Links - 4th May 2020 (1) (China's 'peaceful' rise)

US China trade war: China was already in trouble. Trump just made it worse - "As Beijing considers how to cushion the blow from trade, it'll also have to weigh the country's other major challenge: debt. China’s total debt surged to 271% of gross domestic product last year, from 164% before the global financial crisis"

China's Food Is Only Going to Get Pricier - "The first step in addressing this challenge would be to recognize the seriousness of African swine fever and armyworm. There’s little evidence Beijing has done that. Instead, Chinese officials have been snuffing out critical media coverage, underreporting data and putting an all-too-rosy sheen on their response to the crisis, not unlike what we saw with SARS in the early 2000s"

Worries grow in Singapore over China’s calls to help ‘motherland’ - "Some scholars have highlighted what they call a worrying trend that has seen China increasingly blurring the distinction between huaqiao (Chinese citizens overseas) and huaren (ethnic Chinese of all nationalities).At an overseas Chinese work conference last year, President Xi Jinping stressed the need to bring together people of Chinese descent around the world — up to 60 million ethnic Chinese in more than 180 countries — to enjoy the “Chinese dream”.“The realisation of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation requires the joint efforts of Chinese sons and daughters at home and abroad,” said Mr Xi, according to Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency.Scholars say the focus on strengthening ties with overseas Chinese signals a major shift away from Beijing’s previous, more hands-off approach to diaspora relations. “There is a sense that the emphasis now is on how all ethnic Chinese share a similar origin and therefore should be more sympathetic to a P.R.C. perspective”"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Monday's business with Rob Young - "The options China has, they've already pursued, which is to say they can allow their currency to fall in value against the dollar. And they already have done that. And then the fall in the value of the yuan or the renminbi against the dollar is exactly enough to offset the effective increase in the tariff rate that's been imposed thus far by Donald Trump's administration since he took office"
Strange how China doesn't manipulate its currency, yet the currency devalued by such a neat amount

Australian university staff refuse China’s request for passport information to teach joint class in Sydney - "Academics at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) have refused a demand from the Chinese Ministry of Education for their passport numbers and dates of birth, to be able to continue to teach a joint Chinese-Australian course in Sydney.Twenty-one UTS academic staff were told they were required to disclose their passport numbers and dates of birth as part of a Chinese government review... The Australian National University was hacked by a foreign agent in June, compromising the personal details of thousands of students and staff. Australian intelligence officials publicly said China was the likely origin of the attack, saying it was one of only a handful of countries capable of successfully pulling off the massive breach of 19 years of data."

US China trade war: China was already in trouble. Trump just made it worse - "As Beijing considers how to cushion the blow from trade, it'll also have to weigh the country's other major challenge: debt. China’s total debt surged to 271% of gross domestic product last year, from 164% before the global financial crisis, according to estimates by Bloomberg Economics. That’s left officials wary of rolling out any broad-based stimulus."

Chinese-authored spyware found on more than 700 million Android phones - "The researchers discovered that Adups’ firmware transmitted data packets to a Chinese server every 72 hours. These packets contained user’s call logs, text messages, contact lists, GPS location and other data... Though flaws in software are commonly exploited to exfiltrate private information, that isn’t what happened between Adups and BLU. Instead, it appears that a backdoor was purposefully installed without the knowledge of retailers or the customers eventually relying on those devices."

The backlash is growing against Xi Jinping in China and around the world - "As a leader, Xi is unique in post-revolutionary party politics in not having any identifiable domestic rival or successor, largely because he has ensured that none have been allowed to emerge. But Xi has earned himself an array of what we might called "bad enemies" and "good enemies" since taking office in late 2012.They range from the once-rich and powerful families he destroyed in his anti-corruption campaign, all the way to the small-r reformers angered by his illiberal rollback of the incremental institutional advances of the reform period.Forced to lay low initially because of the dangers of challenging him outright, Xi's critics at home have begun to find their voice. They have been outspoken mainly on economic policy, but the deeper undercurrents of their criticisms are unmistakeable. The sons of former top leaders, revered scholars who guided China's economic miracle, frustrated private entrepreneurs and academics furious about Xi's unrelenting hardline -- all have complained in multiple public forums, in speeches, in online postings and in widely circulated essays at home and offshore, about Xi's policies and style. "Something strange is happening in Xi Jinping's China," wrote Ian Johnson in the New York Review of Books. In what was supposed to be the "perfect dictatorship", the country was witnessing "the most serious critique of the system in more than a decade, led by people inside China who are choosing to speak out now, during the most sensitive season of the most sensitive year in decades.""

China Lost the United States First – Foreign Policy - "the shift has been driven by the Chinese government long before U.S. President Donald Trump began his trade war. Since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, China has been a far less welcoming place for foreigners, especially foreign businesses, than it claims to be. Meanwhile, amid countless examples of unacceptable behavior by Chinese authorities inside the country’s borders, the Chinese government’s propaganda apparatus is operating at full steam in claiming that Chinese citizens and companies are being treated unfairly abroad. The new milieu in bilateral relations also stems, in part, from the United States’ long overdue reaction to the inequitable ways in which China treats U.S. persons and companies at home and overseas... Much has been reported on scrutiny of the foreign business community and unjust detention of foreign citizens such as Michael Kovrig, the former Canadian diplomat held as a hostage by China after the United States requested the extradition of a Huawei executive from Canada. Many are also aware of the almost inevitable surveillance foreigners encounter from the moment they cross the border. Foreigners risk a complete abrogation of their individual rights and any form of legal recourse or due process upon entering the country—putting them, of course, in the same position as the vast majority of Chinese citizens.But this reality is treated as a given by U.S. diplomats and private citizens living in China. Intimidation, lack of privacy, and worse are par for the course. The muted response to U.S. diplomats in China being subjected to unexplained possible sonic attacks in 2017 and 2018 underscores how such activity has become accepted as normal. The interrogation of a Koch Industries executive, reported in July, is representative of the typical scrutiny that high-profile foreign businesspeople endure but fail to publicize for fear of retribution or the impact on their bottom line. Even in official high-level meetings, senior U.S. diplomats and business executives are waltzed into Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, subjected to long-winded, talking point-ridden conversations with Chinese counterparts, and then shooed out—usually without any meaningful outcome... More broadly, foreigners regularly tolerate other less-than-reciprocal arrangements in China. Outside of a few dozen special cases, there is effectively no route to permanent immigration or even established residence in China; even long-term foreign residents often deal with visa issuance on a year-by-year basis. Foreign employees are forced to pay into a pensions and social security system that no one, so far, has been able to tap into.Foreign journalists, who are private citizens permitted to work in China, are treated as covert operatives of their country of origin and routinely have their visas revoked for doing their job... Chinese state media, meanwhile, is free to spew government-backed narratives and disinformation throughout the Western world. And it’s an open secret that some journalists from Xinhua, China’s main state media agency, operate as spies overseas in the same way as Soviet correspondents once did. Much of this trend can be attributed to initiatives launched under the reign of Xi Jinping... it is unsurprising that the foreign business community, which has traditionally promoted engagement in times of strategic distrust, began souring on China’s prospects for reform even before the trade war... If China wants to be treated as an equal, it can start by giving U.S. citizens in China—and all foreigners, for that matter—the respect it asks for its own citizens in the United States... China ought to start behaving like the benevolent global actor it claims to be. If it doesn’t, it will become a global pariah, risking the instability that it so often professes to avoid."

China's Belt and Road Plan Is Destroying the World - "Most Chinese-financed, coal-fired power plants built overseas use low-efficiency, subcritical coal technology, which produces some of the highest emissions of any form of power generation. Thus, China is destroying the environment."

New study uncovers China's massive hidden lending to poor countries - "More than half of China's lending to developing countries is what they term "hidden" money — loans that haven't been reported to any of the international funds, such as the World Bank.Indeed, economist and author of the report, Tresbesch, recently told Germany's Spiegel in an interview following the release of the study's findings, that compiling all of the information was like "a kind of economic archeology." Their information came from numerous financial world databases, along with some documents provided courtesy of the CIA...
"It's more or less safe to say that Chinese companies employ less local labor than other companies because they bring over many Chinese workers, and when they develop local infrastructure, they provide countries with loans which are being used to pay for it, which is then constructed by Chinese companies and Chinese labor."... China has started talking about being more transparent and sustainable on their loans in the future. But no clear evidence of this taking place has yet to materialize."

China, Not Russia, the Greater Threat - "China steals our intellectual property via cybertheft, forces U.S. companies in China to transfer technology, hacks our computers, dumps into our markets to put U.S. companies out of business, subsidizes state-owned enterprises to compete with U.S. firms, manipulates its currency, and, despite our protests, ships to the USA the fentanyl drug that has become a major killer of Americans... For three years, the U.S. establishment has not ceased to howl about Russia’s theft of emails of the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign.Yet the greatest cybercrime of the century was Beijing’s theft in 2014 of the personnel files of 22 million applicants and employees of the U.S. government, many of them holding top-secret clearances... Undeniably, Russia is a rival. But Putin’s economy is the size of Italy’s while China’s economy challenges our own. And China’s population is 10 times that of Russia, and four times that of the USA."

China’s Second Century of Humiliation - "China’s first century of humiliation was forced upon it by colonial powers. Now, China is at the beginning of a second century of humiliation, albeit of a much different kind. This time, Xi Jinping and the CCP will bear responsibility. Xi’s China is a norms-busting, human rights-violating bully and thief among the community of nations... In 2015, Xi stood beside U.S. President Barack Obama in the White House’s Rose Garden and pledged that “China does not intend to pursue militarization” of the South China Sea. By this time China’s construction of artificial islands throughout the disputed territory was already well underway. Though the military implications of these facilities were always obvious, it has become increasingly clear that Xi’s Rose Garden promise was a bald-faced lie... Xi has also lied to the world about China’s economic engagement and trade policies. At the World Economic Forum in January 2017, Xi delivered a speech that made headlines across the globe, portraying China as the world’s new champion of globalization and open markets. Casting the United States as a protectionist and isolationist force in global trade, Xi alleged that “China must have the courage to swim in the vast ocean of the global market… China took a brave step to embrace the global market.”Our national debate over trade notwithstanding, the argument that China will become the world’s leading force for economic globalization is preposterous on its face. Xi presides over closed and protected markets, has instead injected greater Party control into even private business, and shamelessly promotes plans for tech dominance through protectionism, forced technology transfer, and outright theft. The CCP uses China’s massive consumer market to intimidate private industry in furtherance of its political goals, such as when individual companies are targeted for simply recognizing the reality that Taiwan exists as a distinct political entity. Xi intends not to lead the global economic order, but to leech its benefits while avoiding its obligations. Xi has sought to portray China as a positive influence and democratizing force on the world stage, when in reality his signature foreign policy initiatives rely on the predation and abuse of less powerful countries, and seek to undermine global democracy. At the 19th CCP Congress in November 2017, Xi said that “China stands for democracy in international relations and the equality of all countries, big or small.”"