to Silicon Valley. U.S. tech firms will have the advantage if the race to develop AI depends mainly on experimentation and innovation in multiple areas at once. But China is the better bet to win if the decisive factor is depth of commitment to a single goal and the depth of pockets in pursuing it. The one certainty here is that Washington–and the representative democracy and free-market capitalism it champions–is not in the race.
To argue that China’s system is better able to withstand the shocks of today’s world is not to claim that it’s better for those who live within it. Political repression and the lack of rule of law in China create injustice at every level of society. As local governments and companies in China struggle with debt, the state’s ability to bail them out is not inexhaustible. Despite its investments in new technologies, automation and machine learning will displace large numbers of Chinese workers over time, creating long-term risks of social unrest. But for the foreseeable future, China is likely to remain strong and stable. Its international presence will continue to grow, and it is not short of ambition. In October, Xi said it was time for China to “take center stage in the world.”
The China striding into that spotlight is not guaranteed to win the future. In this fragmenting world, no one government will have the international influence required to continue to set the political and economic rules that govern the global system. But if you had to bet on one country that is best positioned today to extend its influence with partners and rivals alike, you wouldn’t be wise to back the U.S. The smart money would probably be on China.
And by Charlie Campbell, same issue:
Today, the ground of Khorgos is mud,” says Guo Jianbin, deputy director of the Khorgos Economic Development Zone administration committee, accenting his words with a booted stamp. “But soon it will be paved with gold.”
Khorgos is a linchpin in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative. Formerly known as One Belt One Road, it’s a rekindling of the ancient Silk Road through a staggeringly ambitious plan to build a network of highways, railways and pipelines linking Asia via the Middle East to Europe and south through Africa. The economic land “belt” takes cargo, in large part via Khorgos, through Eurasia. A maritime “road” links coastal Chinese cities via a series of ports to Africa and the Mediterranean. A total of 900 separate projects have been earmarked at a cost of $900 billion, according to the China Development Bank. There’s the $480 million Lamu deep-sea port in Kenya, which will eventually be connected via road, railway and pipeline to landlocked South Sudan and Ethiopia and right across Africa to Cameroon’s port of Douala. A new $7.3 billion pipeline from Turkmenistan will bring China an extra 15 billion cubic meters of gas annually. Not since the hordes of Genghis Khan galloped west in the 13th century have such sweeping transnational ambitions emanated from China, though instead of ashes and sun-bleached bones, this time the invaders plan to leave harbors, pipelines and high-speed rail in its wake.
“Exchange will replace estrangement, mutual learning will replace clashes, and coexistence will replace a sense of superiority,” Xi told the opening of the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing in May.
(Sounding like the French president from last week. The field for the office of Antichrist is, as I said then, crammed.W.)
It’s a vision of inclusive globalization that bolsters Chinese leadership credentials at a time when the U.S. is wavering on its international commitments. Belt and Road spans some 65 countries, covering 70% of the planet’s population, three-quarters of its energy resources, a quarter of goods and services and 28% of global GDP—some $21 trillion. Beijing’s rationale is clear: these are large, resource-rich nations within its reach, with a severe infrastructure deficit, which China has the resources and expertise to correct. By boosting connectivity, China can spur growth in the short term, gain access to valuable natural resources in the mid term and create new booming markets for its goods long into the future.
The vision Xi expresses is viewed as the ultimate goodness of the capitalist notion. That everyone can profit from the expansionist dreams. The notion that the poor colonies profit from providing the natural resources that power the empire that invades them is hardly new and has been disproven time and again. That will always be the positive view that an empire presents to its media. We can ask Puerto Rico about debt loads and development curbed by its "parent" nation.
But China's investment in foreign securities, especially American ones, make it vulnerable to disaster in the USA. The ice age means almost as large a disaster for them as the Americans. I makes many of their plans iffy though their other reserves help buffer the loss. Nuclear war finishing any USA's possible recovery means a major loss for th Chna as well.
The King of the East feels this loss deeply when his "minute cousin" in NK launches the nuclear war. He had a set of assassins to eliminate the "cousin" if he became "unmanageable", but discovered only the morning of the attack that his killers had been unveiled and eliminated and that the "cousin" blames the US for the plot. His paranoia led him to act and now the King of the East is leveraged into action he would just as soon not take. He knows that the nuclear weapons being used will destroy his dreams for the east of his country. He must act to end it and he contacts his military after the US President ignores him.
Something else lies on the background. Another horseman gallops along with the Chinese and has been haunting them for decades. Their attempts at food control emphasize that ghostly horsemen: The memory of the great Chinese famine lingers.
From 1958 to 1962. the Mao regime presided over a massive loss of life by starvation. It began because Mao had to have control of everything, even the food supply. The ruler demanded a centralized food distribution system, gathering all the harvests, locating them in one main bank and then distributing them equally so all could eat. A great idea, except that the Mao regime was knee deep in corruption. in Tombstone, authir Yang Jisheng records in great detail the way middle managers seized food for themselves and their friends and family along the way to control and how they punished any who disagreed or resisted them.
During this time, Mao's Little Red Book was an anthem to hippie and far left resistance in the USA especially while the Vietnam war was raging and resistance rose:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34932800
"Let's quote from Mao" is not a remark that's commonly heard in the House of Commons, but McDonnell said he did so as a joke to draw attention to sales of British assets to the Chinese government. Picking it up, the chancellor replied mockingly that it was his shadow's "personal signed copy".
It's an icon of China and communism as well as a work of propaganda. More than a billion copies have been published, making the book, often wrapped in its distinctive vinyl cover, one of the most widely produced of all time. During China's "Cultural Revolution" it became virtually mandatory to own and carry one.
While that was circulating on US campuses in the 1960s along with the anitwar movement, China was recovering from major mismanagement of the food supply. According to Yang's research, between 36 and 45 million lives were lost in the famine. Some died of hunger while others were killed by the punishments administered to those who resisted the "Great Leap Forward." Mao initiated many industry aimed plans and ordered that they be carried out no matter what.
Does this sound familiar? Mao claimed that his country would surpass England in steel production and then ordered the statement be accomplished, Communes were opened to reach industrial heights. People who were farmers were taken from their lands and impressed into factory labor. Food production was redirected for exports to impress the rest of the world while workers in smaller communes were moved into huge communes Mao believed the larger communes to be superior so they were , whether evidence showed it or not. Mao and the Central Committee which was the "congress" were at odds but Mao's will always overpowered. Middle managers were given incredible power and little oversight. Uprising in the communes occurred as food was given as a reward for work. Some middle managers blamed the policies of collectivization and the state monopoly on grain purchasing and marketing for the starving deaths in Guangxi in 1957. The military supressed any revolts and imprisonment and physical punishment rose to the extreme.
Chinese leadership artfully misled media and political visitors by showing the more successful aspects and bringing forward witnesses who testified to the grand success of the plan.
Even as it starved millions of their people.
From the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/dec/07/tombstone-mao-great-famine-yeng-jisheng-review
In 1958, China was a state still nervous about its place in the world – isolated from the capitalist countries and with its USSR alliance starting to fray. Mao Zedong pushed hard for a new programme that would boost China's economy at a stroke. His colleagues supported him in a drive that would become known as the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to increase agricultural and industrial production to levels never before seen in human history. Within a year, however, it became clear that the plans were going horribly wrong. In China's countryside, food became ever scarcer. Hugely exaggerated reports of grain harvests were taken seriously at high levels, and food was moved from the countryside to the cities while millions of farmers started to die of starvation and its associated diseases. The death toll has never been fully calculated, but Frank Dikötter's powerful Mao's Great Famine puts the number of dead at some 45 million between 1958 and 1962.
What Yang found is worth knowing. One of the most devastated provinces was Henan, in central China. Henan had known famine before; the province was at the centre of the horrific hunger that struck during the second world war in 1942-43, killing some 3 to 4 million people. The policies of the Great Leap led to a new desolation in the province. Reports uncovered by Yang make evident a cycle of starvation and violence: a file from 1959 tells of one farmer who was "harshly beaten" because a small piece of beef was found in his home; he died six days later. A woman who was found cooking grain was "subjected to group struggle" for stealing; bound up and soaked in cold water, she too died shortly afterwards.
For a while, it was possible to think that the leadership had not understood the full level of the catastrophe in the countryside. The shattering of such illusions came at the Lushan conference of 1959. Peng Dehuai, one of the great marshals of the Chinese civil war against the nationalists, was a strong supporter of the Leap. But the discovery that people from his own home area were starving to death prompted him to write to Mao to ask for the policies to be adapted. Mao was furious, reading the letter out in public and demanding that his colleagues in the leadership line up either behind him or Peng. Almost to a man, they supported Mao, with his security chief Kang Sheng declaring of the letter: "I make bold to suggest that this cannot be handled with lenience." Peng was sent off into political obscurity. While there were minor adjustments to the Leap policies, the fundamental flaws were not addressed, and millions more continued to die until the formal abandonment of the programme in 1962.
China's current success in the capitalist market has hidden a few minor details. They have again had people living in communes working long hours, paid little or nothing so the leadership can obtain contracts for the least bid. And impress the capitalist world with its "success." It has been a practice for "criminals" often political prisoners, to be killed for their organs so China can rise in the organ supply market.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/china-still-gathering-organs-executed-prisoners
For decades, China obtained human organs such as kidneys and livers from executed prisoners, a practice condemned by human rights activists and medical ethicists. China says they no longer do this and have built a new system for organ transplants that now relies on volunteers, not prisoners.
...
Because of his age and rare blood type, he says he would have died before reaching the top of the waiting list for a new kidney. So, urged by family and friends, he went to China’s capital, Beijing, in 2006. Within one week, he received a new kidney. He says he paid $10,000 for the transplant.
In Canada, it would have been free, since the government pays for health care. In the U.S., the average hospital charge for a kidney transplant is $150,000. Traveling to another country for this kind of surgery is called transplant tourism.
....
Dr. Jacob Lavee, Transplant Surgeon:
Back in 2005, a patient of mine came to me one day and told me, doc, I’m fed up waiting here in Israel for a suitable heart donor to become available, and I was told — that’s what he told me — by my insurance company that I should go to China because they have scheduled me to undergo heart transplantation. And he specified a specific date two weeks ahead of time.
Hari Sreenivasan:
Heart surgeon Dr. Jacob Lavee is president of the Israel Society of Transplantation. While kidney transplants can involve obtaining a kidney from a living donor, that is not the case with a heart transplant.
Dr. Jacob Lavee:
If a patient was promised to undergo a heart transplant on a specific date, this could only means that the — those who promised that knew ahead of time when his potential donor would be dead.
Hari Sreenivasan:
Human rights investigator Ethan Gutmann and lawyer David Matas have testified before Congress about China’s transplant system.
David Matas, Human Rights Lawyer:
It is unconscionable to kill a healthy, innocent person so that a sick person can live.
I am suggesting that authoritarian capitalism has little difference from authoritarian socialism, that the leadership with total power is still the leadership with no restraining force to stop it. That human beings have proven they are evil enough to do anything for their own satisfaction or to protect their pride, from the beginning of time until this moment. You can go back from the beginning of this blog chain and read all the bible passages about our ungodly behavior.
Famine will ride in as food and water become more valuable than gold , as the ice age or the flooding or foolish political choices crash the American Dream for good and take down the power of the East and North. Some suggest that war always leads to famine, but that is more often the result of scorched earth policies as armies retreat. Peace time famines come from the wrong policies and the wrong decisions made by people with too much power and too much pride to admit mistakes. And the origin of pride is the king of pride.
Isa 14:12 How great is your fall from heaven, O shining one, son of the morning! How are you cut down to the earth, low among the dead bodies!
13 For you said in your heart, I will go up to heaven, I will make my seat higher than the stars of God; I will take my place on the mountain of the meeting-place of the gods, in the inmost parts of the north.
14 I will go higher than the clouds; I will be like the Most High.
(BBE)
When you believe you are God you don't leave a lot of room for criticism.
The US sub launches two more missiles before the King of the East decides to act. The North Korean defenses were depleted by the the first hit. ABMs hit the first and the second is blasted of course. One of it pretargeted warheads misfires and lands in the middle of Vladivostok. And part a major port city of Russia disappears in nuclear flash.
Now the King of the North becomes involved.
No comments:
Post a Comment