Who will win: Africa or China? What will African people gain?
I discovered this commentary on the recent Beijing Sino-African meeting by a SME on China; slightly edited:
Quote:
How should we understand the triannual Africa-China summit, which just concluded in Beijing? With 53 out of 54 countries in Africa represented and singing the praises of the host, China unquestionably deems it a success. It was a “win” too for leaders of African countries who attended. But what do average citizens of the African countries get out of it? Are we seeing a “new version of colonialism” being put in place? President Xi Jinping hails the summit as a success in partnering with Africa to build up “a community of shared destiny.” He committed $60 billion to assist Africa or, in reality, to support the implementation of his flagship “Belt and Road” initiative in Africa. If every country in Africa were to receive an equal share, this amounts to just over $1 billion each. But the funding will not be evenly distributed. Some will benefit more than others.
Among the commitments for the $60 billion China has earmarked are $15 billion for grants and no cost or low-cost loans; $10 billion for a special Sino-African fund; and $5 billion for supporting African exports to China. There are, however, no details.
Xi has given no indication that Beijing will abandon its centralized approach in dishing out funds for the Belt and Road initiative. This implies that the bulk of the funding will remain tightly controlled and mostly used to finance major infrastructural projects, as before.
But there is one notable change, in the allocation of $5 billion to support African exports to China. True, it is only 8 percent of the total, and that ratio reflects Beijing’s priorities as regards assistance to African countries to build sustainable economic capacities, such as often has been the focus of Western and Japanese development funding. But it is a step in the right direction. It appears to be a response to clamours from ordinary Africans for assistance to promote manufacturing so that jobs will be created for them.
Citizens of most African countries benefit little from shiny new infrastructural facilities that they cannot afford to use. What they need most are jobs and opportunities. Investments in manufacturing, where Africans are employed, are what will make a difference to ordinary folks, not grandiose projects undertaken by Chinese contractors who often employ Chinese workers on foreign worksites.
Yet, what remains to be seen is how this $5 billion will be used to create and sustain manufacturing jobs in African countries. Again, no road map was unveiled. This is a pity as there is tremendous scope for China to relocate labour-intensive low-cost manufacturing to African countries as rising labour costs make them uncompetitive in China. Since such industries are mostly small and medium-sized private enterprises, they will not relocate to Africa and create jobs for Africans just because Xi has set aside this fund. Indeed, the promises of funds do not always become reality.
Is Xi’s effort, limited as it is a response to Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad’s recent articulation in Beijing of concern over “a new version of colonialism”? Mahathir’s reference was effective political rhetoric that enabled his country to back out of a number of unaffordable and non-essential grand projects that had the potential of creating another instance of the China “debt-trap” that has already ensnared a number of African and South Asian nations. That said, as an analytical concept it is not particularly useful. There is not one simple agreed definition of what colonialism means, let alone a “new version of colonialism.” The concept can easily be dismissed by Chinese leaders who claim that since China is a member of the global South, it is by definition not colonialist or imperialist.
This notwithstanding, Chinese leaders should not forget that action speaks louder than words. China does not need to deploy significant troops to any African country for it to be seen as behaving like a colonial power. Most African countries have a colonial past and they know what a “colonial relationship” looks like.
Historically, flag followed trade and informal empire often preceded the creation of a formal imperial relationship. British imperialists of the Victorian era did not have a blueprint for imperial conquest, so the lack of one in Beijing means little. The British Empire was created in a fit of absence of mind, when expanding British economic interests made it irresistible for the British Crown to protect British interests and incrementally assert imperial control. The British Empire also exemplified the most cost-effective imperial expansion. It mostly avoided expansive conquest and relied instead on working with local leaders – a “win-win” of an earlier age.
Whether China under Xi Jinping will follow the path of British imperialists of the past only time will tell. But citizens of African countries who witness rapid expansion of Chinese economic interests will not wait to draw their own conclusions. If Beijing works with them for their benefit, rather than for that of their leaders, they are likely to welcome China as a partner. So if Beijing is serious about making its partnership with Africa a genuine “win-win,” it will have to focus on projects that will benefit ordinary people in African countries, not just their national leaders and Beijing itself. This will be the acid test, but again, there are so far scant details of Beijing’s intentions.
Somewhere I have a UK commentary too, behind a paywall and will try to summarize that - it is now a few weeks old being published when Mrs may was on her three stop African tour.
James Mann And His Prescient Book “The China Fantasy”
This article on Sinocism an online subscription newsletter by a Sinologist, Bill Bishop, and is an updated commentary on a 2007 book 'The China Fantasy' by James Mann.
It opens with:
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a short book arguing that Western elites misrepresented the benefits of engagement with China and that prosperity and capitalism might not, as they claimed, eventually bring democracy to the PRC......I have come to believe that this is the most important and prescient American book on China of the 21st century. I urge you to read it.
Link:https://sinocism.com/james-mann-and-...china-fantasy/
Link to Bill Bishop's slim bio:https://nb.sinocism.com/subscribe#about
I have not heard of this book, nor either author and for once some of the comments on the newsletter commentary are interesting, sadly several are duplicated.
How China is quietly weaponizing overseas tourism
A twist to power politics:
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The reason China is able to use tourists as a political bargaining chip is that, since the turn of the millennium, the number of overseas trips made by Chinese tourists has
boomed from 10.5m to 145m – an increase of 1,380 per cent. This makes China the world’s most powerful outbound market, leapfrogging the US, spending over $300bn overseas per year.
Examples are cited: Palau Islands, Turkey, Japan and South Korea.
Link:https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/c...ourism-palau/?
Not that such a travel / tourism ban is new; more the scale and having obedient tourists to command. Boycotting the Moscow Olympics in 1980 after the Afghan invasion comes to mind. I am sure there are others, such as 'travel advisory' notices after terrorist attacks, e.g. Sinai that stopped most UK tourists travelling there.
Xi's Regime Plot for World Domination Exposed
Maybe the title of the article contains a little hyperbole, or maybe not.
https://nypost.com/2018/12/22/how-ar...mination-plot/
How arrest of Chinese ‘princess’ exposes regime’s world domination plot
Quote:
The “Five Eyes” — Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the US — have over the past year waged a concerted campaign to block the Chinese tech giant from dominating next-generation wireless networks around the world. Not only have they largely kept Huawei out of their own countries, they have convinced other countries like Japan, India and Germany to go along, too.
Whoever controls the 5G networks will control the world — or at least large parts of it.
Yet Huawei is far from finished. The company has grown into a global brand over the past two decades because, as a “national champion,” it is constantly being fed and nourished by the party and the military with low-interest-rate loans, privileged access to a protected domestic market, and other preferential treatment.
The article goes on to point out how Huawei supports China's intelligence organizations, and how her detention resulted in 3 Canadians being detained in so called secret prisons in China with threats to arrest more in retaliation.
It ends with,
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The real payoff of her arrest lies elsewhere. It has exposed the massive campaign of espionage that Huawei is carrying out around the world at the behest of the Party. It has revealed how that Party dreams of a new world order in which China, not America, is dominant.
It also links to his book on Amazon, "Bully of Asia." It is worth reading the summary on Amazon in my opinion. I don't think I have seen any reviews of this book on SWJ yet?
Chinese Hawk makes uninformed Comment
If all the Chinese hawks are this stupid, they have more worry about than we do. If he really thinks killing 5,000 sailors will cause America to cower in a corner he is not a student of history.
http://chinascope.org/archives/17126
Chinese Hawk Admiral: Strike at What the U.S. Fears
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Luo Yuan claimed that the US-China trade war “is definitely not a simple economic and trade friction” but an “important strategic issue.” The origin of the conflict is that “the U.S. national strategy has changed.”
Quote:
In his speech, Luo Yuan strongly advocated that China should respond with “asymmetric counterattacks.”
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Luo Yuan said that the “five fundamental foundations of the United States” are the military, the dollar, talent, the ballot, and the creation of enemies. Among them, in the military, “the United States is most afraid of death.” Luo suggested using a missile to sink one U.S. ship and cause 5,000 casualties, and two with 10,000 casualties. “Let’s see if the U.S. is afraid or not.”
Oops, they're not afraid, now what Admiral?
Beijing’s Nuclear Option: Why a U.S.-Chinese War Could Spiral Out of Control
An updated article by Caitlin Talmadge an Associate Professor of Security Studies at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. It is one of several articles fully available in the latest 'Foreign Affairs': Do Nuclear Weapons Matter?
Near the beginning two passages as a "taster":
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If deployed against China, the Pentagon’s preferred style of conventional warfare would be a potential recipe for nuclear escalation. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States’ signature approach to war has been simple: punch deep into enemy territory in order to rapidly knock out the opponent’s key military assets at minimal cost. But the Pentagon developed this formula in wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Serbia, none of which was a nuclear power.
China, by contrast, not only has nuclear weapons; it has also intermingled them with its conventional military forces, making it difficult to attack one without attacking the other. This means that a major U.S. military campaign targeting China’s conventional forces would likely also threaten its nuclear arsenal. Faced with such a threat, Chinese leaders could decide to use their nuclear weapons while they were still able to.
Link:https://reader.foreignaffairs.com/20...2/content.html
New DoD Report: U.S. Defense Implications of China’s Expanding Global Access
A commentary by a US SME (a new name to me) and starts with:
Quote:
This report assesses China’s global expansion by military and nonmilitary means, implications of China’s activities, and the U.S. response, as mandated by Section 1259b, “Assessment on United States Defense Implications of China’s Expanding Global Access,” of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2018, Public Law 115-91.
Link to commentary:http://www.andrewerickson.com/2019/0...global-access/ and to the author's bio:http://www.andrewerickson.com/about/
DIA Study on China's Military Power
http://www.dia.mil/Military-Power-Publications/
Quote:
In September 1981, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger asked the Defense Intelligence Agency to produce an unclassified overview of the Soviet Union’s military strength. The purpose was to provide America's leaders, the national security community, and the public a comprehensive and accurate view of the threat.
In the spirit of Soviet Military Power, DIA began in 2017 to produce a series of unclassified Defense Intelligence overviews of major foreign military challenges we face. This volume provides details on China’s defense and military goals, strategy, plans, and intentions; the organization, structure, and capability of its military supporting those goals; and the enabling infrastructure and industrial base. This product and other reports in the series are intended to inform our public, our leaders, the national security community, and partner nations about the challenges we face in the 21st century
.
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China’s double-digit economic growth has slowed recently, but it served to fund several successive defense modernization Five-Year Plans. As international concern over Beijing's human rights policies stymied the PLA’s search for ever more sophisticated technologies, China shifted funds and efforts to acquiring technology by any means available. Domestic laws forced foreign partners of Chinese-based joint ventures to release their technology in exchange for entry into China’s lucrative market, and China has used other means to secure needed technology and expertise. The result of this multifaceted approach to technology acquisition is a PLA on the verge of fielding some of the most modern weapon systems in the world. In some areas, it already leads the world. Chinese leaders characterize China’s long-term military modernization program as essential to achieving great power status. Indeed, China is building a robust, lethal force with capabilities spanning the air, maritime, space and information domains which will enable China to impose its will in the region. As it continues to grow in strength and confidence, our nation’s leaders will face a China insistent on having a greater voice in global interactions, which at times may be antithetical to U.S. interests. With a deeper understanding of the military might behind Chinese economic and diplomatic efforts, we can provide our own national political, economic, and military leaders the widest range of options for choosing when to counter, when to encourage, and when to join with China in actions around the world. This report offers insights into the modernization of Chinese military power as it reforms from a defensive, inflexible ground-based force charged with domestic and peripheral security responsibilities to a joint, highly agile, expeditionary, and power-projecting arm of Chinese foreign policy that engages in military diplomacy and operations across the globe.
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Entering the 21st century, China’s leaders rec¬ognized the confluence of several factors that led them to expand the scope and quicken the pace of PLA development: China’s growing global economic and political interests, rapid technology-driven changes in modern warfare, and perceptions of increased strategic-level external threats, including to China’s mari¬time interests. At this time, Chinese leaders perceived a “period of strategic opportunity” wherein the country presumably would not be involved in a major military conflict before 2020, allowing time for economic and military development. As a result, throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, China’s leaders initi¬ated several practical steps to modernize the PLA as a warfighting instrument.
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The PLA has been a politicized “party army” since its inception and exists to guarantee the CCP regime’s survival above all else, serving the state as a secondary role, in contrast to most Western militaries, which are considered apolitical, professional forces that first and foremost serve the state.
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China characterizes its military strategy as one of “active defense,” a concept it describes as strategically defensive but operationally offensive. The strategy is rooted in the con¬cept that once Beijing has determined that an adversary has damaged or intends to damage China’s interests at the strategic level, Beijing will be justified in responding “defensively” at the operational or tactical level, even if the adversary has not yet conducted offensive military operations. Beijing interprets active defense to include mandates for deescalating a conflict and seizing the initiative during a con¬flict, and has enshrined the concept in China’s National Security Law (2015) and in the PLA’s major strategy documents.
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The PLA often uses the term “informatization” to describe the transformation process of becoming a modern military that can operate in the digi¬tal age. The concept figures prominently in PLA writings and is roughly analogous to the U.S. mil¬itary’s concept of net-centric capability: a force’s ability to use advanced information technology and communications systems to gain operational advantage over an adversary.
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The PLA’s Strategic Support Force (SSF), established in December 2015, has an import¬ant role in the management of China’s aero¬space warfare capabilities.121 Consolidating the PLA’s space, cyber, and electronic warfare capabilities into the SSF enables cross-domain synergy in “strategic frontiers.”
On the Horns of a Dilemma
I missed this article when it was posted to SWJ earlier, but just finished reading it in the Winter 2018 issue of "The Drop," the Special Forces Association magazine.
https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/ar...engagement-hoa
On the Horns of a Dilemma – Addressing Chinese Security Engagement in the HOA
Doug Livermore
Overall well balanced and insightful until you get to the last section on U.S. opportunities. I found that section overly optimistic. Looking at the world through rose-colored glasses if you will. Win-win solutions are not what the Chinese pursue, they seek leverage for exploitation through insidious means such as creating debt traps. Instead of socialism with Chinese characteristics, a more accurate description would be neo-colonialism with Chinese characteristics.
Why We Should Hate Huawei
Huawei, like many Chinese companies, they stole their innovation from other countries, and then seek to penetrate their markets with their knockoff technology.
https://www.theamericanconservative....global-menace/
How Chinese Theft Becomes a Global Menace
Huawei, accused many times over of stealing secrets, is poised to control next-gen cellular technology worldwide.
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Huawei is trying harder to take tech than develop it, maintains Anne Stevenson-Yang of Beijing-based J Capital Research. “Virtually the entire Chinese bureaucratic apparatus has been mobilized to support Huawei,” she writes in a research note issued this month. “And, given the way top Huawei executives have dissembled in order to support a cut-and-dried theft of IP, one begins to wonder whether the company’s whole mission might be to acquire foreign technologies under the cover of an independent global conglomerate.”
Let their be no doubt that not only did China steal the technology that underpins Huawei, they will use Huawei technology to increase their ability to steal more secrets from other countries and support totalitarian governments use technology to more effectively suppress their people. It isn't just wireless technology, it is a means and ways to achieve nefarious ends.
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The fifth generation of wireless communications will exponentially increase data carried—and the power of those who supply network equipment. The State Department’s Rob Strayer has been warning U.S. partners that China, if it ends up controlling 5G, could steal “trillions” of dollars of intellectual property, insert malware, and shut down networks.
Anxiety about Huawei equipment is not theoretical. Beijing for five years, from 2012 to 2017, secretly took data using “backdoors” in Huawei equipment installed in the new African Union headquarters, which China donated to the organization.
Changing The Rules Of The Game - Chinese Maritime Power and the Middle East
From the UK website an interesting overview. Here is one passage:
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One thing is clear though, the Gulf is no longer going to be an exclusively Western pond to operate in. There will be long term challenges about how to respond to the Chinese presence, both in the region, and realistically in time in the Med too. For the first time ever, we are on the cusp of an out of region power establishing a credible and sustainable military presence close to our strategic areas of interest.
Link:https://thinpinstripedline.blogspot....-maritime.html
I am aware that Oman's younger generation are less inclined to be pro-Western and PRC has made investments there that dwarf the UK's traditional role.
Beyond South China Sea tensions
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/201...istory/154946/
Beyond South China Sea tensions, part two: The CCP vision and the future of Chinese history (link to part 1 available at the site)
This is the second part of a two-part series of interviews on China in Defense One. If you're interested in China then both are worth reading or listening to (podcasts).
These interviews cover a wide spectrum of topics, ranging from how China is building the world's most extensive global commercial empire via its latticework of infrastructure project ranging from dams, railroads, to telecommunications systems. Part 1 provides a historical overview of the CCP's One Belt, One Road strategy, and their nine-dash line claim in the SCS. I focused on part 2, because of the growing interest in how CCP is not only increasingly implementing ever greater oppressive control over its own population via techno-authoritarianism, it is exporting this technology to other countries. Also of interest, is how the CCP leverages surveillance technology, artificial intelligence, and data collected via its Confucious Centers to monitor for negative trends in those societies that could impact CCP interests. The bottom line is this technology is becoming more pervasive globally and will have significant implications across multiple dimensions.
The experts provide an interesting overview on how Xi is trying to replicate Mao's Mass Line that led to the cultural revolution resulting in the deaths of over a million Chinese. Xi is more subtle, he is using a combination of surveillance technology to spy on his own citizens and provide social scores to influence their behavior. This is reinforced via the impact of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences that focuses on "cultural security" by promoting a totalitarian view of political correctness via fantasy history and other methods.
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Hoffman: “There’s a concept that a lot of what the Party’s doing right now is based on is called social management. But it’s ultimately about the Party’s political control. So it’s a process that is both co-opting people and coercing people to participate, in the Party’s language, in their own management so that they uphold the Party’s political power. It’s a process that’s aimed at Party state security.
Reference the term techno-authoritarianism
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Hoffman: “It’s a pretty good term. I think I prefer to refer to what the Chinese Communist Party is doing as technology-enhanced or technology-augmented authoritarianism — because you’re talking about the processes the Chinese Communist Party has been engaged in for decades being augmented through technology.”
Reference using surveillance technology and artificial intelligence overseas in support of their OBOR projects.
Quote:
Hoffman: “Yeah. Dual use to inform, say, a rail project or a port project or something like that would also be used to inform political decision-making because they talk about, for instance, using data from Confucius Institutes. Or data collected using automatic translation technologies to improve their understanding of Turkic languages and then understanding the political risk in the region in order to be able to shape how people think about what the CCP is doing.
Engineers of the Soul: Ideology in Xi Jinping's China
Another China expert accepts the unpleasant truth of China's trajectory towards deepening totalitarianism at home and abroad. The author goes into sufficient detail to show the clear linkage of how Xi's ideology deliberately aligns with Stalin, and why Xi thinks deviating from it would pose an existential threat the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The language in the previous posts describe how Xi leverages technology to revitalize Mao's Mass Line concept, and condition people to think along party lines. As the author in the article points out, ideology is the critical component of Mao's, and now Xi's totalitarianism.
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Mao’s discursive advantage was Marxist-Leninist ideology. Language was not just a tool of moral judgment. It was an instrument for shaping acceptable behaviour and a weapon for distinguishing enemies and friends. This is the subtext of Mao’s most famous poem, Snow. Communist ideology enabled him to “weaponise” culture in a way his imperial predecessors had never managed.
https://nb.sinocism.com/p/engineers-...ul-ideology-in
Engineers of the Soul: Ideology in Xi Jinping's China by John Garnaut
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Some now say he has become a China hawk, but I see it as more the evolution of a sophisticated China watcher who believes in seeking truth from facts, no matter how difficult it may be to accept the reality of the direction Xi and the CCP appear to be taking China. This is a trajectory I have found myself on, along with many of the most experienced foreign China watchers I know.
Stalin described artists and authors as "engineers of the human soul." They simply served for promoting the party and its views. In other words, art and writing was purely propaganda intended to as means to facilitate cultural and ideological security.
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Xi uses the same ideological template to describe the role of “media workers”. And school teachers. And university scholars. They are all engineers of ideological conformity and cogs in the revolutionary machine.
Among the many things that China’s modern leaders did – including overseeing the greatest burst of market liberalisation and poverty alleviation the world has ever seen – those who won the internal political battles have retained the totalitarian aspiration of engineering the human soul in order to lead them towards the ever-receding and ever-changing utopian destination.
Combine the findings in this article, with the insights from the previous article, "The CCP Vision and Future of Chinese History," you'll gain a greater appreciation of incidious threat the CCP poses.
What the India-Pakistan Crisis Taught China
Lede sorta buried on this one.
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Even after twenty-one rounds of bilateral talks, the India-China border dispute remains unresolved. Nor is the frontier quiet. In the summer of 2017, a flare-up occurred at Doklam near the India-Bhutan-PRC tri-junction. The catalyst was an attempt by China’s People Liberation Army (PLA) to construct a road on the Doklam plateau, through disputed territory. Bhutan, which has a security pact with India, turned to New Delhi for assistance. India responded by deploying a contingent of forces to block the road building. That decision did not stem from altruism toward a weak neighbor but rather from the awareness that China, had it completed the road, would have been in a position to launch a pincer movement to cut India’s ground links to its northeastern states in the event of a war.
https://nationalinterest.org/feature...ht-china-46377
EU Urges Trump to Lift Tariffs So Allies Can Cooperate on China
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...erate-on-china
EU Urges Trump to Lift Tariffs So Allies Can Cooperate on China
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“We have a problem: China is dumping the market, China is subsidizing their industry, this creates global distortions. We can agree on that. So what is the solution? Well, we think it is to cooperate on China,” Malmstrom told Bloomberg News in an interview in Washington. “The solution to these problems is not imposing tariffs on the European Union. Why is that so hard to understand?”
We all got it, balancing policy decisions across the DIMEFIL to address multiple and often conflicting national interests is challenging to say the least. The President is trying to protect U.S. jobs and manufacturing. He is doing so by simultaneously targeting competitors who are in broad terms adversaries (China) and competitors who are friends (EU). To address the greatest threat, it may be best to delay our trade discussions with the EU so we can collectively focus on the major threat to international norms which is China. It would somewhat stabilize the markets, and give us a position of advantage to compete more effectively against China.
South China Sea tensions at new high after Vietnamese boat rammed and sunk
https://www.news.com.au/world/south-...affafd742defab
South China Sea tensions at new high after Vietnamese boat rammed and sunk
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“A Chinese ship reportedly rams and sinks a Vietnamese fishing boat in the Paracels (again),” he said on Twitter.
“China’s neighbors have become so numb to the constant exercise of low-intensity violence and intimidation that it will warrant barely a mention in regional press.”
The West Isn’t Ready for the Coming Wave of Chinese Misinformation
https://www.defenseone.com/technolog...nseone_today_n
The West Isn’t Ready for the Coming Wave of Chinese Misinformation
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The Chinese government activity has gone largely undetected by Americans because it mostly aims to shape perceptions about China. But the researchers’ data shows that Chinese social media posts are very effective at achieving their aims. They report that just two Chinese profiles on Instagram achieved “a level of audience engagement roughly one-sixth as large as the entire Russian IRA-associated campaign targeting the United States” on the same platform.
Yea, but you can't lie to us better than we lie to ourselves.
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Also, neither Chinese nor Russian misinformation activity matches what Americans do to one another. A new report out Thursday from the NYU Stern School of Business and Human Rights found that Americans are the largest creators of misinformation on American social networks.
This is the link to the actual report.
https://www.recordedfuture.com/china...ia-operations/
What we need to see to balance this report is China's influence on other countries, where they very much seek to influence the outcome of elections to advance their OBOR interests.
Masood Azhar Is China’s Favorite Terrorist
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/03/21...s%20Picks%20OC
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So important is the China-Pakistan partnership that Beijing was willing to stick its neck out in support of a key terrorist asset of the Pakistani state who garners little sympathy outside Pakistan.
While most understand that China and Pakistan have a close relationship, many regional experts thought China had the upperhand in the relationship, and had the leverage to support the UN effort to designate Azhar a terrorist, but instead China placed a technical hold on the resolution.
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Perhaps the biggest reason to have believed China would let Azhar be designated a terrorist is that it would have been a low-risk move for Beijing. Pakistan’s close friendship with and deep dependence on China—which increased after the United States suspended its security assistance to Pakistan last year—means Islamabad would have been in no position to express displeasure, much less retaliate. So there would have been no deleterious consequences for bilateral relations. In fact, allowing the resolution to pass would have benefited Beijing: It would have brought China some international goodwill at a moment when its global image has been marred by its cruel and repressive policies toward the Uighur community.
China's Unrestricted Warfare Strategy in Play
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mkxL4iqcAY&app=desktop
BBC Documentary China vs USA - Empires at war
The video interviews numerous PRC, Taiwan, and U.S. strategists, and as the retired PLA clearly states, China is at war with the U.S. now, but it is a different type of war, unrestricted warfare.
The next article focuses on PLA's maritime militia, or little blue men.
https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/04/ar...uth-china-sea/
Beijing’s maritime militia, the scourge of South China Sea
China uses hundreds of fishing trawlers, manned by military-trained sailors and modified for ramming and spying, to seize islands
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For two years, scores and sometimes hundreds of Chinese fishing ships have been harassing, swarming and spying on Filipino construction crews upgrading infrastructure on the island of Thitu, known as Pagasa in the Philippines. This is the second largest naturally occurring island in the Spratly archipelago, and is home to about 100 Filipinos and a small military detachment.
The Rise of China: What do we want from the next Prime Minister?
An event in London last month @ Policy Exchange (a UK think tank) on this topic, albeit with a reference to the internal Conservative Party competition for the next Prime Minister. The panel has an Australian, Alex Downer, an ex-Foreign Minister; ret'd US General Petraeus; two UK SME and a former Conservative Minister of Defence, Ivan Fallon. The podcast is 71 mins long and I am currently listening to it.
Link:https://policyexchange.org.uk/pxeven...rise-of-china/
The new Cold War is hotting up: US's new strategy towards China could actually work
A rather good article IMHO on this vexed issue by Gerard Baker, of the WSJ, now two weeks ago in the British weekly magazine 'The Spectator'. He outlines the Trump approach, drawing attention to his VP's speech in October 2018 - which I had not heard of - and concludes with:
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No one thinks a war with China is either desirable or likely. But what’s changed in the US since Trump came to power is a belief that, just as with the threat from the old Soviet Union, peace is more likely to be achieved through enhanced US strength and a willingness to project it than through accommodation and vacillation.
Link, which includes a podcast discussion between the author and two Brits:https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/06/...actually-work/
We must see China - the opportunities and the threats - with clear eyes
An opinion piece in The Sydney Morning Herald by an Australian Federal MP and chair of the Intelligence & Security Committee; identified by a "lurker". It is strongly worded and was condemned by the PRC (see BBC report).
Link: https://www.smh.com.au/politics/fede...07-p52eon.html and a related BBC News item: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-49273989
Note the later identified the author as being an ex-Australian SOF officer 2010-2015 His official bio:https://www.aph.gov.au/Senators_and_...an?MPID=260805 and another:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew...e_(politician)