It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning. -Bill Watterson, comic strip artist of Calvin & Hobbes
***
Hundreds of anti-oil, pro-Palestine protesters clashed with riot police outside the APEC summit in San Francisco ahead of President Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping's widely anticipated meeting on Wednesday.
***
In Japan, the market for adult diapers is larger than the market for infant diapers
***
Xi Jinping’s Selected Major Statements
Xi met with President Joe Biden in California this week. It's a meeting of different cultures, different philosophies, different historical arcs. While free nations believe free men is the apogee of political evolution, and it sometimes lapses into political evangelism, it is generally a defensive philosophy with isolationist potential. That is not true of its socialist/communist opponents and their degenerate totalitarian endpoints.
***Xi has been trying to stabilize relations with Washington, apparently pressed by China’s economic troubles and a desire to reduce Beijing’s diplomatic isolation. “We have a thousand reasons to grow the relationship between China and the United States, and none at all to ruin it,” Xi told American lawmakers in Beijing recently.
But Xi underscored that his judgment of the challenge posed by the United States remains unchanged, saying with rare public bluntness in March: “Western countries led by the United States have implemented all-around containment, encirclement and suppression of China.”
When President Xi Jinping of China made his first state visit to the United States in 2015, he wrapped his demands for respect in reassurances.
He courted tech executives, while defending China’s internet controls. He denied that China was militarizing the disputed South China Sea, while asserting its maritime claims there. He spoke hopefully of a “new model” for great power relations, in which Beijing and Washington would coexist peacefully as equals.
But back in China, in meetings with the military, Xi was warning in strikingly stark terms that intensifying competition between a rising China and a long-dominant United States was all but unavoidable, and that the People’s Liberation Army should be prepared for a potential conflict.
“Beyond doubt, our country’s growing strength is the most important factor driving a profound readjustment of the international order,” he told top commanders in November 2015, two months after his visit to the United States. “Some Western countries absolutely never want to see a socialist China grow strong under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.”
Despite his assurances to President Barack Obama not to militarize the South China Sea, Xi told his senior commanders in February 2016 that China must bolster its presence there, saying: “We’ve seized the opportunity, eliminated intervention and sped up construction on South China Sea islands and shoals, achieving a historic breakthrough in maritime strategy and defending maritime rights.” (In the years that followed, China quickly expanded its military infrastructure in the area.)
Xi’s remarks are among collections of speeches that Xi made to the People’s Liberation Army and Communist Party officials, published by the military for internal study by senior officers, and seen and corroborated by The New York Times. The volumes, “Xi Jinping’s Selected Major Statements on National Defense and Military Development,” cover his initial years in power, from 2012 to February 2016.
The global financial crisis of 2007-08 had shattered official Chinese assumptions that Washington’s economic policymakers were competent, even if Beijing disagreed with them. Chinese officials quizzed American officials like Hank Paulson, then the Treasury secretary, about their mishandling of the situation. For many in Beijing, the lessons extended beyond the financial system.
“It was a defining moment,” said Desmond Shum, a business owner whose memoir, “Red Roulette,” describes those years, when he mingled with China’s political elite. “After that point, the entire Western model was questioned much more. There was also this growing belief that the world would need China to lead the way out of the mess.”
Xi saw lessons in the “Arab Spring” uprisings that had toppled corrupt authoritarian leaders across the Middle East. The overthrow of Egypt’s leader, Hosni Mubarak, in 2011, left a deep impression on Chinese leaders, who saw parallels with the 1989 pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, said John K. Culver, a former CIA officer who followed Xi’s rise.
“What really scared them was Egypt, because Hosni Mubarak rose as an officer in the Egyptian military, and yet the military turned on him,” Culver said. Chinese leaders, he added, “saw that and asked themselves: ‘If Tiananmen Square happened today, would the army again save the party?’
Within weeks of taking power in late 2012, Xi met with officials and sounded a warning: The collapse of the Soviet Union, he said, was a cautionary tale for China. It had fallen, he lamented, because its military had lost its nerve. He warned officials that China could suffer the same fate unless the party recovered its ideological backbone.
Months later, he issued an internal edict to roll back the influence of what he called Western ideas, such as the concept of universal human rights and the rule of law, in universities and the news media.
Xi, who leads the military as chair of the Central Military Commission, reserved some of his bluntest warnings about the West for his commanders.
“The ‘laws of the jungle’ of international competition have not changed,” he told military delegates to China’s national legislature in 2014. He pointed to the growing presence of U.S. jets, ships and aircraft carriers in the Asia-Pacific region as evidence that the United States was seeking to contain China.
He also said that the pro-Western protests that were then sweeping across Ukraine were a warning for Beijing. “Some Western countries are fanning the flames there and secretly scheming to achieve their geopolitical goals there,” he said. “We must take heed of this lesson.”
To prepare for the threats Xi saw ahead, he said, China needed to urgently overhaul its military. From late 2015, he initiated a sweeping reorganization of the People’s Liberation Army, seeking to make it an integrated force capable of extending Chinese power abroad, especially through air, sea and space forces. His warnings about the West helped underscore the urgency of those changes.
“Speeches to people within the system are attempts to mobilize,” said Blanchette, the researcher in Washington. “You don’t do that by just saying that the world is getting a little bit complicated; you need a narrative that is going to allow you to smash vested interests to achieve change.”
Xi warned that the People’s Liberation Army was still dangerously backward, and could fall behind if it did not seek to innovate, particularly in upgrading its weaponry and command organization. In these speeches, Xi did not say that war was unavoidable. But he made clear that without a formidable military, China would not be able to assert its will.
“In international contestation, political operations are very important, but ultimately it comes down to whether you have strength and whether you can use that strength,” he told the commanders on the Central Military Commission in November 2015. “Relying on a silver tongue won’t work.”--from “Xi Jinping’s Selected Major Statements on National Defense and Military Development,” reported in NYT
***
In Japan, the market for adult diapers is larger than the market for infant diapers
***
Xi Jinping’s Selected Major Statements
Xi met with President Joe Biden in California this week. It's a meeting of different cultures, different philosophies, different historical arcs. While free nations believe free men is the apogee of political evolution, and it sometimes lapses into political evangelism, it is generally a defensive philosophy with isolationist potential. That is not true of its socialist/communist opponents and their degenerate totalitarian endpoints.
This is from a collection of comments made by Xi, illustrative of his thinking and his lessons from recent American events.
***Xi has been trying to stabilize relations with Washington, apparently pressed by China’s economic troubles and a desire to reduce Beijing’s diplomatic isolation. “We have a thousand reasons to grow the relationship between China and the United States, and none at all to ruin it,” Xi told American lawmakers in Beijing recently.
But Xi underscored that his judgment of the challenge posed by the United States remains unchanged, saying with rare public bluntness in March: “Western countries led by the United States have implemented all-around containment, encirclement and suppression of China.”
When President Xi Jinping of China made his first state visit to the United States in 2015, he wrapped his demands for respect in reassurances.
He courted tech executives, while defending China’s internet controls. He denied that China was militarizing the disputed South China Sea, while asserting its maritime claims there. He spoke hopefully of a “new model” for great power relations, in which Beijing and Washington would coexist peacefully as equals.
But back in China, in meetings with the military, Xi was warning in strikingly stark terms that intensifying competition between a rising China and a long-dominant United States was all but unavoidable, and that the People’s Liberation Army should be prepared for a potential conflict.
“Beyond doubt, our country’s growing strength is the most important factor driving a profound readjustment of the international order,” he told top commanders in November 2015, two months after his visit to the United States. “Some Western countries absolutely never want to see a socialist China grow strong under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.”
Despite his assurances to President Barack Obama not to militarize the South China Sea, Xi told his senior commanders in February 2016 that China must bolster its presence there, saying: “We’ve seized the opportunity, eliminated intervention and sped up construction on South China Sea islands and shoals, achieving a historic breakthrough in maritime strategy and defending maritime rights.” (In the years that followed, China quickly expanded its military infrastructure in the area.)
Xi’s remarks are among collections of speeches that Xi made to the People’s Liberation Army and Communist Party officials, published by the military for internal study by senior officers, and seen and corroborated by The New York Times. The volumes, “Xi Jinping’s Selected Major Statements on National Defense and Military Development,” cover his initial years in power, from 2012 to February 2016.
“It was a defining moment,” said Desmond Shum, a business owner whose memoir, “Red Roulette,” describes those years, when he mingled with China’s political elite. “After that point, the entire Western model was questioned much more. There was also this growing belief that the world would need China to lead the way out of the mess.”
“What really scared them was Egypt, because Hosni Mubarak rose as an officer in the Egyptian military, and yet the military turned on him,” Culver said. Chinese leaders, he added, “saw that and asked themselves: ‘If Tiananmen Square happened today, would the army again save the party?’
Within weeks of taking power in late 2012, Xi met with officials and sounded a warning: The collapse of the Soviet Union, he said, was a cautionary tale for China. It had fallen, he lamented, because its military had lost its nerve. He warned officials that China could suffer the same fate unless the party recovered its ideological backbone.
Months later, he issued an internal edict to roll back the influence of what he called Western ideas, such as the concept of universal human rights and the rule of law, in universities and the news media.
“The ‘laws of the jungle’ of international competition have not changed,” he told military delegates to China’s national legislature in 2014. He pointed to the growing presence of U.S. jets, ships and aircraft carriers in the Asia-Pacific region as evidence that the United States was seeking to contain China.
He also said that the pro-Western protests that were then sweeping across Ukraine were a warning for Beijing. “Some Western countries are fanning the flames there and secretly scheming to achieve their geopolitical goals there,” he said. “We must take heed of this lesson.”
To prepare for the threats Xi saw ahead, he said, China needed to urgently overhaul its military. From late 2015, he initiated a sweeping reorganization of the People’s Liberation Army, seeking to make it an integrated force capable of extending Chinese power abroad, especially through air, sea and space forces. His warnings about the West helped underscore the urgency of those changes.
“Speeches to people within the system are attempts to mobilize,” said Blanchette, the researcher in Washington. “You don’t do that by just saying that the world is getting a little bit complicated; you need a narrative that is going to allow you to smash vested interests to achieve change.”
Xi warned that the People’s Liberation Army was still dangerously backward, and could fall behind if it did not seek to innovate, particularly in upgrading its weaponry and command organization. In these speeches, Xi did not say that war was unavoidable. But he made clear that without a formidable military, China would not be able to assert its will.
“In international contestation, political operations are very important, but ultimately it comes down to whether you have strength and whether you can use that strength,” he told the commanders on the Central Military Commission in November 2015. “Relying on a silver tongue won’t work.”--from “Xi Jinping’s Selected Major Statements on National Defense and Military Development,” reported in NYT
*
So, not only is the socialist philosophy necessarily cannibalistic because of its own inefficiencies, America's own recent behavior has raised the question of the American giant's competence and, hence, its vulnerability.
1 comment:
Too Complicated for Me
Post a Comment