18 January 2023 — Indian Punchline
China’s economic data for the year 2022 has been released in Beijing on Tuesday. The striking part is that China’s GDP growth slowed down to 3 percent.
China’s economic data for the year 2022 has been released in Beijing on Tuesday. The striking part is that China’s GDP growth slowed down to 3 percent.
Chinese President Xi Jinping meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin via video link on December 30, which drew alarm from certain Western media outlets. The New York Times, for example, concluded that the call came amid a “weak moment” for both leaders. Readers were led to believe that both China and Russia find themselves “isolated and desperate.” However, the assertion conceals a more difficult truth. That is, the U.S.-led unipolar order has experienced a number of challenges to its stability over the course of 2022 that show no sign of letting up in the new year.
(Se puede leer esta nota en español aquí.)
Russia has spent years trying to decrease its dependency on the US dollar. But especially since the escalation of the proxy war in Ukraine in 2022, Moscow has accelerated its drive toward de-dollarization.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
On 15 November 2022, during the G20 summit in Bali (Indonesia), Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told journalists that his country ‘seeks a stable relationship with China’. This is because, as Albanese pointed out, China is ‘Australia’s largest trading partner. They are worth more than Japan, the United States, and the Republic of Korea… combined’. Since 2009, China has also been Australia’s largest destination for exports as well as the largest single source of Australia’s imports.
The time has come to pick up threads from my blog of January 27 titled The West co-opts the Taliban. Indeed, the wheel has come full circle: the three-day conclave in Oslo on January 23-25 between a core group of Western diplomats with Taliban officials failed to work out a reasonable a modus vivendi. The pendulum has since swung to the other extreme.
Though brief, the exchange between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Indonesia on November 16 has become a social media sensation. Xi, assertive if not domineering, lectured the visibly apprehensive Trudeau about the etiquette of diplomacy. This exchange can be considered another watershed moment in China’s relationship with the West.
By Felix Abt
Max Amstutz, the former head of the world’s largest cement company, Holcim, is calling on Europe, like many other Western warmongers before him, to arm itself massively against China and Russia in preparation for the inevitable major confrontation.
The report that Chinese President Xi Jinping is planning his first overseas trip after the Party Congress and it may be to Saudi Arabia drips with enormous symbolism. According to the Wall Street Journal, the visit is likely to take place early December and hectic preparations are under way.
German diplomacy presented a riveting sight of “counterpoint” with Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock hosting her G7 partners in Münster on November 3-4 even as Chancellor Olaf Sholz was emplaning from Berlin on a one-day visit to Beijing.
The photo-op showed the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken flanking Baerbock at the main table with Under-secretary of State Victoria Nuland — best known as the master of ceremonies at the 2014 “Maidan” coup in Kiev in 2014 — peering from behind.
The highlight of the recent 20th National Congress of the Communist Party (CPC) of China has been the re-election of Xi Jinping as the General Secretary for another five-year term. The tradition set by Deng Xiaoping in the post-Mao Zedong era has been set aside. This was not unexpected, and has been largely interpreted as a consolidation of political power by the incumbent leader. That is partly so but not entirely. Its consequences are wide-ranging.
The US government has imposed aggressive sanctions that aim to “kneecap” China’s tech sector and halt the country’s rise, Washington policymakers and industry analysts have admitted.
Prabir Purkayastha
THE US has gambled big in its latest, across-the-board sanctions on Chinese companies in the semiconductor industry, believing it can kneecap China and retain its global dominance. From the slogan of globalisation and “free trade” of the neoliberal 90s, it has reverted to good old technology denial regimes followed by the US and its allies during the Cold War. While it might work in the short run in slowing down the Chinese advances, the cost to the US semiconductor industry of losing China – its biggest market – will also have significant consequences. In the process, the semiconductor industries of Taiwan and South Korea and equipment manufacturers in Japan and the European Union are likely to become collateral damage. It reminds us again of what Kissinger once said: “To be an enemy of the US is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal”!
Even as Xi Jinping was promising China’s Communist Party’s national congress that China would “resolutely win the battle” in key areas of technology, employees of technology companies in China and elsewhere were being told to down tools. Dozens of the hundreds of executives and engineers with US citizenship or green cards who work in or with China’s semiconductor sector, many of them born in China, have been told by their employers – whether those are foreign or Chinese companies – to stop work while their employers seek clarification of a new US rule that bars US citizens and residents from supporting China’s advanced chip-making industry without a licence.
In part one of my analysis of China’s economic future, I dealt with the claims that China would slow towards stagnation because its investment rate was too high, the working population was falling fast and the economy needed to become like mature Western capitalist economies based on consumption-led growth. I argued that the Western capitalist model was hardly great shakes, given its regular and recurring crises and the much lower levels of consumption growth. Anyway, in an economy, consumption does not lead investment and national output. On the contrary, it is investment that leads in capitalist economies just as much as in China.
China’s Congress of the Communist Party takes place this week. This is an important event not only for China, but globally. The Western media have concentrated on the fact that current party leader Xi Jinping will be confirmed for an unprecedented third term as party leader and thus also continue as President of China when the National Congress meets next March.
By Felix Abt
By now, everyone in the West should know that there is mass slave labor in the Chinese province of Xinjiang, where Muslim Uyghurs live. The slaves have to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and without pay. Worse, they are not even Uyghurs, but foreigners, and Americans at that. The inhumane owners of the cotton farms, most of whom are Uyghurs themselves, force American John Deere machines to do unlimited slave labor on their 90% automated farms.
The Ministry of External Affairs has done the right thing by explaining its taciturn press release on Thursday in a single sentence regarding the disengagement of troops in the area of Gogra-Hotsprings along the LAC in the Western Sector of India-China border areas.
September 3, 2022 (Brian Berletic – New Eastern Outlook) – The early August visit by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took place amid heavy protests from Beijing. The visit was a blatant violation of Washington’s bilateral agreement with Beijing regarding the “One China” policy as well as a violation of international law regarding political independence and territorial integrity.
In response to our article posted on another Facebook environmental site commenting on how China leads the world in green energy, a US reader from New York in the USA commented:
It may, but China is still the biggest CO2 emitter by far.
This sort of snide response needs to be called out for what its is–Western supremacist bigotry.