Tag Archives: Xi Jinping

China, Economic, Government, International trade, Politics, Society, United States

Global trade war: America is advancing its own decline

ECONOMIC

Intro: China is braced for economic turbulence due to swingeing tariffs. But it sees an opportunity by taking the longer-term view: a decline in US hegemony 

THERE can be no winners in Donald Trump’s ferocious trade war that he has unleashed, least of all among consumers and workers. In strongarm tactics, this has become a game of who can bear more pain. And because trade is at the heart of US ties with its biggest tariff target, China, the rest of the bilateral relationship is likely to deteriorate. That too is concerning.

Yet, paradoxically, despite the economic struggles of recent years, China may see a longer-term opportunity in the current crisis. Beijing’s response to the initial US tariff announcements was measured. Now it vows to “fight to the end” and has imposed an additional 50% tariff on US goods – taking total tax charges to 84% – in retaliation for reciprocated tariffs that Mr Trump now says will hit 125%.

Such an approach is unlikely to falter first. Any concessions would likely be taken as a sign of weakness, encouraging the US to ramp up the pressure even more. Xi Jinping is also a strongman who has dialled up nationalism as economic growth has slowed. Backing down would be humiliating, especially when the US vice-president, JD Vance, speaks dismissively of “Chinese peasants”.

Beijing is already allowing the yuan to weaken, but a major devaluation in the currency is thought unlikely. It has been preparing for this moment. China’s demographic boom is at an end, Mr Xi’s new vision for his nation, the impact of the pandemic, Donald Trump’s first term in office, and US bipartisanship have all turned against China in reshaping the world economy. But China has diversified in areas such as agricultural imports and found new markets for its goods – though exports to the US still account for just under 3% of its GDP. In recent weeks, it announced plans to “vigorously boost” domestic consumption, although previous action on that long-held ambition has not matched the rhetoric.

Mr Trump’s sudden announcement that he is suspending punitive tariffs on other countries for 90 days highlights an apparent underlying intention to make them distance themselves from China and stop them being used as a conduit for its goods. Still, if he goes ahead, high rates risk pushing them towards Beijing instead. Trump’s erratic policy may also reflect growing anxieties about the impact of those tariffs, not least among his own supporters. China is quietly confident that the U.S. will come under growing pressure to rethink from billionaire backers, ageing workers worried that their retirement funds are losing value, farmers, employees fearing for their jobs, and consumers contemplating higher prices in everyday consumables. A bilateral deal is not impossible, but sense needs to be restored.

Beijing does not like what lies ahead. But in the longer term, it has more confidence in its trajectory. It looks back to the 2008 financial crisis, when it “saved the world” with its massive stimulus package, and looks ahead now with emboldened self-assurance following its launch in January of its AI DeepSeek platform.

Above all, Beijing believes that when this storm has passed, few will regard the US as a dependable economic or security guarantor, with China becoming a more predictable and likeable partner. At February’s Munich security conference – where Mr Vance’s sneering attacks on European allies made the headlines – China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, pledged that China would be “a steadfast constructive force” and “factor of certainty in this multipolar system”. Some countries may feel forced to live with Beijing’s own trade and investment restrictions, and its use of economic coercion for political purposes. But others may simply drift from America’s orbit.

China expects to suffer, but as it watches on it will not be entirely unhappy as the US advances its own decline.

This is a transformational moment in the global order.

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Afghanistan, China, Middle East, Politics, Society

China preparing to capitalise in Afghanistan

ESSAY

Intro: Just days after the U.S. and its Coalition partners prepare to leave Afghanistan, China is preparing to gain a direct route to the riches of the Middle East. With billions in the Chinese war chest, just where will China’s ambitions end?

THERE is a reason why Afghanistan is known as “the graveyard of empires”. Every few decades this beleaguered nation emerges from obscurity to remind an apparently invincible invader that his army is not the first to bite the bitter dust there. Afghanistan is littered with examples of invading armies sent into retreat and heavy defeat. 

In 1842, the first of Britain’s four Afghan wars ended in catastrophe. Only one man survived from a force of about 4,500, plus 10,000 or so camp followers, linguistic interpreters, and local allies – and he was set free only so he could recount the scale of the defeat and the dire end of his comrades.

After ten years of brutality trying to convert Muslim Afghans into ‘modern’ communists, the once mighty Red Army found itself in humiliating defeat from Afghanistan in 1989. It would mark the beginning of the rapid fall of the Kremlin’s dominoes from Eastern Europe to Moscow itself.

Today, we see the U.S. and its coalition partners leaving Afghanistan in defeat after almost 20 years; the superpower discovering that Afghanistan’s fragmented tribal culture masks an unbreakable resilience. President Joe Biden, a recent convert to the cause of ending what he has described as a “forever war”, has set a deadline of September 11 for the last American troops to leave.

It is, of course, a highly symbolic act that marks 20 years since the 9/11 attacks by Al-Qaeda – which had its training camps in Afghanistan – that destroyed the World Trade Centre in New York.

Within two months of the invasion in October 2001 by the U.S.-led Coalition forces, Al-Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden, had fled to Pakistan and the fundamentalist Taliban routed. But the mission soon lost its way, at a cost of thousands of military and civilian lives.

Now the U.S. cannot get out fast enough, abandoning its huge airbase at Bagram overnight on 2 July. Today, the situation around the capital Kabul is chaotic, its population in panic, and the Taliban is sweeping back into territory it had been forced to flee by Coalition forces.

Afghan soldiers loyal to the fragile Western-backed Kabul government are being routed. After clashes with newly strengthened Taliban units, an estimated 1,600 have fled and dispersed across the border into neighbouring Tajikistan.

Others have abandoned their weapons and uniforms to return to their homes or switched to fight with the Taliban, which is also taking territory it did not hold prior to the Coalition’s arrival.

Despite more than $2.3 trillion spent waging a war against a badly armed and underfed ragtag of rebels, the Americans leave their enemy in better shape than ever before.

But this will not deter the world’s newest superpower – China – which is waiting patiently in the wings. The Dragon of China will soon enter the fray.

In a development that should strike fear through Western capitals, Beijing scents an unrivalled opportunity to extend its influence in the region and gain strategic territorial and economic advantage that could rewrite the geopolitical map in its favour.

For President Xi Jinping’s Marxist government, Afghanistan is a prize beyond measure. It offers a portal through which Chinese military might could access the Arabian Sea, via Iran or Pakistan.

And the war-torn country could provide two other things China desperately wants: overland access to Iran and the Middle East, and a route to the Indian Ocean and on to Africa.

To reach these markets currently, Chinese goods must go the long way round, via container ships through the disputed South China Sea. But the short border Afghanistan shares with north-western China offers potential for a mega-highway, a high-speed rail link and fuel pipelines.

Beijing is confident that it can succeed where Whitehall, the Kremlin and the White House have failed over the centuries, for the simple reason that it is not interested in transforming Afghan society.

It has learned from the mistakes of the Russian communists. Chinese communists have no desire to remake Afghanistan (or anywhere else) in their own image.

Threat

Nor will its goals be achieved by brute force; President Xi has a far smarter plan. When the Kremlin occupied Afghanistan in 1979, it saw it as a steppingstone to dominating the oil-rich Middle East, but Soviet communism had little to offer compared with the wealth of modern China.

Xi prefers to use financial muscle as much as the threat of military power and, if reports that Beijing is prepared to invest $62 billion in Afghanistan are true, it is following a blueprint perfected in many countries from Malaysia to Montenegro.

Under a policy known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), vast loans are offered to cash-strapped countries for infrastructure projects. In return, China gains access to new trade routes and ports, as well as banking hefty interest payments on its investment.

If the repayments are late, the Chinese could step in to reclaim land, mineral rights, or other collateral as compensation. It is a business plan more common in the underworld of gangsters and organised crime groups: victims are lured into a “debt trap” and forced to repay, one way or the other.

In return for its largesse, China will also expect the Taliban to ignore the “genocidal” oppression of their fellow Muslims, the 12 million Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang province, which sits close to the Afghan and Pakistani borders.

The last thing Beijing wants is an anarchic scenario in which a rise in Islamic fundamentalism on its border threatens domestic security in China.

But it has seen how indifferent strict Islamic regimes in the Middle East are to Uighur rights. The oil-rich Arab monarchies will much prefer doing lucrative deals with Beijing than bothering about its treatment of fellow Muslims.

Pakistan’s Prime Minister, the former international cricketer Imran Khan, who cynics argue has reinvented himself as a born-again Muslim to cement his political power base, has spoken up about the Uighurs – but only to defend China’s handling of them.

And even before Khan came to power, Pakistan’s generals saw the Taliban as a natural ally against their number one adversary, India. China, too, is at daggers drawn with India, so it will view an anti-India Taliban regime in Kabul as a possible ally.

Uncertain days lie ahead and as the remaining American troops gather to stockade the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and protect the dwindling band of Westerners there, there are many observers who recall evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Saigon in 1975. 

Similar humiliating scenes are likely in the coming weeks. Up to 1,000 U.S. troops are expected to be stationed at Kabul Airport to protect departing Western civilians.

Bleak

That will be little comfort to all those Afghans who have worked bravely with Coalition forces over more than two decades trying to improve life for their own people. Betrayed, their future is now bleak.

And, as for our pledges to women and girls – with the likely return to power in Kabul of the Taliban – they will lose those rights and freedoms that Allied intervention had brought.

China sees Afghanistan – even with the Taliban back in control – as one of the most crucial squares on the chessboard of world politics. And like a chess grandmaster, President Xi Jinping is not planning for a quick checkmate.

Historians will no doubt look back at what is happening now and see that China did indeed learn the lessons of history. Where Britain, Russia and America have failed, it may yet triumph, gaining the influence it seeks without having shed the same terrible price in blood and human sacrifice.

Appendage

– Afghanistan and China share a short 46-mile border. Afghanistan has huge strategic importance for China.
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China, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

Under China’s watchful eye

ORWELLIAN CHINA

Intro: The reality of modern China is no longer Orwellian science fiction. Every face and every move are being tracked. ‘Wrong’ political thoughts punished. All citizens’ lives are being controlled by the State. There are chilling implications for us all

TROUBLE in Hong Kong began earlier last month. Police ruthlessly beat protesters with batons and showered them with pepper spray in violent running battles. Rounds of rubber bullets and tear gas were fired into the crowds of angry but until then peaceful demonstrators.

The scenes in Hong Kong were as shocking as any seen there since the former British territory was handed over to China in 1997.

The handover was supposed to guarantee Hong Kong considerable autonomy and democratic rights under a “one country, two systems” agreement. But now its China-friendly parliament is debating plans to allow the extradition of Hong Kong citizens to mainland China, and a very different legal system. Which is why thousands have continued to besiege government buildings in the city, prompting the brutal crackdowns that have become more prevalent.

Hong Kong is the only spot on Chinese soil where any such protest is still imaginable. But for how much longer?

Be under no illusion, Hongkongers are protesting not in an act of hope but of desperation. With the new extradition law looming over them, they feel that this is their end game.

Beijing’s aim is clear: to turn Hong Kong into a Chinese city like any other. In the new China that means a place with harsher and vastly more efficient repression than we have seen in recent memory.

There are several reasons the Chinese Communist Party deeply distrusts Hong Kong and its way of life and is intent on destroying it.

One is the ability of Hong Kong to remember. In China remembering events the Chinese Communist Party chooses to erase from history is a subversive act and thus forbidden and punished.

Take Tiananmen Square. It was 30 years ago that a brave demonstrator carrying nothing more than a plastic grocery bag was photographed as he stood in front of a tank during protests in the Beijing square against China’s Communist government.

The starkest of images, it encapsulated in one potent frame the struggle for freedom against dictatorial oppression.

 

BUT the courage of this man, whose identity and fate has never been discovered, was to no avail. The regime of Deng Xiaoping cracked down on the revolt, beginning with a massacre of the Tiananmen protesters, followed by the widespread suppression of liberties.

The bloodshed, bullets and bayonets of Tiananmen Square in June 1989 only served to strengthen the Chinese Communist Party, cementing its grip on power and laying the foundations of the China we know today – a China which is now more determined than ever to eliminate all memories of Tiananmen.

In the two decades after the massacre, the Beijing Government pursued a twin-track policy of political authoritarianism combined with economic liberalism. Essentially, the nascent urban middle-classes were offered a deal: share in prosperity and keep your mouths shut.

But this dual approach, while fuelling record growth, gradually began to undermine the authority of the communist regime, as its guiding ideology decayed, and corruption spread. All that changed in 2012 with the arrival in power of the new Party chief and President Xi Jinping, an apparatchik who has turned out to be a ruthless autocrat.

Now effectively President for life, Xi has overseen the return of a merciless Leninist dictatorship, complete with relentless state propaganda, the eradication of dissent and the domination of civic life by the Communist Party.

What makes this development even more forceful is that his Government is using today’s high-tech tools, such as mass video surveillance powered by artificial intelligence, to enforce its rule.

The internet and the cyber revolution have been often hailed as instruments of liberation, but in the hands of Xi Jinping’s state, they have become instruments of repression, mind control and political manipulation.

Communist dictatorship has been given a digital rebirth.

This is not the story we are usually told in the West. Politicians in Europe tend to focus on the threat of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. They all but ignore the reality of the far greater challenge from the evermore ambitious China.

Many Westerners have, indeed, long clung to the delusion that a more open economy and increasing growth will automatically bring political liberalisation to China.

The argument went that if we engaged and traded with China, the country would slowly start to resemble us. But that was nothing more than wishful thinking. Domestic repression is accelerating, while the regime seeks greater global influence.

The inability of officialdom to effectively face up to this threat is perfectly illustrated by the explosive controversy over the British Government’s plan to allow the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei to play a key role in the creation of the new generation 5G network here, despite the profound reservations of allies like the United States and Australia, who remain gravely concerned about the security implications.

Trying to downplay such anxieties, Huawei’s boss Ren Zhengfei has given assurances that his company “will never cause damage to a nation or an individual”. But this ignores the fact that an intelligence service law from 2017 obliges all “Chinese organisations and citizens” to “support, aid and co-operate with the work of the national secret service”.

There is breathtaking naivety and complacency about the true nature of Xi Jinping’s China. Far from being more pluralistic, China’s structure as a one-party state has been reinforced.

“The party rules everything,” says Xi, a chilling statement of fact that embraces every institution from the universities and the media to the civil service. Indeed, the party is now an organisation with no fewer than 89 million members, more than the entire population of Germany or, indeed, Britain.

In this climate, a new cult of Xi’s personality is accompanied by the punishment of any deviation from the ruling orthodoxy. The lives of China’s 1.4 billion citizens are saturated in Communist propaganda, including patriotic songs in nursery schools, banners on urban buildings, posters of Xi and output in the state-controlled media. Some taxis carry LED screens on their roofs showing party slogans.

Chairman Mao had his little Red Book. Xi has his Little Red App, launched in January this year, whereby citizens can collect reward points while reading socialist texts.

More aggressively, through show trials and arrests, the Communist regime aims to strike terror into anyone who still dares challenge the state.

This quest for ideological control has seen bloggers, journalists, campaigners and civil rights lawyers silenced; some have disappeared all together, others are forced to appear on TV, confessing to misdeeds. According to Xi, the Chinese legal system is “the handle in the knife of the party”.

 

A KEY element of Chinese propaganda is, as stated above, the rewriting of history. “Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past,” wrote George Orwell in his dystopian novel 1984 – a stance the Beijing regime has eagerly adopted.

A permanent state-run exercise in collective amnesia is under way, as shown by the way any reference to the Tiananmen Square atrocity has been gradually eradicated.

Over the years, the “counter-revolutionary riots” became known first as “the riots”, then “the political storm” and eventually just “the incident”. In the end even the “incident” dissolved into silence, as if an old photograph had faded until only a meaningless silhouette remained. Many of those under 30 years of age have no idea that it ever took place.

Chairman Mao once said that the Chinese Communist revolution “relies on guns and pens.” Guns and pens also go together in the case of Tiananmen Square. The state’s troops murdered the protesters; the state’s writers murder the truth.

By promoting freedom of expression, modern technology was meant to be an antidote to the poison of oppression. But it has not worked out like that in China.

Under Xi’s regime, this sophisticated technology has been harnessed as a weapon for the classic Communist Party tactics of intimidation, indoctrination and censorship. What we are witnessing is the return of totalitarianism in digital guise. When he was first installed in power, Xi gave the order to “win back the commanding heights of the internet”, a task that Westerners might have thought impossible given the web’s reputation for anarchic freedom.

But the Communists did it. They intimidated dissident bloggers, deleted accounts and demanded ideological compliance and censorship from providers.

Users of one of the most lively and popular social media tools, Weibo – China’s version of Twitter – were brought to heel in 2013 by the simple device of threatening jail sentences for “spreading rumours”. Political discussions were quickly dropped by Weibo, with the site confining itself to entertainment, commerce and propaganda.

Perhaps even more stunning is the Chinese state’s exploitation of monitoring techniques and facial recognition systems powered by artificial intelligence to impose strict conformity on its citizens.

Unlike much of the West, China is unencumbered by concerns about data protection and privacy, so it is using its cyber-expertise to forge ahead in this field.

The process is fuelled by the state placing a priority on cutting edge research and the population’s enthusiasm for mobile technology – no less than 60 per cent of all the world’s cashless transactions in 2017 took place in China, while the country is the world’s biggest market for e-commerce.

A new society is being born, one dominated by the all-seeing, all-powerful eye of the Government. By next year, China plans to have 600 million CCTV cameras, strengthening the apparatus of the surveillance infrastructure.

Already, the impact on individual life is phenomenal. At railway stations in cities like Guangzhou and Wuhan, for instance, entry is only allowed to people once their faces have been scanned and checked against a police database. And this is just the beginning.

The citizens of Hong Kong understand the extent of the state’s reach. During the initial protests there were long lines at the metro ticket machines because people didn’t want to use their rechargeable Octopus cards for fear of leaving a digital trail that could connect them to the protest.

A central component of the new China is the planned “Social Credit System”, which will gather data on the behaviour of each citizen to ensure, through rewards and penalties, adherence to the state’s rules on personal responsibility.

It is being trialled in places such as Rongcheng, where residents start with 1,000 “social credit” points, then earn bonuses or reductions according to their conduct, like obedience at traffic signals or remarks about the party on social media.

Digital technology even dictates the supply of lavatory paper in some of Beijing’s public facilities, with users given a restricted number of sheets in their allotted time once their faces have been recognised by the dispenser.

In China’s bold new vision, omnipresent algorithms create economically productive, socially harmonised and politically compliant subjects, who will ultimately censor and sanction themselves at every turn. In the old days, the party demanded fanatical belief; now mute complicity will suffice.

Of course, China’s plans are not just for domestic consumption. The country is exporting its surveillance and artificial intelligence technology all over the world.

And other autocracies are eager buyers, keen to ape China’s authoritarianism. Western democracies are also supplicants – as Britain proves with its courting of Huawei, hailed by Chinese police as being a “close partner” in “technological” and “digitalised” police work.

 

THE technological export drive is part of China’s concerted effort to expand its global influence. Until the recent past, the Beijing Government was deeply reluctant to play any role on the international stage, preferring to concentrate on domestic problems. But again, all that has changed under Xi Jinping, whose outlook combines socialist ideology with nationalistic pride.

The latter impulse is demonstrated in a host of initiatives: in the massive expansion of China’s military; in the funding of Chinese institutes in Western universities and think tanks; in the control of Chinese student associations overseas; in the creation of global propaganda machines like the television’s “Voice of China” whose European headquarters was recently set up in London; in the vast Chinese investments in Africa and South America; in the support for colossal infrastructure projects like Britain’s new nuclear power plant at Hinckley Point; any in the ferocity of response to any attacks on Xi’s regime.

The brave and proud Hongkongers out in the streets are a living rebuttal for the party’s claim that the Chinese aren’t cut out for democracy. And that is exactly why our governments should stand by them.

Xi’s regime has shown that it sees itself in ideological competition with us. Through its slide back to totalitarianism, it has rejected our values and tries to undermine them. For the sake of our own future, we must be willing to defend them.

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