China's Emergence as a Superpower (2015 onwards)

[Bill Moore]

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.

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

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.

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.

[AdamG]

Chinese hackers singled out over two dozen universities in the US and around the world in an apparent bid to gain access to maritime military research, according to a report by cybersecurity firm iDefense, which was obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

The hackers sent universities spear phishing emails doctored to appear as if they came from partner universities, but they unleashed a malicious payload when opened. Universities are traditionally seen as easier targets than US military contractors, and they can still contain useful military research.

Twenty-seven universities were found to have been targeted by the group, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Washington, and other colleges in Canada and Southeast Asia. iDefense didn’t name every school in the report due to ongoing investigations, but anonymous sources told the WSJ that Penn State and Duke University were two of the other targets.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/5/18...-cybersecurity

[AdamG]

(Washington, D.C.) The increasing global reach of Chinese nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines, armed with JL-2 weapons reportedly able to hit parts of the US, continues to inspire an ongoing Navy effort to accelerate production of attack submarines, prepare long-dwell drones for deployment to the Pacific and continue acquisition of torpedo-armed sub-hunting planes such as the P-8/A Poseidon.

Seeking to overcome the Pacific’s “tyranny of distance” dispersed geography, and track China’s expanding fleet of submarines, the Navy is working with Congress to produce as many as three Virginia-class submarines per year, moving beyond the current plan to build two. In the air, the Navy has been moving to place its new Triton sea drones in Guam and has recently awarded Boeing a $2.4 billion deal to produce 19 more P-8A Poseidon surveillance and attack planes.

Given the Poseidon’s role as a high-tech surveillance aircraft, known for capturing video of Chinese phony island building in the South China Sea (land reclamation) several years ago, it takes little imagination to envision ways its advanced sensors, sonobuoys and weapons could function as part of a containment strategy against Chinese expansion - - and even operate as a deterrent against China’s growing fleet of nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines (SSBN).

https://defensemaven.io/warriormaven...med-submarines

[AdamG]

Lede sorta buried on this one.

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

[Bill Moore]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...erate-on-china

EU Urges Trump to Lift Tariffs So Allies Can Cooperate on China

“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.

[Bill Moore]

https://www.news.com.au/world/south-...affafd742defab

South China Sea tensions at new high after Vietnamese boat rammed and sunk

“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.”

[Bill Moore]

https://www.defenseone.com/technolog...nseone_today_n

The West Isn’t Ready for the Coming Wave of Chinese Misinformation

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.

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.

[AdamG]

Double-tapped post, as it could dovetail with Bill's post above.

Note - this conclusion is based on the number-of-papers-published. Flip a coin as to whether this is a valid indicator of actual progress or academic hot air.

In July 2017, China’s government published an ambitious policy paper, outlining how the country would become the world leader in AI by the year 2030. But by some measures China has already succeeded in this goal — a decade ahead of schedule.

A new study shows that China’s output of influential AI research papers will soon overtake that of the US, the world’s current number one in AI research. The finding suggests that China’s plan to expand its AI capabilities with the help of generous government investment in both educational facilities and private industry is paying off.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/14/1...in-ai-research