Asia China's growing influence

[Jello_B]

Trade talks began again today, and the US sends a destroyer through the SCS on the same day. I’m thinking it will be a stalemate on industrial and Tech talking points, but some progress will be made on tariffs. Trump surely would be feeling like he needs some sort of win.

 

[Ned_Flanders]

Trade talks began again today, and the US sends a destroyer through the SCS on the same day. I’m thinking it will be a stalemate on industrial and Tech talking points, but some progress will be made on tariffs. Trump surely would be feeling like he needs some sort of win.

China also releasing video of its version of the MOAB

Both sabers are being rattled

 

[Jello_B]

China also releasing video of its version of the MOAB

Both sabers are being rattled

Yep, unfortunately China looks like it’s going to start something and the US don’t have any issues agitating for it. Being called a Cold War already in media, I wasn’t around for the last major wars but surely people understand how bad this could get if China continue displaying aggression towards Taiwan.

 

[Elroo]

Yep, unfortunately China looks like it’s going to start something and the US don’t have any issues agitating for it. Being called a Cold War already in media, I wasn’t around for the last major wars but surely people understand how bad this could get if China continue displaying aggression towards Taiwan.

We've only recently had a PRC frigate in Australia for Kakadu 18 exercises in Darwin. We've also had recently RAN vessels overflownby long-range PRC surveillance aircraft whilst they were operating in the Coral Sea. The Chinese are definitely expanding their reach in the region.

 

[Craven Morehead]

This will end well for us all.
A little more than sabre rattling.

Beijing has announced it has deployed intermediate ballistic missiles to the country's north-west region, saying the weapons have the capacity to destroy US ships entering disputed waters in the South China Sea.
The DF-26 missiles — which have been previously dubbed the 'Guam Killer' or 'Guam Express' by Chinese media and defence experts — are capable of carrying conventional or nuclear warheads.
They have a range of 4,500 kilometres, making them capable of reaching as far as Guam in the east and Indonesia in the south, providing Beijing with a powerful weapon as tensions continue to rise in the South China Sea.


https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01...missiles-capable-of-sinking-us-ships/10705594

 

[smokingjacket]

Depends on what you think the goal of the Trump administration is. Trump is a guy who likes symbols, holding giant cheques and other showbiz as politics but in strategic terms, the Trump administration entered an economic war of attrition against the Chinese, won convincingly, and the contest is now approaching a rout. At this stage, a deal on tariffs is actually in China's interests, and it's more likely the US dragging its heels on trade negotiations.

The Trump administration has secured a number of key trade concessions but more importantly they've completely turned the "China inevitability" narrative on it's head. Previously there was almost a fatalism about the way China was hoovering up supply chains and increasingly advanced manufacturing, but now many US and European companies are either in the process of, or strongly considering, de-risking or completely abandoning their Chinese supply chains with exposure to the US.

A number of indicators coming out suggest a dramatic slowdown in the Chinese economy that will exacerbate preexisting problems with bad debt and reliance on export orientated infrastructure investment over consumption to drive growth, a problem the CCP plans on solving with another enormous infrastructure stimulus package.

There's little the US can do about Chinese economic interdependence with US allies in Asia but excising US business interests from supply chains in China gives US policymakers much greater flexibility when dealing with China, for example the possibility of elite-targeted or broad economic sanctions.

 

[smokingjacket]

Kevin Rudd today in the AFR explaining how the agreement on China

The analytical underpinnings of the period of engagement were that China, having embarked upon a series of economic, social, and some political reforms, was incrementally integrating itself into the American-led international rules-based order.
...
The United States, including its political establishment, both Republican and Democrat, its national security establishment, the foreign and intelligence policy communities, as well as American business across most sectors of the economy, have concluded that China is not becoming more internationalist in its policy direction, but instead is becoming progressively more nationalist and mercantilist. This has been reinforced by parallel analyses that the Chinese economy is becoming less market oriented, in its behaviours both at home and abroad, and that its political system, rather than becoming more liberal over time, is progressively becoming more illiberal.

https://www.afr.com/opinion/kevin-r...-is-a-new-and-dangerous-phase-20190122-h1acu6

 

[smokingjacket]

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.


https://www.afr.com/opinion/what-you-should-know-about-bob-carr-and-china-20181105-h17jic

Also considering at risk of posting to myself, something to add to the discussion we had in here about the Bob Carr hit piece.

One of the most damning allegations against Carr was the fact that he had lobbied a Labor Senator to put certain facts about John Garnaut - PM advisor and head of China policy - on record in the Senate estimates committee, presumably on behalf of the Chinese government.

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.

The context of this is the shifting landscape of Aus/US-Chinese relations in 2018, as in Rudd's piece above, and certain China affiliated groups scrambling to contain the damage. Why would Bob Carr and the CCP be interested in John Garnaut in particular? Mid 2017 he delivered this speech that among other things, expressed the view that Xi Jinping's ideological grounding and politics are Stalinist, and determined to remain that way while preserving the rule of the CCP at all costs. The election of Xi as leader for life in 2018, came as many were already reappraising the path of Chinese development away from Western theories of economic and democratic development going hand in hand, towards the view of scholars who had been taking the CCP on their word, that they had no intention of developing as a liberal democracy.

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.
...
Today the PRC is the only ruling communist party that has never split with Stalin, with the partial exception of North Korea. Stalin’s portrait stood alongside Marx, Engels and Lenin in Tiananmen Square - six metres tall - right up to the early 1980s, at which point the portraits were moved indoors.
...
The key point about Communist Party ideology - the unbroken thread that runs from Lenin through Stalin, Mao and Xi - is that the party is and always has defined itself as being in perpetual struggle with the “hostile” forces of Western liberalism.

Xi is talking seriously and acting decisively to progress a project of total ideological control wherever it is possible for him to do so. His vision “requires all the Chinese people to be unified with a single will like a strong city wall”, as he told “the broad masses of youth” in his Labor Day speech of May 2015. They need to “temper their characters”, said Xi, using a metaphor favoured by both Stalin and Mao.

There is no ambiguity in Xi’s project. We see in everything he does and - even in a system designed to be opaque and deceptive - we can see it in his words.

Where to from here?

 

[Del191229]

Bob Carr was CIA, now he's gone over the road.

 

[Del191229]

Depends on what you think the goal of the Trump administration is. Trump is a guy who likes symbols, holding giant cheques and other showbiz as politics but in strategic terms, the Trump administration entered an economic war of attrition against the Chinese, won convincingly, and the contest is now approaching a rout. At this stage, a deal on tariffs is actually in China's interests, and it's more likely the US dragging its heels on trade negotiations.

The Trump administration has secured a number of key trade concessions but more importantly they've completely turned the "China inevitability" narrative on it's head. Previously there was almost a fatalism about the way China was hoovering up supply chains and increasingly advanced manufacturing, but now many US and European companies are either in the process of, or strongly considering, de-risking or completely abandoning their Chinese supply chains with exposure to the US.

A number of indicators coming out suggest a dramatic slowdown in the Chinese economy that will exacerbate preexisting problems with bad debt and reliance on export orientated infrastructure investment over consumption to drive growth, a problem the CCP plans on solving with another enormous infrastructure stimulus package.

There's little the US can do about Chinese economic interdependence with US allies in Asia but excising US business interests from supply chains in China gives US policymakers much greater flexibility when dealing with China, for example the possibility of elite-targeted or broad economic sanctions.

Good post - but this is just the tactical fight, not the strategic.

The real fight is about who dominates AI, nanotech, bio etc etc.

That one is still up in the air although the Chinese are making a strategic retreat on Made in China 2025.

 

[its free real estate]

The real fight is about who dominates AI, nanotech, bio etc etc.

Israel.

 

[Lebbo73]

Israel.

An Israeli company is claiming that they will have a publicly available cure for cancer within a year.

 

[its free real estate]

Great piece in The Age:

​

More dispiriting is the silence of the progressive left in Australia.​

​

Mainstream progressivism has studiously diminished, deflected or looked away from China’s direction under Xi. The Dastyari affair was reduced to partisan politics or insinuations about the role of ASIO. The national shame of offshore detention has been turned into a moral equivalence to neutralise any response to the internment camps in Xinjiang.​

​

The accusation of anti-China xenophobia has been readily used to close down debate about the nature of the PRC party state and its implications for Australia.​

​

https://www.theage.com.au/world/asi...ustralian-left-s-dilemma-20190128-p50u3r.html

 

[Nuggs Bunny]

Great piece in The Age:

​

More dispiriting is the silence of the progressive left in Australia.​

​

Mainstream progressivism has studiously diminished, deflected or looked away from China’s direction under Xi. The Dastyari affair was reduced to partisan politics or insinuations about the role of ASIO. The national shame of offshore detention has been turned into a moral equivalence to neutralise any response to the internment camps in Xinjiang.​

​

The accusation of anti-China xenophobia has been readily used to close down debate about the nature of the PRC party state and its implications for Australia.​

​

https://www.theage.com.au/world/asi...ustralian-left-s-dilemma-20190128-p50u3r.html

It wasn't too long ago that the ALP anchored their foreign policy on strong Sino-Australian relations, Kevin Rudd in particular went very hard on that front during the election campaign. No doubt they've picked up some strong local and international Chinese support along the way. Shedding that support and/or acting against those interests is not easy, it's probably the most difficult political 180 that one can attempt.

Bill Shorten winning this year is basically a formality, it will be very interesting to see how Bill negotiates our relationship with China (which he'll probably get along better with than any of the three musketeers) and our relationship with the US (there's no doubt Trump will not like a union man like Bill). ScoMo and Turnbull are eager to side with the US on any and every international issue but I'm sure Shorten won't be, which could lead to some seemingly innocuous but otherwise profound changes to the power balance in the region.

 

[Del191229]

Huang Xiangmo denied Australian citizneship, as per Macca and Uhlmann in the paper today.

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/...offshore-denies-passport-20190205-p50vtg.html

Wonder what the payback will be - fun times to be an Aussie exec in China lolz.

 

[Mofra]

Huang Xiangmo denied Australian citizneship, as per Macca and Uhlmann in the paper today.

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/...offshore-denies-passport-20190205-p50vtg.html

Wonder what the payback will be - fun times to be an Aussie exec in China lolz.

As RIO Tinto know all too well, 'free room and board' as a guess.

 

[Del191229]

As RIO Tinto know all too well, 'free room and board' as a guess.

Crown too.

It will come though, the payback.

I suspect it won't be straight payback like the Canadians got - it will be a reduction or tourist or student visa numbers.

 

[its free real estate]

Huang Xiangmo denied Australian citizneship, as per Macca and Uhlmann in the paper today.

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/...offshore-denies-passport-20190205-p50vtg.html

Wonder what the payback will be - fun times to be an Aussie exec in China lolz.

See ya later Sarah Ferguson!

 

[Ned_Flanders]

Huang Xiangmo denied Australian citizneship, as per Macca and Uhlmann in the paper today.

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/...offshore-denies-passport-20190205-p50vtg.html

Wonder what the payback will be - fun times to be an Aussie exec in China lolz.

Unlikely to be any. China doesn't allow dual, so to become an Aussie citizen he has to renounce his Chinese citizenship.

Chinese govt peeps tend to look down on those who do that.

Very very low level funny story on this, a friend of mine filled out her immigration card in Mandarin, and it was rejected by the Chinese immigration official. Explanation, you're a traitor and not Chinese, so you are not allowed to write in Chinese

 

[Del191229]

See ya later Sarah Ferguson!

There's a bright side to everything then.

 

[Del191229]

Unlikely to be any. China doesn't allow dual, so to become an Aussie citizen he has to renounce his Chinese citizenship.

Chinese govt peeps tend to look down on those who do that.

Very very low level funny story on this, a friend of mine filled out her immigration card in Mandarin, and it was rejected by the Chinese immigration official. Explanation, you're a traitor and not Chinese, so you are not allowed to write in Chinese

Yeah, I think they might be OK with Huang doing it in this case.

 

[Chief]

Chinese buying up media to "tell China's stories":

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02...a-push-a-major-threat-to-democracies/10733068

In September 2018, billboards adorned with kangaroos and pandas began popping up around Australia's capital cities as part of a $500 million advertising campaign urging viewers to "see the difference" on China's Central Global Television Network (CGTN) — available on Foxtel and Fetch TV.

Here's the danger of a weak press: China steps in with cash and the advertising vehicles leap at it. Journalists hanging for a well-paid job that isn't just writing press releases jump in to collaborate with a murderous dictatorship... to rewrite Chinese government press releases.

​

Meanwhile, a five month investigation published in The Guardian in December revealed the "astonishing scope and ambition" of China's world-wide propaganda campaign over the past decade.​

​

This included a commitment by Mr Xi's predecessor, Hu Jintao, in 2009 to spend 45 billion yuan ($9.3 billion) on a media expansion campaign to develop CCTV, Xinhua and the People's Daily newspaper.​

​

According to a report released by the Pentagon this month, Xinhua launched 40 new foreign bureaus between 2009 and 2011 alone. That number jumped to 162 in 2017 and it aims to have 200 by 2020.​

 

[Del191229]

Chinese buying up media to "tell China's stories":

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02...a-push-a-major-threat-to-democracies/10733068

In September 2018, billboards adorned with kangaroos and pandas began popping up around Australia's capital cities as part of a $500 million advertising campaign urging viewers to "see the difference" on China's Central Global Television Network (CGTN) — available on Foxtel and Fetch TV.

Here's the danger of a weak press: China steps in with cash and the advertising vehicles leap at it. Journalists hanging for a well-paid job that isn't just writing press releases jump in to collaborate with a murderous dictatorship... to rewrite Chinese government press releases.

​

Meanwhile, a five month investigation published in The Guardian in December revealed the "astonishing scope and ambition" of China's world-wide propaganda campaign over the past decade.​

​

This included a commitment by Mr Xi's predecessor, Hu Jintao, in 2009 to spend 45 billion yuan ($9.3 billion) on a media expansion campaign to develop CCTV, Xinhua and the People's Daily newspaper.​

​

According to a report released by the Pentagon this month, Xinhua launched 40 new foreign bureaus between 2009 and 2011 alone. That number jumped to 162 in 2017 and it aims to have 200 by 2020.​

Hmmm, it is an interesting one.

I worked as a producer for CGTN (CCTV International as it was at the time) and we never got any direction from Beijing, the only time there was real editorial hassle was on some the Hong Kong protest stuff. But overall, it was hands off.

This is, admittedly, a different beast.

 

[smokingjacket]

The worry is that this debate ends up belonging to the absolute worst people in the US security establishment. As soon as the CIA started wheeling about on their assessment of China you can imagine all the neo-cons getting frothy mouthed over a new great power adversary to denounce. I like the rope analogy though.

“[W]e must stop our own companies from helping China build this new evil empire,” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said in a speech at the Hudson Institute. “This is the 21st century rope that capitalists will sell to hang themselves.”
...
“China has a plan for the world, and it’s as concrete as the prison cells where it keeps dissenters,” Cotton said. ”Make no mistake: The brutal police tactics in Xinjiang are not just an assault on that province’s native people, although they’re surely that. They’re also an assault on the American-led world order and a disturbing premonition of an alternative world order — one controlled by the Chinese Communist Party and one that ends in Room 101.”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/...om-cotton-china-is-building-a-new-evil-empire

 

[its free real estate]

Does this all this subterfuge affect the Port games in China?

The worry is that this debate ends up belonging to the absolute worst people in the US security establishment. As soon as the CIA started wheeling about on their assessment of China you can imagine all the neo-cons getting frothy mouthed over a new great power adversary to denounce. I like the rope analogy though.


https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/...om-cotton-china-is-building-a-new-evil-empire

theyre more likely to **** it up too.

Trump’s “dumb” heuristics on how nations should act is more likely to contain China’s rise than a hall full of Ivy League and Oxbridge graduates