China and Silk

America is a diplomatic fox, while Beijing is a hedgehog fixated on the big idea of reunification. Niall Ferguson June 1, 2021 Editor’s noteThis article was published as an opinion piece by Bloomberg on March 21, 2021. We bring you here the few last paragraphs which, hopefully, will stimulate you to read the whole piece at Bloomberg. The analysis’ central message is what the headline hints at – namely Taiwan as an exceptionally important issue for China that the United States ought not to deal lightly with and provoke (more) conflict around. It is not the style of Bloomberg to publish such pieces with an understanding of Chinese concerns and it is not every day an analysis like this comes out of the Hudson Institute. Perhaps Taiwan will turn out to be to the American empire what Suez was to the British Empire in 1956: the moment when the imperial...

May 23, 2021 Richard Falk, TFF Associate Prefatory Note: The post below is a slightly modified version of Policy Paper #4 RESPONDING TO CHINESE VIOLATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS, published previously on the website of the Committee for a Sane China Policy. It reflects my view that the protection of human rights is being geopolitically manipulated to mobilize public support for an anti-Chinese foreign policy in the West that risks generating a dangerous geopolitical confrontation. Such a confrontation is costly, amounts to war-mongering, and diverts U.S. attention from self-scrutiny and global peacebuilding. Whether a second cold war is already underway is a matter of interpretation, but even those reluctant to reach such a depressing assessment would have to acknowledge that unless there are strong efforts made to support what I would call ‘inclusive global multipolarity,’ the drift toward such a dismal near-term future will become inevitable. The need to sound the alarm...

Image by Stock File Madison Tang and Jodie Evans May 23, 2021 U.S. President Joe Biden’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year was recently announced, and it requests $715 billion for his first Pentagon budget, 1.6 percent more than the $704 billion enacted under Trump’s administration. The outline states that the primary justification for this increase in military spending is to counter the threat of China, and identifies China as the U.S.’s “top challenge.” Within the proposal is an endorsement of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command head Admiral Philip Davidson’s request for $4.7 billion for the “Pacific Deterrence Initiative,” which will increase U.S. military capabilities in Guam and the surrounding region. The Indo-Pacific Command is also requesting $27 billion in additional spending between 2022 and 2027 to build a network of precision-strike missiles along the islands surrounding Beijing. This article was originally published at Pressenza The U.S.’s unilateral aggression toward China—in...

Cyrus Janssen May 19, 2021 Many Americans view China in a completely wrong way. They only view it from the eyes of an American. But how does a Chinese person view China? Is China a threat to the USA? Is China going to overtake the US? In today’s video I break down my thoughts on the America’s foreign policy towards China and reveal the truth about China. This video was posted at Cyrus Janssens Youtube Channel, May 14. 2021 About the author: Cyrus Janssen is an American Expat that has lived in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Vancouver over the past 14 years. He is passionate about showing a true insight into China and loves sharing about his travels around the world. Here is his amazing YouTube Channel with 137 000 subscribers. A great example of citizens’ media/reporting – much better informed and free than many Western mainstream media reporters. Please...

First version – to be revised I was recently asked by Abhishek Bhaya at CGTN – China Global Television Network, see Wikipedia here and the network itself here with about 150 million followers across the globe – whether, as a peace researcher, I had any ideas what decision-makers in both the West and in China could do to avoid the worst possible scenario – given the present confrontation, or Cold War-like atmosphere. It’s the first time in a very long time that any media asked me a question about peace – that discourse has disappeared or been disappeared. In preparing my answer, I wrote this: It seems pretty unlikely that the US under Biden/Blinken should come to its senses quickly, if at all. Policy documents, statement and budget laws point in the direction of a well-planned long-term Cold War-like campaign against anything China – 7-8 standard negative stories, perhaps some...

Jan Oberg May 15, 2021 The conflict between the US/West and China will shape humanity’s future more than any other conflict. Therefore, it is not a bilateral issue but a global concern. I believe it ought to be on top of the agenda at the peace research institutions that have not turned state-dependent and/or US-mainstreamed.Both the Trump and the Biden Administrations have determined that what is going on in Xinjiang in China is a genocide and lots of mainstream media, editorials, policy statements and experts have spread this ”determination” as the truth. However, not one has checked the accusation’s documentation, the stated “independence” of the producing institutes or the experts’ ideological connections. This was originally posted as an editorial on Transcend Media Service, TMS, on May 3, 2021 here The world has a right to expect that the extremely serious genocide accusation is based on rock-solid evidence. To find out...

Or – it isn’t every day you address several hundred million people The TFF report “The Xinjiang Genocide Determination As Agenda” has reached more people in more countries than virtually anything else we have produced the last few years. That is, outside the West, in Asia in general and in China in particular. All leading Chinese media have paid substantial attention to it in both their Chinese and English editions. It is as if there was a need for a substantial – not political – scholarly examination of the empirical basis of the accusation, or “determination,” that Western governments have issued spearheaded, of course, by the Trump and Biden Administrations. In the report we reveal that the documentation is very weak, the scholarly work biased and bordering on the anti-academic and that those who have brought the documentation are anything but independent. Instead, many of those who have provided the...

Tom Fowdy May 11, 2021 Sinophobia is a fear or prejudice expressed towards China and its people. Similar to other varieties of racism, such as Islamophobia, Sinophobia embodies a series of beliefs and discourses that place emphasis on the apparent cultural inferiority and backwardness of “Chinese culture” to the western dynamic, which are used to argue that the “ways” of China pose an existential threat to the norms and values of a given society, or what was historically referred to as a “Yellow Peril”. The prejudice relies upon a series of cliches and representations regarding Chinese people and their way of life and in turn positions itself from a position of assumed western supremacy, of which owing to the legacy of colonialism treats China as “problem must be solved”. Originally posted on Tom Fowdy’s homepage, April 13, 2020 What is China? The answer is not a simple one, but for many people...

Photo taken on April 17, 2021 shows the Boao Forum for Asia International Conference Center in Boao Town, South China’s Hainan province. [Photo/Xinhua] Tom Fowdy April 28, 2021 At the Boao Forum for Asia, a regional summit for government, business and academia typically hosted in Hainan province, China said that it does not seek hegemony and that it does not strive to displace the United States, only seeking fairness and justice in the international system. This came amid the Western mainstream media repeatedly framing Washington and Beijing as being in a competition for global dominance. Unfortunately, this view is shared by many politicians in the United States increasingly depicting China as a threat and a strategic competitor – espousing the language of the Cold War. Originally published at china.org.cn What is hegemony? In international relations, a hegemon is a state that wields so much undisputed power that has almost complete...

File photo. A portrait of China’s President Xi Jinping in Beijing, China © AFP / Wang Zhao Tom Fowdy April 28, 2021 Chinese- and Russian-funded journalism is ‘disinformation,’ but when Washington spends millions on ‘independent’ news outlets and buying journalists to get favourable coverage of its policies, it’s called ‘spreading information.’ The US Senate last week passed a bumper anti-China bill titled the S.1169 – Strategic Competition Act of 2021  Backed by Chuck Schumer (Dem, New York) as one of his biggest priorities since becoming the Majority leader, the 270+ page document contains scores of recommendations and provisions on formalizing America’s “geopolitical competition” against Beijing, including in the fields of military, diplomacy, technology, trade and more. There’s little question it will be passed into law, having already cleared the Senate and with the anti-Chinese sentiment in Washington being routinely bipartisan.  Originally published at rt.com The bill also notably pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in various...

En kritisk analys av en rapport från Newlines Institute och Raoul Wallenberg Center Gordon Dumoulin, Jan Oberg och Thore Vestby Transnationella Stiftelsen för Freds- och Framtidsforskning, TFF, Lund, Sverige TFF@transnational.org • The Transnational • Ph +46 (0) 738 525200 Översättning av engelska utgåvan: Rolf Nilsson Den 5. maj, 2021 Den 8 mars 2021 publicerade Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy i Washington en rapport, The Uyghur Genocide: An Examination of China’s Breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention i samarbete med Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights i Montreal. Den säger att ”Denna rapport är den första oberoende experttillämpningen av folkmordskonventionen från 1948 för den pågående behandlingen av uigurerna i Kina. Det genomfördes av Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, i samarbete med Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights, som svar på framväxande redogörelser för allvarliga och systematiska grymheter i Xinjiang-provinsen, särskilt riktade mot uigurerna, en etnisk minoritet, för att fastställa...

The world’s rising powerhouse In 1986 on returning for my first 3-week visit to China, I wrote an article, “China: Key Player in a New World Game” in The Futurist, December 1986. I had been invited by China’s State Council at the recommendation of my good friends, Alvin and Heidi Toffler, best-selling authors of Future Shock (1970), who both had, and still, have a big following in China. This surprise invitation was to speak at “The First International Conference on Creativity”, co-sponsored by the United Nations Education & Scientific Cooperation Organization (UNESCO), along with Edward de Bono of Britain and US psychologist/philosopher Jean Houston, author of The Possible Human (1982). Mystified, I called the phone number in China of Professor Xu, the convenor at Shanghai-based Jiaotong University, and asked why I had been invited to this event, all expenses paid. Professor Xu replied in perfect English, “In China, you are a great scholar and your...