風蕭蕭_Frank
以文會友
Made in China makes peace for human world
Made in China: the Middle East Peace Deal
Watch a video recording of this article here: https://youtu.be/IP7-GiYBtMM
Whilst it is certain there may be some people in the world who do not want to see a peaceful Middle East, there are many millions more, especially those who live in the region who do.
Tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran probably go back centuries but those of us who are old enough to remember the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979 will know this was the start of modern-day tensions which have from time to time erupted into hostilities. Iran and Iraq were at war for much of the 1980s and Saudi Arabia supported Iraq. It’s now well-known that the USA spent billions illegally supporting Iraq, and its leader Saddam Hussein, during that period.
In 1979, the USA already considered Iran to be what George W Bush would later term as part of the “Axis of Evil” after a large group of militants had taken over the US embassy and held more than 50 staff and military members hostage for over a year. In one interesting turn of events, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the release of all the women and any hostage who was a person of colour, on the basis that they would be unlikely spies for America.
Tensions that exist in the region haven’t been eased by US involvement, they’ve been stoked. As far as the US is concerned, there isn’t very much that’s good about Iran, according to the CIA World Factbook, they are abusers of human rights, abusers of religious freedoms and suppliers to Russia. It would never be easy to facilitate relationships when your intelligence apparatus publishes such information but it becomes even harder when your country has no diplomatic relations either. The US has not had an embassy in Iran since 1980 and Iran has no embassy in the USA. So, if we were looking for global leadership towards a peaceful resolution between neighbours in the Middle East, the USA is definitely not the place to look.
Without US involvement, these two countries reached tacit agreement to create a stable Middle East, in 1997 Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia visited Iran, two years later President Khatami of Iran visited Saudi Arabia where a Security Agreement was signed; all was looking good but in 2003, the USA invaded one of their neighbours and set that process back.
Fast forward to this week in China and the unthinkable has happened. China, showing the global leadership that has been absent for the last few decades, has brokered what future historians will describe as perhaps the most significant peace deal in modern history by bringing leaders from two of the largest Middle Eastern economies to Beijing and reactivated the 2001 Security Agreement.
US media describes the deal as a surprise but White House Spokesperson John Kirby suggests that the US were well aware, they had been appraised by the Saudis. There is much criticism from the US about a lack of trust of China. Despite what the US believes, it’s clear that these two Islamic countries do not share the same misgivings.
Critics might suggest that it’s not China’s role to play peacemaker in a region that’s heavily influenced by the USA but if China couldn’t then who could? The USA claims to have been trying for the last 60 years but has only succeeded in enriching its military suppliers and clearly hasn’t brought anything like peace or stability to any of the places where it claims to have tried.
When we think of modern conflicts, we think of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Israel and Palestine, they’re all in the Middle East and all could be resolved with diplomacy; In Africa, Algeria and Morocco, Mali, Benin, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, all require international and peaceful interventions, they don’t want and they probably don’t need military boots on the ground, they need diplomats.
Diplomacy has been missing but China has brought it back. The reopening of embassies in Iran and Saudi Arabia is just a first step, it’s likely this will lead to an easing of tensions in Yemen. Success in this part of the Middle East could extend to other parts of the region and proof of China’s good intentions could lead to deeper discussions in Ukraine. Who knows, with a new leader in global terms that doesn’t have a military industrial complex to feed, we could finally see some peace in the world.
The Greatest Propaganda Campaign in Human History
https://jerry-grey2002.medium.com/the-greatest-propaganda-campaign-in-human-history-9e8c49c863c9
Watch a video of this article here: https://youtu.be/uIGUh21-SyE
China is the victim of the largest and greatest propaganda campaign in human history. Whether this is a sign of things to come or an aberration based around this particular point in time remains to be seen but propaganda it definitely is.
Apparently, in 2017, China incarcerated between 1 and 5 million Xinjiang residents, except there’s no logistics to provide for the movement or incarceration of this many people, so that was impossible.
When those claims were discredited, they softened the allegations, yet 150 million tourists a year went to engage with local culture, eat local foods and they saw local language and the religion of Islam were widely practiced so, it wasn’t “cultural genocide”.
The claims were then diluted to “forced labour”, except some of the world’s biggest companies work there: Germany’s Volkswagen; USA’s Skechers; Japan’s Uniqlo; France’s SMCP; and Spain’s Inditex which owns Zara, among other brands have all investigated — and some of them have been investigated but no evidence has been found. One of the world’s largest apparel companies, HK based Esquel, have taken this matter to the US Supreme Court.
Hilton and Marriott Hotels, KFC, McDonalds and many more US brands operate without any issue and they employ people in accordance with their own standards and local laws. The world’s biggest agricultural machinery company, John Deere, not only operates there, business is so good it started a JV in China in 2020 in order to “capitalize on this important and rapidly expanding marketplace”.
So, the story was then changed again, from forced labour in Xinjiang to wider distribution of forced labour in other provinces. And, once again, that was investigated; it was found to be a normal migrant worker program benefitting Xinjiang by providing better paid jobs in Eastern regions so money could be sent home. The Cowestpro Papers did an excellent job of debunking this.
These allegations are so widely reported now that it doesn’t matter what the Supreme Court says, it doesn’t matter that the evidence has been debunked, it doesn’t matter when diplomats from 21 countries visit in 2021, or religious and political leaders from 32 Muslim countries visit in 2022, and even 8 African countries sent diplomats in 2023 and say they’ve seen no evidence. Because it’s on every news channel, it must be true — except, as we all know, it isn’t.
Nor is it true that Xi Jinping threatened to invade Taiwan, he’s never said anything of the sort. What he has said, and the United Nations agree with him, is that Taiwan is part of China, China will defend its property. China won’t accept another period of humiliation like the Qing Dynasty, when Hong Kong was taken by the British and more than 40 foreign concessions were taken by nine different countries.
Talking of Hong Kong, we were widely and “credibly” informed that China would send troops there in 2019, but they didn’t. We were told the “freedoms and democracy” were taken from Hong Kong; but they weren’t. China has broken the Joint Declaration media reported to us, but they haven’t according to British Barrister and Hong Kong’s former top lawyer, who wrote an open letter to the then PM Johnson to let him know how widely misinformed he, and his advisors were.
I urge everyone who has any interest in the well-being of HK to read this letter, so I’ve linked it in the description, this will help you understand how misinformed people are about the true situation in HK where more democracy now exists than at any time in their history. The success is so widely recognised in both HK, by the vast majority of Hong Kongers, and the Mainland, that Xi Jinping suggested on the 25th anniversary that “One Country Two Systems” would endure beyond the 50 agreed years.
So, if China isn’t persecuting Uyghurs, nor is it threatening Taiwan, it hasn’t removed any of the rights or freedoms from Hong Kong’s residents; what is it actually doing wrong?
It may be sending balloons the size of circus tents over America but, let’s be honest, if it was doing that to spy then it’s the stuff of a Marx Brothers comedy skit. And, there are probably millions of Americans who believe it; many of them were actually encouraged out of the basement to try shooting at it.
What China is doing, is growing. Growing in influence, growing in trade, growing in economy, growing in wealth, in fact, it’s growing in every aspect of technology, medicine, education and lifestyle and yes, in order to protect these improvements, it has grown in military power too — a defensive military power.
China may have militarised some atolls in the South China Sea but, unlike the US, it doesn’t have 7000 troops and occupy 30% of the land in Guam. China doesn’t have nearly 30,000 troops in any of its neighbouring countries, as US has in South Korea. Nor has it colonised any Asian country with 80,000 troops and 125 active bases like Japan.
This is another of the great disinformation campaigns: the military expansion of China. A country which hasn’t invaded in a generation and works closely with the USA in Djibouti, the only overseas base China actually has.
China isn’t fortifying Gwadar Port in Pakistan, as alleged by some media, nor is it, as suggested in think tank reports, providing military aid to the Solomon Islands, in fact the agreement with the Solomon Islands specifically excludes military aid, read it, you’ll see.
What China is doing is building world-class infrastructure. 42,000 kilometres of high-speed rail with 1,100 stations that criss-cross the country. China has lifted 800 million out of poverty in the last 40 years. China has improved the air and water quality to the point where there was once smog, there are now blue skies,
where people once said it was hard to find wild animals in China they now abound, from the protected and rarely seen wetland birds in Jiangsu, to rare whales off the Guangdong coast, to Asian elephants wreaking havoc in Yunnan, from leopards in Shenzhen to Tigers in Heilongjiang. These ecological changes say more about a country than teams of Western economists or journalists can.
For a real perspective of China, try Chinese media and then watch what China does. In every case so far, what China said it would do, is what they actually did. Another rule of thumb I adopt is to look at what Western media says is happening in China and then assume it’s a deflection from what’s really happening somewhere else, because it usually is.
The collapse of the collapse theory
https://jerry-grey2002.medium.com/the-collapse-of-the-collapse-theory-81e7dde76a77?
A video link to the article can be found here: https://youtu.be/_CQ-4flcqb4
Western economists keep getting it wrong. The “collapse of China” has been around for years. Books have been written, articles have been published and videos have been produced for at least 20 years and keep being reiterated and always for different reasons.
James A Robinson suggests it’s because people aren’t free
Peter Zeihan suggests its because of the ageing population, oh and he believes the only reason China has grown strong is because of the “freedoms and protections” offered by the US navy, when they stop protecting the waters around China, China will collapse for different reasons.
Gordon Chang claimed in 2001 that it would happen by 2011 and then, 12 years ago suggested it was a year away. More specifically, according to his own website, he doesn’t even know why it will collapse, just that it will because of the inefficiency of State run enterprises and the inability of the Communist party to create an open and democratic society
Others suggest the debt to GDP ratio is too high and China can no longer sustain the level of debt, which happens to be considerably lower than that of the USA.
Australia’s Lowy Institute wrote an interesting article called the “collapse of the Chinese Collapse theory” and that’s what I’m going to talk about today.
China continues, even through the pandemic to grow and the world constantly wonders why they get this so wrong. How does China “lie its way” out of this collapse every year. Clearly, the only reasons China reports positive growth is because they are lying about, right?
For many, many, years, we’ve been inundated with reports about how the authoritarian government will accept no failures in reporting statistics — everyone is afraid to stand up to Beijing and afraid they will be removed from their posts, even shot if they get it wrong. Well, if that were true, then all the predictions would have been correct and the economy would have collapsed, except it didn’t!
Let’s take off the Western lenses and look at how it happens.
The first and most obvious thing is that those reports of authoritarianism were wrong. Quite obviously, China has a very different governance system to the West and the West don’t like it but, what they don’t like, doesn’t really matter to Chinese people, because they do like it.
There’s no way on earth a country could develop the way China has if everyone was forced to work, if everyone was kept in dire working conditions and if they had no free time, hated their employers, hated their boss and hated their country. So, there’s one theory that we should put straight to bed — Chinese people may not live in utopia but they are, for the most part, gainfully employed and relatively happy with the system they have — just because the same system doesn’t work in another country, doesn’t mean it’s a bad system, it just means it’s a different one.
The ageing population is correct, but an ageing population hasn’t caused a collapse yet and isn’t likely to in the future. People have forgotten, there is a culture here of looking after the elderly, it isn’t an imposition, it’s a responsibility that is accepted and, in many cases welcomed. I’ve heard Chinese people say their parents cared for them for many years now it’s time to repay them. People in China give gifts to their parents not just on the parent’s birthday, but on their own birthday as a way of saying thank you to them.
People here also save and invest for their retirement, something the West hasn’t done too well with many “social security” countries struggling with huge pension deficits. In the west, this could easily cause a financial crisis, it’s less likely to in China.
There won’t be enough jobs because of automation to support this ageing population is one of the claims, except that there will be less people working and more machines taking over mundane work — China has already addressed this future concern as it is the leader in AI, robotics, online healthcare. Investments totally billions of dollars have created AI towns and infrastructure which will help an ageing population to live a meaningful life. These investments recognise a problem and are providing working solutions to it already.
In the west, there may very well be an ageing population that is discarded and forgotten about, or too expensive to maintain. Already Canada is offering “assisted exits” if it all gets too much, this isn’t likely to happen in a society such as China with Confucian values which include, among other things, filial piety.
Which brings us to the last one of Debt to GDP ratio and, yes, there’s no doubt it’s high but there’s also no doubt it’s well-spent. In the last 10 years China has built more than double the number of new universities that exist in the UK. There are 42,000 kilometres of high-speed rail and more coming with over 11,000 new stations built to accommodate them in the last 20 years. People say this system runs at a loss and maybe it does but they don’t take into account the amount of GDP added by the ability to travel so freely and quickly to places that were once inaccessible
The World Bank acknowledges that China’s Poverty Alleviation scheme is a roaring success but economists and headlines ask: “at what cost”. The simple fact is that the cost is unimportant as China has opened economic opportunities to the 770 million people lifted out of poverty, opportunities that weren’t available to them 20 years ago and in doing so, they’ve created a very large number of new tax paying citizens. Where a region was once impoverished and a drain on society, that region is now adding to society — it might take another 20 or even 50 years to repay the cost and this is something Western economists can’t grasp — China isn’t looking for a one-to-three-year return on investment. China is thinking a generation ahead. As are the parents of children born in those communities who not only go on to become middle income earners but also go on to look after their ageing parents in 20–30 years-time.
If we stop thinking like western economists and journalists for a moment, we might actually see something special. A society that has constantly improved over the last 50 years and one that thinks beyond the next election cycle by planning years into the future to avoid these foolish predictions.
China calls for Peace
A link to the video for this article, can be found here: https://youtu.be/4jz7bdEavUo
There are two communities in the world, one is the so-called International Community and the other is the rest of the world.
The international community, which even Wikipedia can’t define, except as some nebulous concept, probably consists of the USA and her allies, which amount to about 18% of the population of the world but well over 50% of the GDP
China is, apparently, not part of the international community. It seems that you can only be part of that exclusive club if you follow the same ideological path as the US and, if won’t matter if you’re on a path of peace or a path of conflict, unless you’re on the same path as the US you’re on the wrong path
When did Venezuela invade anyone, when did Iran actually threaten or pose a threat to anyone — we’ve been hearing they’re weeks away from having a nuclear bomb since George W Bush was president, when did China last invade or threaten to invade anyone, for most Youtubers, it was before they were born!
So, it comes as no surprise to anyone outside this “international community” that China is, as usual, calling for peace.
There can’t be any doubt that the world is on the brink of disaster. NATO has pushed Russia into a war with Ukraine; the US keeps pushing China’s red lines, Iran wants to do business with Middle Eastern countries but the US doesn’t like that. Cuba has done nothing wrong except to be geographically near the US with a different ideology but is constantly in the US crosshairs.
Australia is China’s largest supplier and China is its largest customer; it is the only developed country that has a trade surplus with China but is arming itself against what US think Tanks keep telling it, is a pending invasion. India is friends with Russia, had some disputes with China and is a member of the “Quad” making it a very special friend to the USA, but that all appears to be changing now as US is getting more and more angry that the world’s largest democracy is following a more authoritarian and individual path.
China’s Foreign Minister Qin Gang, has just released a paper, I’ve linked the full text in the decription which calls for a: “UN-centered security governance structure and supports its efforts to prevent war and lead in post-war reconstruction, calling for major countries to play a leading role on global security issues, to reject hegemony and bullying and to build a peaceful coexistence, delivering stable and balanced relations between major countries”.
Despite US claims that China would be crossing a red line if it supports Russia, the only thing China has ever done is suggest it can help negotiate a settlement, there’s another link to that. Most recently, on 16th February this year
As Qin Gang says, and surely, there can be no disagreement, a nuclear war cannot be won and should never be fought.
If we’re honest, there isn’t a sane person in the world who doesn’t think this is a good call. Is there?
If anyone thinks UN structure is wrong, they should say why. If anyone thinks preventing war is a bad thing, they should say why, if anyone thinks leading countries, which would include China, USA and even Russia should reject hegemony and bullying, they should say why. And building a peaceful co-existence should be the goal of every nation and every person in the world. If you disagree with that, what’s wrong with you?
Anyone who is reasonable, sane and has some moral standards must agree with Qin Gang, unfortunately, many won’t, not because it’s wrong, but because it was China which pointed it out and there we have the most damning statement of all:
People will disagree with such a rationale just because… Well, just because China…!
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