Asia China's growing influence

smokingjacket

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One for the “China is so great to do business in, the West is held back by red tape” brigade

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/climate/china-ozone-cfcs.html
What products would they be mass producing that still have CFC's in them? My understanding was that there were better alternatives at a similar price. Cheap refigerants for the Chinese market?

I couldn't think of any off the top of my head and the pieces I've seen online can only come up with running stocks down but this NYT article seems to imply production of new CFC's. Very odd.

Maybe this has something to do with refrigeration for quantum computing?
 

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I don't think Australia should completely trust the USA on foreign policy. We were lied to about the gulf war (which I accepted at the time), the Vietnam war, and they have interfered in our elections.

As for the urghurs, I think they like Tibet should be independent. Reality is in China the Han completely dominate population in most areas except a few like these two, so minorities have little if any voice in the party

There was a huge factor of USA v EU, $US v $EU in that war. then along comes brexit
 

smokingjacket

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Pretty brutal hit piece on Bob Carr and his Chinese advocacy in the AFR this morning. Stops just short of calling him an agent of CCP intelligence.

ACRI has provided Carr with the public platform he lost with the end of his brief tenure as foreign minister and again he has a strong media presence. For an instant in July this year it seemed the organisers of the Brisbane Writers Festival might have silenced him briefly but when word got around that he had been denied a place on the festival program, he won added media coverage for his latest book along with personal support from leading public figures. "This is a fundamental freedom of speech issue," former foreign minister Gareth Evans told The Australian. It seems that even at invited events nobody can deny Bob Carr an opportunity to speak without breaching the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
...
There are demonstrable alignments with Beijing's position. In May 2018 it was reported that Carr had used a Labor colleague in Parliament to put questions about former Fairfax China correspondent John Garnaut to the Senate estimates committee. Garnaut had subsequently worked for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on China's influence operations in Australia, and the point of the questions was apparently to compel public servants to place Garnaut's actions in that role on the public record. Security officials in China had the same interests. They interrogated Chinese-Australian academic Professor Feng Chongyi about Garnaut when they detained him in March 2017.
https://www.afr.com/opinion/what-you-should-know-about-bob-carr-and-china-20181105-h17jic
 

smokingjacket

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Spooks openly call him that
The AFR piece has a few strong 'drop' vibes, both in content and author, but Fitzgerald did do a lot of the legwork with Clive Hamilton for Silent Invasion so my auto-skepticism around these anti-China stories is probably doing a great disservice to Fitzgeralds knowledge of the Aus-Sino relationship, and the players involved.

I have to say, I've always had a lot of time for Bob Carr, and even as I've been watching his drift towards becoming an outright propagandist for a while now, I've always been willing to hear him out for a couple of reasons: Mainly, because that's what he's paid to do. I don't have a problem with China having lobbyists in Australia. They're our largest trading partner and exert far less influence on our foreign policy than Israel or the US. One of the very strong points Carr continues to make is the absence of a domestic Chinese lobby in Australian politics, either for CCP goals, or a rabidly anti-communist diaspora that might pull Australian policy towards Cuban like symbolic statements of anti-communism, possibly not in our economic interests.

I've always very generously labelled Carr's excesses in defending China as swinging too far when defending a contrarian position - like the excellence and benefit of the CCP - when confronted by hostile US aligned security types or general audiences that have typically only heard the spooky version. Mainly because I'm aware I do it myself. That passage about getting Garnaut on record in parliament is an absolutely brutal open mouth moment, and extremely disappointing from an ex-Foreign Minister, even if he has his own views about what Australia's best interests are. I don't know how he'll be able to maintain his working level relationships with politicians anymore when everyone will be avoiding him like the plague else they look like Dastyari just for talking to him.
 

smokingjacket

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You think? I mean I know he plays it up wanting the first class lifestyle in his books but he's always struck me as too self aware for that.

He has delusions of grandeur and wants to be a great statesman. I think he saw the perfect opportunity to attach himself and his aspirations as global diplomat to the growth of Chinese power. It's very difficult for an Australian to break through to become an international statesman in the US system because they have their own priorities and if you can't insert yourself into their establishment, David Kilcullen style, you're competing for thinktank positions against all the other power hungry ex-diplomats from the US treaty partners across the world. IMO he saw himself playing the world diplomat, slowly building his clout with the Chinese and triangulating interests between Australia, China and the US, a bit like Rudd but from a different angle. Maybe use the Chinese connections to have a crack at a UN position at some point or leverage a big think tank role.
 
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its free real estate

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You think? I mean I know he plays it up wanting the first class lifestyle in his books but he's always struck me as too self aware for that.

He has delusions of grandeur and wants to be a great statesman. I think he saw the perfect opportunity to attach himself and his aspirations as global diplomat to the growth of Chinese power. It's very difficult for an Australian to break through to become an international statesman in the US system because they have their own priorities and if you can't insert yourself into their establishment, David Kilcullen style, you're competing for thinktank positions against all the other power hungry ex-diplomats from the US treaty partners across the world. IMO he was saw himself playing the world diplomat, slowly building his clout with the Chinese and triangulating interests between Australia, China and the US, a bit like Rudd but from a different angle. Maybe use the Chinese connections to have a crack at a UN position at some point or leverage a big think tank role.
Yeah in Carr’s case it’s probably ego
 

smokingjacket

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The Chinese Government wants to go to war with the US and it's allies.
It has no other choice in order to secure it's South China Sea holdings.
China believes that once it has bloodied the US, they will then be left alone.
I doubt that very much tbh. China already has a very strong defensive position in the SCS that's improving each month. Their anti-air and anti-ship missile systems have flipped the burden of proof underlying naval force projection to the point that it's very much for the US Navy to prove that they could operate within the first island chain in a conflict, let alone the areas of access denial closer to the coast, without taking catastrophic losses. Basically, their land holdings in the SCS are secure already.
 

smokingjacket

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We'll give Bob a reply, not specifically to this mornings article but a recent piece that explains his positions. It's simultaneously quite reasonable and also an insight into why he might not be a Five Eyes favourite right now.

Australians have no interest in joining US cold war against China
I had just been appointed foreign minister and was consulting my predecessors. Downer implied cold war was not smart diplomacy and not in Australia’s interest.

But in its biggest policy shift on China since 1971, that is precisely what the US has embarked upon.

On October 4, US Vice President Mike Pence threatened China with the biggest military build-up since Ronald Reagan, and pledged to choke its economy. He was fulfilling President Donald Trump’s vow that China would be stopped from getting ‘bigger than us’.

Now America will set about recruiting allies for a ‘coalition of the willing’ to hit China with adversarial policies.

If I were the political officer in the US embassy in Canberra, I would be drafting a cable telling Washington that Australia was unlikely to join. I would quote the Lowy Institute poll from June this year that showed 82 percent of Australians think China is ‘more of an economic partner’ than a ‘military threat’. The poll also showed 43 percent of these funny Aussies have confidence in President Xi Jinping ‘to do the right thing regarding world affairs’, but only 30 percent in Trump.
...
Pragmatism on China is a stronger Coalition tradition than the short-lived ideological line that captured policymaking through 2017 and was relegated and reversed this year by Turnbull just before he was removed.

Australia’s capacity to say no to the Trump-Pence cold war will be easy given the stand of other US allies in Asia. Japan, pursuing rapprochement with China, will not be joining in. Nor will South Korea or The Philippines. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made it clear during his summit this year with Xi that India would run its own bilateral with China without deferring to its US partner. Singapore, like other Asian states, harbours the deepest doubts about US reliability and since October last year has run its own robust bilateral with Beijing.

That leaves the Europeans who, to be sure, have many grievances against China over economic access but are likely to be satisfied by China’s concessions.

Therein lies China’s big challenge. Chinese who want their own government to deliver more ‘reform and opening up’ hope that their leaders respond to Trump by doing just that: more rule of law, more markets, more foreign investment.

How Xi Jinping responds to US cold war mobilisation will test whether he is ideologue or statesman.
https://www.australiachinarelations...no-interest-joining-us-cold-war-against-china
 

RupieDupie

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With the Chinese taking over all of the Pacific, I wonder whether one day we will have to look forward to being slaves, working for external investors so that they can have wealthy lifestyles at our expense.

Oh noes! I wouldn't want that to happen, that would be the shittiest thing that one person could do to another person, and surely would not happen under our current nice democratically elected Australian Gubmint :poo::poo::poo:
 
With the Chinese taking over all of the Pacific, I wonder whether one day we will have to look forward to being slaves, working for external investors so that they can have wealthy lifestyles at our expense.

Oh noes! I wouldn't want that to happen, that would be the shittiest thing that one person could do to another person, and surely would not happen under our current nice democratically elected Australian Gubmint :poo::poo::poo:
The key difference is more the fact that this message board wouldn't be allowed in China and we'd all be in serious trouble for participating in it. We in the west have far more freedoms than we realise and take too many for granted. The relationship with have the US at least allows us to openly express our dislike of the White house without any real repercussions.

On [device_name] using BigFooty.com mobile app
 

smokingjacket

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The key difference is more the fact that this message board wouldn't be allowed in China and we'd all be in serious trouble for participating in it. We in the west have far more freedoms than we realise and take too many for granted. The relationship with have the US at least allows us to openly express our dislike of the White house without any real repercussions.

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There are heaps of forums like this in China. Maybe even more advanced and linked to other forms of social media. The issue is posts get scrubbed by censors and certain tags get blocked at the CCP's discretion.
 
There are heaps of forums like this in China. Maybe even more advanced and linked to other forms of social media. The issue is posts get scrubbed by censors and certain tags get blocked at the CCP's discretion.

chinese know how to work around those blocks. lots of open talked is coded
 

smokingjacket

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chinese know how to work around those blocks. lots of open talked is coded
Exactly. The repression works for the older generation but the more technologically advanced young people know how to get around it. The original point was that however repressive the Chinese government is, they don't ban internet forums.
 

RupieDupie

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The key difference is more the fact that this message board wouldn't be allowed in China and we'd all be in serious trouble for participating in it. We in the west have far more freedoms than we realise and take too many for granted. The relationship with have the US at least allows us to openly express our dislike of the White house without any real repercussions.

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Having the Freedom of speech to voice a concern, as well as the Freedom to vote, does not mean anything if the Gubmint does not listen or represent.

It is just an illusion to make plebs feel better about themselves.
 

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I doubt that very much tbh. China already has a very strong defensive position in the SCS that's improving each month. Their anti-air and anti-ship missile systems have flipped the burden of proof underlying naval force projection to the point that it's very much for the US Navy to prove that they could operate within the first island chain in a conflict, let alone the areas of access denial closer to the coast, without taking catastrophic losses. Basically, their land holdings in the SCS are secure already.
Against the Americans.
There are other players in the region, proximity with whom ensures the Chinese are far less secure militarily.
 
There are heaps of forums like this in China. Maybe even more advanced and linked to other forms of social media. The issue is posts get scrubbed by censors and certain tags get blocked at the CCP's discretion.
Exactly. The repression works for the older generation but the more technologically advanced young people know how to get around it. The original point was that however repressive the Chinese government is, they don't ban internet forums.
But they do ban political discussion if it isn't effusing praise on the CCP, which was my original point, but whatever. Seriously, the fact we have legal protection to slag off whichever government official we like in this forum and not face consequences for our beliefs is something that most people in the world have never known.
 

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Exactly. The repression works for the older generation but the more technologically advanced young people know how to get around it. The original point was that however repressive the Chinese government is, they don't ban internet forums.
You don't actually know that.

In addition, there are other avenues of social media beyond "forums", which have been effectively blocked to ensure their content can be managed. The Chinese have a policy of enforcing the tightest control they can over the information available in China, and they do enforce it.

Weibo, by way of example, is a logical outgrowth of that policy. Ban something you can't control, and replace it with something you can.
Limiting the discussion to "internet forums" is a bit cute, and very apologist.
 
Having the Freedom of speech to voice a concern, as well as the Freedom to vote, does not mean anything if the Gubmint does not listen or represent.

It is just an illusion to make plebs feel better about themselves.
Yeah, sorry pal but just because you feel the gubmint doesn't represent you or there's certain wings of the government that you aren't a fan of doesn't equate to you not having it considerably better than at least three quarters of the world. I don't know your life story, but I've lived and worked in some seriously shitty countries in my time. We have it really good here.
 
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