July 29, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - On 13 July an
international newscast reported that the European
Commission will discuss as a priority on how the EU
should react to China’s national security law for Hong
Kong, a sovereign decision taken by Beijing to protect
the citizens of the Chinese territory, Hong Kong, from
western instigated riots and acts of terror. This is
apparently an issue close to the heart of the German
Foreign Minister, Heiko Maas, as he raised the issue as
a priority for the EC to be discussed.
Can you imagine! The
audacity of the EC to even suggest debating on what
should be the reaction of Europe on an entirely internal
affair of Sovereign China?
What would Europe,
Germany, France, or any other EU member state say if
China would comment on their EU-collective or individual
sovereign internal affairs? – It’s not difficult to see
the hypocrisy of the west, vis-à-vis the east,
especially China and Russia.
Or, in the words of RT:
The economic
sanctions imposed on China in the Huawei affair will
be returned several-fold by Beijing. If the Queen
Elizabeth goes too far, the Chinese Navy has more
than what it takes to sink her.
And if the three million Chinese arrive from
Hong Kong, it is not immediately clear where they
will be housed or where they will work in Britain’s
broken economy. In fact, perhaps the most cunning
plan would be for China to open the Hong Kong
floodgates now and force London to own up to its
words.
Why is the west so much
interested in Hong Kong? – Could it be that Hong Kong
has been serving mostly western oligarchs and corporate
and financial giants for illegal fiscal transactions,
like money laundering and tax evasion? Why not shifting
dubious financial transactions simply to Singapore? –
Hong Kong is much closer still to the British Crown
(until 1997), than Singapore which was dissolved as
Crown colony in 1963, when it became a state of
Malaysia, ending 144 years of British rule. In August
1965, Singapore became officially the independent
Republic of Singapore. Since then Singapore has built up
a strictly controlled financial and fiscal regime.
This – just as an
introduction to the Big Picture that China may want to
keep in mind for their future economic policy and
planning vision. The west cannot be counted on. The
west, under the leadership of the dying Anglo-American
empire is in its last breath hell-bent to stop, to
destroy China’s economic advances – if it could. But it
can’t.
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Mind you, China’s are
fully legitimate economic advances that do no harm
anybody, to the contrary, China keeps seeking peaceful
cooperation with the west. A prime example is President
Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the New Silk Road –
designed as bridge that spans the world with projects
and initiatives intended to bring humanity closer
together, developing jointly her economic potential,
attempting to respect and better understand cultural
differences and learn from the variety of their
richness. A “win-win” for all.
In the words of famous
Russian economist, Mikhail Khazin, While the world
economy is collapsing as it never did in the history we
can remember – maybe by as much as 50%, the Chinese
economy is growing.
When SARS-2-Cov, later
renamed by WHO to COVID-19 – was first discovered in
Wuhan, China, Wuhan and Chinese authorities reacted
immediately with a total lockdown, extending from Wuhan
(11 million population) to the entire Hubei Province (60
million) – and subsequently beyond, covering the whole
country. China’s reaction was decisive, immediate and
with full discipline of the population.
The origin of the “new”
corona virus, is still debated, but all substantiated
evidence leads to conclude that the virus originated
outside of China and was transported to China in one way
or another. Patient zero was with high probability
somewhere in the United States and emerged likely
sometime between August and October 2019.
We also know about the
2010 Rockefeller Report that predicted a pandemic
outbreak at the beginning of 2020 – with what the report
calls “The Lockstep Scenario” – precisely what the world
is living now and has been going through since the
beginning of 2020, especially since the worldwide
lockdown of everything in mid-March 2020. This already
looks like a meticulously planned global “pandemic”.
Something that has never happened since the existence of
mankind- that a pandemic virus hits the world population
at the very same time, at once. This in itself is
already too much of a coincidence to be a natural
occurrence.
Now, add to this, Event
201 of 18 October 2019, sponsored by the Johns Hopkins
University School of Health, the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation (BMGF) and the cream of the elite, the WEF
(World Economic Forum), an event, whose key purpose was
to computer simulate – yes, you guessed it – a corona
pandemic that not only killed (by computer simulation)
over a period of 18 months, 65 million people, but also
destroyed the stock market and by and large the world
economy, leaving behind uncountable bankruptcies, untold
misery, poverty, famine and desperation – a way of
transferring wealth from the “grassroots” to the top.
Doesn’t the current
global economic annihilation that is uprooting the world
as we know it, look very similar? From mid-March to
mid-May 2020 – two intense Covid-months – US
billionaires have added US$ 434 billion to their wealth,
according to an CNBC report. And we haven’t even seen
the tip of the iceberg yet in terms of bankruptcies,
unemployment, misery and famine, nor in terms of asset
transfers from the bottom to the top. Let alone what’s
to follow over the coming one to three years.
Whoever directs this
“coincidental” covid-scenario, may have a multi-purpose
in mind. For example, creating a new world economic
paradigm of a fear-infested broken society of poverty
and slavehood, led by a corporate financial elite – and,
perhaps equally or more important – eliminating the
perceived Chinese competition for world hegemony.
Western perceived and propagated, of course. Devoid of
reality. As China doesn’t have hegemonic ambitions.
Never had such ambitions, as thousands of years of
Chinese history indicate. It’s not part of her Tao
philosophy. With the endless bashing of China, who could
expect the west having the slightest idea of Chinese
history and Taoism?
China’s disciplinary
lockdown wiped out – temporarily – more than two thirds
of her production apparatus. Yet, this very lockdown and
discipline was also what saved China from total
disaster, as has happened in other countries, notably
the US.
As of 13 July 2020, China
had 83,602 cases of infection and 4,634 deaths, out of a
total population of 1.4 billion. Compare this to the US,
with 3.4 million infections and 137,000 deaths, by 13
July and according to official US statistics. The US has
a population of about 330 million, less than a fourth of
the Chinese population.
The consequential halt to
the Chinese economy – a vital supply chain to western
economies, especially the US but also Europe – plus the
western border and harbor closings due to Covid, had a
disastrous impact on the world economy. Once the corona
peak was reached in China and the disease slowly abated,
around May / June 2020, China gradually re-opened her
borders and restarted her economy. Today, the Chinese
economy has basically fully recovered. The outlook for
China is good.
The IMF initially
predicted an unrealistic global GDP contraction of 3%,
later adjusted to 5.5%, for 2020 with a slight growth
for 2021. This is far from reality. In truth, nobody can
predict the full global calamity at this point. But the
social dimension of global misery, poverty, famine and
the related death toll is a human disaster way
outranking the 1929-33 Great Depression; a socioeconomic
blow unheard of in human history.
Outlook and
Forward Strategy
Realizing China’s rapid
recovery, but also taking into account the western trade
war against China, the IMF predicted a 1% growth for
2020 and rising in 2021 to maybe 3%. Given China’s
preparedness for western aggressions, economic and
otherwise, China estimates a 2020 growth of around 3.5%
and reaching 5% to 6% in 2021.
Western propaganda media
would like the world to believe that the decline of
China’s phenomenal growth of 12% and higher, to a “mere”
5% to 6% is an indication for China’s big economic
problems. Never mind that an expansion of 5% to 6% is
still more than double that of the west. China has
decided to convert vertical growth – based on production
and consumption and the use of natural resources – to
horizontal or “quality growth”, meaning using her
extensive network of public banking and other public
financial institutions to address territorial and
sectorial weak spots and inequalities in the country.
This approach allows
dealing specifically with local (mostly western China)
infrastructure shortcomings which have sustained
inequalities of living standards between the eastern
Pacific Rim and the country’s interior, notably the
western and north-western provinces. Many of these local
investments, by local public banks may be based on
long-term financing at highly favorable conditions. What
the west would call “subsidies”, a derogatory term in
western neoliberal economies which function on the
concept of ‘instant profit’.
China sees this
differently. A long-term financial instrument at
favorable conditions is a contribution to the communal,
regional and national economy. It increases the general
welfare and productivity of people, the “happiness
factor” – which is an indicator of the overall
improvement of a country’s equilibrium and wellbeing.
China is currently
confronted with western aggressions of several kinds –
all led by Washington and supported by its subservient
allies. One is the on-and-off but seemingly never-ending
trade war by the Trump Administration against China. The
US knows, of course, that the trade war in reality has
nothing to do with trade, but rather with launching bad
publicity against China, and bashing China’s currency –
meaning, attempting to destroy world confidence in the
yuan. This will not happen.
Most of the United
States’ still functioning industries (those not yet
outsourced) and the biggest contributor to US GDP –
consumption – depend largely on the Chinese supply
chains. They all need Chinese goods and inputs to
survive, in particular, the medical industry which
depends to 80% on imports from China. This refers
especially to pharmaceuticals and inputs to
pharmaceutical products, manufactured in the US or
Europe. In the case of antibiotics, the percentage is a
s high as 90%. This is only one sector. Imagine, China
would stop selling iPads and iPhones – or other computer
parts to the US, what that would mean for the US
economy, let alone for the US consumer’s wellbeing and
comfort.
China knows the threat of
trade war and of cutting off China’s supply chains, is a
bluff, but China is ready to call the bluff, by
reorienting and enhancing her trade relations with Asia
and the members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization
(SCO), which include, in addition to China and Russia,
most Central Asian countries, and also India, Pakistan,
with Iran, Malaysia and Mongolia in observer status,
preparing to be fully incorporated.
China is also boosting
trade among the ASEAN+3 countries (Association of
Southeast Asian Nations – Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia,
Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore,
Thailand, and Vietnam; plus 3 = Japan, South Korea and
China). Monetary transactions will take place mostly in
yuan and local currencies, not the US dollar.
In the first three months
of 2020, China’s trade with ASEAN countries surpassed
both the EU and the United States. During this period,
ASEAN-China trade increased by 6 percent year-on-year to
US$140 billion and accounting for 15 percent of China’s
total
trade volume, expected to increase to 30% or higher
by 2025. Some of this shift may be due to the EU’s
almost total covid-lockdown during this period. However,
the reoriented and intensified trade with ASEAN+3, away
from the western aggression, is sustainable with a
visible tendency to grow.
Trading with ASEAN and
SCO countries, monetary transfers will be carried out in
yuan or local currencies, outside the dollar domain and
avoiding the SWIFT payment scheme. Instead, monetary
transfers will use the Chinese CIPS (Cross-Border
Interbank Payment System), or, alternatively, the
Russian MIR (meaning ‘peace’), at present mostly used
for Russian internal transactions, but gradually being
internationalized. In addition, the Chinese People’s
Bank of China controlled crypto yuan is just about ready
to be launched internationally – see below for more
details.
SCO and ASEAN+3 account
for about half the world population and for one third of
the globes economic output. While continuing offering
partnerships with the west, as China non-belligerently
does, China is no longer dependent on the west’s good
will. Far from it.
China may also expand its
concentration onto the super-continent of Eurasia which
is connected to Africa and includes the Middle East. To
serve this enormous landmass no seas have to be crossed.
Its easy trading, friendly relations, no conflicts,
because equal partners strive for the real meaning of
trade, no losers, only win-win.
Not to forget, Eurasia
has been for the past century a thorn in Anglo-American
empire’s eye. It is a huge market, covering about 55
million square kilometers (21 million sq. mi), or around
36.2% of the Earth’s total land area; with a population
of about 5 billion people (2020 est.), about 65% of the
world population. In addition, the supercontinent
harbors enormous riches of natural resources. An
estimated at least two thirds of still available natural
resources are located in Eurasia. This is a formidable
resource and market.
Dominating Eurasia is
part of the self-declared Anglo-American hegemon’s
objective – and it is a key reason for Washington’s
relentless aggression against China and Russia. One of
the strategies Washington applies is the thousands of
years-old “divide to conquer” – separating Western
Europe from Russia and China. For hundreds of years
before the ascent of the Anglo-American empire, western
European countries and territories were natural trading
partners of Russia, as well as of China, the latter
largely thanks to the old (2100-year-old) Silk Road.
WWII and the subsequent
Cold War with its “Iron Curtain” was supposed to
“finish” the socialist Soviet Union and at the same time
sever western Europe from her traditional alliance with
the Eurasian Continent, notably with Russia, but also
with more distant China. The elaborate construct of
building a post WWII united Europe with eventually a
unique currency, an idea initiated by the CIA with
European Atlantists of the Club of Rome in the 1950s –
was supposed to finally make Western Europe a US ally
and to separate Europe definitely from the concept of
socialism, notably from the Soviet Union.
The plan almost
succeeded. But dynamics sometime seek out justice and
equilibrium. The Soviet Union was finally destroyed by
the west, starting in the mid-1980s with the final
collapse in 1991, helped by Mikhail Gorbachev
(1985-1991) and Boris Yeltsin (1991-1999). Yeltsin sold
out much of the riches of the Soviet Union to the
western-allied Russian elite and through them, to the
west.
However, in 2000 Vladimir
Putin was elected as Russia’s new President. He saw
through this western fraud – and changed it all. He took
firm control over Russia and successfully ended western
usurpation of Russia. Today, under President Putin, and
despite endless western sanctions, Russia has regained
full sovereignty and has become self-sufficient in the
three life-pillars, food, education and health. Russia
has also become one of the world’s foremost food grain
exporters, like wheat, as well as a military power with
technologically the most advanced defense systems in the
world. In alliance with China, a solid pact between the
two countries – the East, the Eurasian Continent is
unbeatable by the west.
This
politico-socioeconomic success of Mr. Putin’s, away from
western exploitation and for the benefit of the Russian
people, has unleashed a firestorm of wrath by the
Occident against Putin and Russia. There is hardly a day
when Putin or Russia bashing – and also China bashing,
for that matter – is not on the western news menu.
Europe, still oscillating
somewhere in between west and east, may eventually join
(or re-join) her natural partners in the east.
Indications to that end are the clearest in Germany,
where the corporate world is already allied with Russia
and by extension, with China – and this despite Madame
Merkel, whose official position has until recently been
fully pro-Washington. However, more recently she has
also been propagating independence from Washington.
Without much ado,
pioneered by Greece and Italy, and against protests from
Washington, Europe is gradually also becoming part of
China’s BRI. Predictably, new alliances will emerge and
that with the idea of a multi-polar world. Both Beijing
and Moscow have been propagating moving away from a
unipolar hegemonic system towards a multi-polar world,
favoring peace and cooperation.
Away from the
sanction-prone west, a priority for China is also
developing her own internal market and infrastructure.
This has already begun, addressing primarily China’s
western and north-western provinces. It is the
conversion from China’s traditional vertical growth,
reaching in the past at times 12% or more per year, to
what is called “quality growth”, bringing about
socioeconomic development to the Chinese “hinterland” –
people’s wellbeing and more equilibrium of the Chinese
economy, comparing the country’s eastern and western
regions.
Another territorial area
of contention is the South China Sea. This is nothing
new. Already under Obama’s infamous “Pivot to Asia”
(2012 onward) – a political disaster – he “occupied” the
South China Sea with about 60% of the US navy fleet,
yes, almost two thirds of US war ships were menacingly
circulating and watching over Chinese movements and
activities – in what is China’s historically sovereign
territory. Under President Trump, the aggression has
become even fiercer.
On 14 July RT reports
China’s Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian as
saying to reporters that the US has been “the
troublemaker and the disruptor of peace and stability in
the region,”. He added, “China enjoys indisputable
sovereignty over the South China Sea and the
islands. China’s stand is based on historical facts and
international law. China’s sovereign rights and
positions are formed in the course of history and this
position has been held by Chinese Government for long.”
And further, “Beijing has never sought to establish “an
empire” in the region. However, he argued that China’s
territorial claims and interests “have sufficient
historical and legal basis,” and are legal under
international law.”
What are the real bones
of contention of China’s rightful territorial claims to
much of the South China Sea? – There are between 42 and
70 billion barrels of oil under the South China Sea,
possibly more – and close to 300 trillion cubic feet of
gas.
China is
less wary about her territorial partners in the South
China Sea (Brunei, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, the
Philippines, and Vietnam.), than about western / NATO
interference and bullying of these partners into
conflicts and belligerence with China. The
non-confrontational approach of China is bound to find
resources sharing arrangements with these regional
partners.
A key issue for the US is
China’s strong currency, the yuan. The yuan is poised to
gradually replace the US-dollar as a major world reserve
currency. The international strength of the yuan is
being enhanced by a blockchain-based and gold-backed
People’s Bank of China (PBC) controlled crypto-yuan.
China’s central bank (PBC)
has launched a trial run in a number of cities,
including Shenzhen, Suzhou, Chengdu, and Xiong’an, of
her new crypto-currency, the e-RMB (Ren Min Bi, meaning
People’s Money), or Yuan. So far it has been fully
accepted by the people and is used virtually for
everything, from salary deposits, to on-line purchases,
to rent payments, street shopping and more.
Eventually the new cyber
money will be rolled out internationally for trade,
commodity pricing – and even to be used as a safe and
stable reserve currency. The digital blockchain money
assures the users total security, no interference from
outside. It is a protection from ”sanctions” and
arbitrary confiscation of financial assets. As such, the
new cyber yuan may become an attractive international
trading / transfer alternative to the US-dollar. This
will add a new dimension to China’s economic strength.
Not only will her economy soon outrank that of the
United States, the yuan may also gradually become one of
the main reserve currencies of the world.
With sanctions and
threats of war – from trade, to biological, to cyber, to
hard warfare by missiles and bombs – China is once again
on her way to a new autonomy, a trustworthy Asian market
– even including Australia and Japan – as well as a
large potential internal market. The west, the US and
Europe, may continue to depend on China’s supply chains,
but these can no longer be used as instruments for
sanctions and coercion.
China is embedded in a
solid alliance with Russia and in a strategic coalition
with the SCO. In addition, President Xi’s Belt and Road
Initiative – BRI, or also called the New Silk Road – is
about to become the world’s economic development
revolution of the 21st Century. In this sense, China
will continue to relentlessly work in a non-aggression
style forward, towards a world community with a shared
future for mankind.
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