Dustin Grage on X - "๐จ BREAKING: Tim Walz spoke this morning on who can be the voice in the world that could negotiate some type of deal with moral authority. “It might be the Chinese.” Thank God this guy isn’t in the White House. WOW. ๐ฎ"
China's Largest Comic Convention Bans Anime & Manga - "China’s largest comic convention, COMICUP, has effectively banned Japanese anime and manga from its upcoming event after organizers announced a sudden shift to a “New Chinese Style–only” format... Posts claim that cosplayers portraying non-Chinese IP characters may be denied entry and that staff will conduct inspections inside the venue to ensure compliance... The COMICUP decision comes amid a series of recent restrictions on Japanese entertainment in China, particularly in the anime and manga. In December 2025, the theatrical run of Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle ended abruptly after regulators declined to grant the film a standard release extension. The decision was officially attributed to “unavoidable circumstances,” despite box office performance that would typically support a longer run. Other Japanese anime films have faced similar uncertainty. Screenings of Detective Conan: The Time-Bombed Skyscraper and the latest Crayon Shin-chan movie have been postponed indefinitely, alongside the live-action adaptation of Cells at Work!, with no revised release schedules announced. In late November, Japanese singer Maki Otsuki was escorted offstage during a performance in Shanghai, while scheduled Sailor Moon live stage shows in China were also canceled."
Natalie Winters on X - "WATCH: Neil Bush, son of George H.W. Bush and Chair of Bush China Foundation Chair, outlines a plan to make Americans “less fearful” of China. He’s speaking to a Chinese Communist propaganda and spy front that’s paid him millions. Exclusive report below ⬇️"
Melissa Chen on X - "The Chinese have been cultivating influence amongst some of the most prominent American political families for DECADES. The Bush family's China friendship began in 1974 when George HW Bush served as de facto ambassador to Beijing. As president in 1989, Bush worked hard to smooth relations after Tiananmen, sending a secret delegation to Beijing just a month later. When Jeb Bush ran against Donald Trump in 2016, he was backed to the tune of $1.3 million by a Chinese couple named Gordon Tang and Haudan Chen who own a property development company in California called SingHaiyi. They had already appointed Jeb's brother, Neil Bush, as non-executive chairman of their company. Neil chairs the George HW Bush China-US Relations Foundation which has ties to a known united front body, the Chinese Peoples' Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC). This is an agency that forms an integral part of the CCP's united front work. In June 2019, Chinese state media People's Daily enthusiastically reported Neil Bush opining that the US was using trade barriers as a "political weapon to bully China." He's on record saying that China is becoming more mature, and that US democracy is flawed and politicians are "brainwashing Americans into seeing China as a problem." In short, this isn't new. He has been spouting lines as if lifted directly from the CCP's Propaganda Department for years and he is actually DIRECTLY working with the united front, having been personally enriched by these liaisons."
Nguyen Ho on X - "China is trashing the oceans. Each year, 4M tons of juvenile fish are caught before they can breed. That is 1/3 of China’s catch. China has exceeded its legal catch limits every year since 1994."
Noah Smith ๐๐บ๐ธ๐บ๐ฆ๐น๐ผ on X - "China is destroying much of Earth's ocean life and most environmentalists don't even give a shit"
Melissa Chen on X - "This is so frustrating. It's getting quite hard not to conclude that the environmental movement is primarily an anti-Western vehicle given its silence about arguably the biggest environmental destruction currently being wrought on the planet. The massive - and potentially irreversible - oceanic destruction by China's huge trawler fleet has been known for about a decade now, but still no one seems to care. The history of funding and influence links between Russia, China, and some Western environmental groups is well known: See @UnHerd article here: https://unherd.com/2025/05/how-china-co-opted-the-green-movement The longer our most visible environmental activists and orgs stay silent about the behavior of the Chinese trawler fleet, the more we know what their game plan was all along. Also I seem to recall celebs like Leo DiCaprio caring very much about marine conservation and protection of biodiversity. Sadly, he won’t say shit about this because he would never make another movie again. He would sooner denigrate Western consumption habits on stage at the Oscars than criticize or use his foundation to do anything about the Chinese destroying swathes of marine ecosystems and overfishing."
BLACK DUMPLING™ on X - "You mean the Leftost movement that crippled American nuclear because "the environment", destroyed American manufacturing to save "the environment" and targeted American AI development for destruction because "the environment" didn't care about the environment?"
Mommar on X - "It's not an accident that the entire western world has been manipulated into killing its fossil fuel industry, limiting its energy usage and output, and thereby destroying its manufacturing base meanwhile China does the complete opposite without an ounce of criticism. This is by design"
Ken Cao-The China Crash Chronicle on X - "Finally, someone in the United States has started asking the obvious question: what exactly happened to the Qing Dynasty and Republic of China government bonds that the U.S. still holds? If the Chinese Communist Party insists those debts don’t count, then by the same logic, there’s no sacred reason the United States must honor U.S. Treasury bonds held by the CCP either. And if Beijing’s defense is that “the Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China are not today’s China,” then congratulations—you’ve just invalidated the entire “since ancient times” narrative in terms of Taiwan in one sentence. You can’t disown history when it comes to debt and then reclaim it when it comes to territory. I used to think the CCP was playing some kind of grand, long-term chess game. Turns out it wasn’t chess at all. Just a pile of rhetorical boomerangs—thrown confidently, only to come spinning back at full speed."
China Is a Paper Dragon - The Atlantic - "In 2018, the Tufts University professor Michael Beckley published a richly detailed study of Chinese military and economic weaknesses. The book is titled Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower. The book argues that China’s economic, financial, technological, and military strength is hugely exaggerated by crude and inaccurate statistics. Meanwhile, U.S. advantages are persistently underestimated. The claim that China will “overtake” the U.S. in any meaningful way is polemical and wrong—and wrong in ways that may mislead Americans into serious self-harming mistakes. Above all, Beckley pleads with readers not to focus on the headline numbers of gross domestic product. China may well surpass the United States as the largest economy on Earth by the 2030s. China was also almost certainly the largest economy on Earth in the 1830s. A big GDP did not make China a superpower then—and it will not make China a superpower now, or so Beckley contends. Beckley is a voracious reader of specialist Chinese military journals and economic reports. And, he argues, many of the advances cited as Chinese strengths don’t hold up to close scrutiny. American analysts often publish worries about China’s growing navy, and especially its two aircraft carriers. But, Beckley writes, “Chinese pilots fly 100 to 150 fewer hours than U.S. pilots and only began training on aircraft carriers in 2012,” and he adds that “Chinese troops spend 20 to 30 percent of their time studying communist ideology.” When Chinese forces do train, Beckley argues, the exercises bear little resemblance to the challenges the People’s Liberation Army would face in a great-power conflict... Worried about Chinese students’ high scores on comparative math tests? You’re looking at the curated outputs of highly selective groups of students... Repression is expensive. Comparing China’s military spending to that of the United States, for example, doesn’t make much sense. The Chinese military’s first and paramount mission is preserving the power of the Chinese Communist Party against China’s own people. The U.S. military can focus entirely on external threats. The lines that plot the comparative GDP of the United States and China distort the real balance of power between the two societies, Beckley argues, because China must devote such a large share of its resources to basic subsistence needs to avert the overthrow of the state... in the 1800s, the Chinese empire had a GDP much larger than that of Great Britain. The Chinese army of 800,000 men also enormously exceeded Britain’s troop numbers. Yet when the two states clashed in the two Opium Wars, from 1839 to 1842 and again in 1858, China was crushingly defeated. Why? A great part of the answer, then as now, was the cost of repression. Nineteenth-century China faced an average of 25 local uprisings a year. Most of its troops had to be deployed to suppress rebellions and control banditry, leaving few available for war-fighting. The next part of the answer is that mass is not power. Although China’s resources were enormous in the aggregate, most were consumed by the basics of subsistence. In the 19th-century, Britain produced only half as much as China, but it did so with one-thirteenth the population—making more wealth available for more purposes. A final piece of the answer is that technological copycats face huge disadvantages against technological innovators. They will always lag behind the more creative rival, not only in the factory, but on the battlefield. “Repeatedly during the Opium Wars … Chinese armies of thousands were routed in minutes by a few hundred, or even a few dozen, British troops,” Beckley notes... the very real limits besetting China: a fast-aging population, massive internal indebtedness, and a regime whose worsening repression suggests its declining popularity... As China’s population ages, it will deplete its savings. Chinese people save a lot to compensate for the state’s meager social-security provision. For three decades, the savings of ordinary people financed the spectacular borrowing of China’s state-owned enterprises. How much was borrowed? Nobody knows, because everybody lies. What happens as the savings are withdrawn to finance hundreds of millions of retirements? Again—who knows? China misallocates capital on a massive scale. More than a fifth of China’s housing stock is empty—the detritus of a frenzied construction boom that built too many apartments in the wrong places. China overcapitalizes at home because Chinese investors are prohibited from doing what they most want to do: get their money out of China. Strict and complex foreign-exchange controls block the flow of capital. More than one-third of the richest Chinese would emigrate if they could, according to research by one of the country’s leading wealth-management firms. The next best alternative: sending their children out."
From 2021
China’s new restrictions on rare earth exports send a stark warning to the West - "Beijing’s new rules announced on Thursday stipulate that licenses will be required for the export of technologies used in rare earth mining and processing, as well as for the manufacturing of magnets, which can be used in military technologies. Crucially, any foreign firm that wants to supply rare earths produced in China or processed with Chinese technologies outside China will also need to get a license, according to China’s Ministry of Commerce... China’s willingness to use its trade heft to advance geopolitical goals should make policymakers in the West wake up to the burgeoning power of China’s manufacturing supply chain and its control over certain so-called ‘chokepoint’ technologies – which it can limit access to at will... Chinese companies compete not only with mid-technology counterparts in the West but also at the apex of the tech pyramid. Research from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) shows that China leads the US in 57 out of 64 critical technology categories."
Time for China to increasing funding for environmental groups blocking rare earth mining
Xi Jinping’s rare earths weapon is backfiring on China - "The dominant narrative at the moment is that Xi has put America in its place with restrictions on rare earths, over which China has a near monopoly. In April, Beijing announced a strict export licensing regime. The measure was turned into a comprehensive set of controls on Oct 9. These actions enhanced restrictions issued in previous years. Reuters reports that Beijing last week agreed not to go ahead with the October rules but left the April measures in place. The White House’s fact sheet has a different slant, stating that general licenses for the export of certain minerals “means the de facto removal of controls China imposed in April 2025 and October 2022”. But the details of the agreement may matter less than the direction of travel. Scott Bessent, the US Treasury Secretary, told the Financial Times that China had “made a real mistake” by weaponising rare earths. He also predicted Beijing’s leverage would last no more than 24 months. The Treasury Secretary is right. First, America is moving at “Trump speed” in signing rare earths deals with alternative suppliers, most notably the $8.5bn (£6.5bn) pact inked on Oct 20 when Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited the White House. Moreover, agreements with Thailand and Malaysia signed on Oct 26 and the one with Japan two days later have rare earths provisions. The G7 announced a production alliance on Oct 31. Moreover, the US is working on technologies, such as those being developed at the University of Texas at Austin, that “increase domestic supply and decrease reliance on costly imports”. These new methods could crack Beijing’s firm hold on processing: China currently processes 92pc of the global output of these minerals. While America will make good use of the truce, China will do the opposite. Beijing’s rare earths embargo is accelerating its isolation. “Each embargo justifies a new refinery, alliance, or export control [by China’s opponents],” Tanvi Ratna, an engineer who writes on emerging tech and state power, posted on X. “China’s leverage is real,” she notes, “but it peaks on use”. More fundamentally, Beijing’s rare earths rules take on all other nations, not just the United States. As such, they accelerate the de-globalisation that started with the Covid pandemic. China was clearly the biggest beneficiary of globalisation after the Cold War, and now the country is more trade dependent than at any other time in its history. It, therefore, will almost certainly end up the biggest victim of the de-linking process. Additionally, Xi is now doubling down on policies that make China even more dependent on America. At the Fourth Plenum of the Central Committee, which ended on Oct 23, the Communist Party continued to emphasise industrial production over domestic consumption as the primary driver of the economy, incorporating this priority in the 15th Five-Year Plan, which begins next year. China’s consumers cannot absorb existing factory production, and the economy is already trapped in a deepening deflationary spiral. The Consumer Price Index has been negative six of nine months of this year, and September was the 36th straight month the Producer Price Index, which measures factory-gate prices, was in negative territory. So the country will have to export even more... In response to Trump’s tariffs, Beijing has been selling more to what it calls the “Global South”, but, as Brookings scholar Robin Brooks explains, margins on those sales are lower. China still needs America. American consumers account for about 34pc of global household consumption. With more products to sell, China will need the US more than before. Last year, America accounted for 29.8pc of China’s merchandise trade surplus of $992.2bn (£755bn). Moreover, as each month passes, China’s economy continues to erode. The country’s reported growth figure of 4.8pc for the third quarter of this year is not credible. With even industrial production slowing – the country’s official Purchasing Managers’ Index showed that the contraction in the all-important factory sector deepened last month – President Trump was right to crow that the meeting with Xi was a 12 on a scale of zero to 10. But not for the reasons many commentators might imagine."
Sadly for China, rare Earth elements aren’t actually all that rare - "It all started in July 2023, when the Chinese government announced it would restrict the export of gallium and germanium, two critical minerals that are mostly used in making solar panels and semiconductors. Over the following two years, China’s list of controlled products expanded to include antimony, graphite, and other materials. Earlier this month, the Chinese government escalated things even further, subjecting seven rare earth elements to a more comprehensive export licensing program that covers the whole world and is designed to further choke off American companies... Without them, in many cases, technological infrastructure and consumer gadgets won’t be able to perform at the same level—but they will still maintain their basic functions. “The wind turbines will just go out of service 10 years earlier; electric vehicles will not last as long,” says Wang. Lange agrees that the impact of losing access to heavy rare earth elements would be somewhat manageable for American companies. “One place where that rare earth is in your car is in the motors that pull up and down your window,” says Lange. “There are ways to just deal with some things that are not as fun, like rolling down your windows by hand.” In the past, China’s critical mineral restrictions haven’t worked very well. One reason is that US companies that want to buy rare earth minerals can simply go through an intermediary country first. For example, Belgium has emerged as a possible re-export hub that appears to pass germanium—one of the minerals Beijing first restricted in 2023—from China to the US, according to trade data. Since the European Union has much closer ties with Washington than with Beijing, it’s difficult for the Chinese government to effectively stop this flow of trade. Another sign that China’s export controls haven’t been very effective is that the price of critical minerals has increased only slightly since the policies were first implemented, indicating that supply levels have remained steady. “Whatever they did in 2023 hasn’t really changed the status quo” of the market, says Lange... In the long run, however, companies may be able to find technological solutions to address a potential shortage of rare earth minerals. Tesla, for example, announced in 2023 that it had reduced the use of them in its EV motors by 25 percent, and it planned to get rid of them completely in the future. The carmaker hasn’t clarified what it would use instead, but experts speculate it could be turning to other types of magnets that don’t rely on rare earths... Unlike making advanced semiconductors, which requires using sophisticated machinery worth hundreds of millions of dollars and building extremely complicated factories, critical minerals aren’t that hard to produce. The technologies involved to mine and refine them are mature and both the US and Canada have large natural deposits of some of them. But the mining industry was pushed out of the West because it doesn’t generate much value and is also extremely polluting. In the past, efforts to build up the critical minerals supply chain in the US have either been slowed down or called off. That’s more due to basic economic calculations, says Lange, rather than technological difficulties. “It’s like bending down to pick up a nickel,” he says, meaning the effort isn’t worth the reward. Because companies only need tiny quantities of these minerals, the market for them is very volatile—prices can drop when a single new factory comes online and starts mass producing and refining them. That means if a mining company were to open up shop in the US, it could inadvertently tank the price of the same mineral it’s trying to profit from, says Lange. But if China succeeds in strictly enforcing its export control policies, it might provide just enough incentive for the US government and private companies to finally reshore the mineral refining industry. If that happens, Lange says, it could take about two years for a new critical mineral operation to open in the US."
Lim Tean | Facebook - "The Great Myth Of China Never Having Invaded Other Countries !
Nothing irks me more than to hear the persistent claim, often repeated in public debate, and even by renown scholars such as Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, that China has never invaded other countries and that there is nothing to fear from her unparalleled military build-up over the past 2 decades, and that she is a benign power. This assertion does not withstand serious historical scrutiny and should be rejected plainly and without equivocation. China’s own imperial history tells a very different story. For more than 2 thousand years, successive Chinese dynasties expanded their territory through military conquest, occupation and coercion, just as other great powers have done throughout history. The Han dynasty pushed Chinese armies deep into Central Asia, conquering the Tarim Basin and waging sustained offensive wars to secure strategic depth and trade routes. The Tang dynasty projected military power across much of Inner Asia, subjugating Turkic states and repeatedly intervening by force in Korea and Vietnam. The Yuan dynasty launched large-scale invasions across East and Southeast Asia, including Korea, Vietnam and Burma. The Ming dynasty occupied Vietnam for 2 decades, following military conquest while the Qing dynasty- the most territorially expansive of all- used force to absorb Xinjiang, Tibet and Mongolia, effectively doubling the size of the Chinese state. These were not defensive actions. They were wars of expansion, conducted to secure dominance over China’s periphery. Some argue that these campaigns were softened by so-called tributary system. That, too, is a distortion. Tributary relations were not partnerships of equals ; they were hierarchical arrangements enforced by the credible threat and frequent use of military force. States that resisted were punished. Those that complied did so under pressure. This was order imposed by power, not harmony achieved by consent. Those who promote the myth of China’s historical exceptionalism ignore one of the most enduring insights of human experience. The great Greek historian Thucydides, who wrote the history of the Peloponnesian Wars, warned us that human nature does not change, and that fear, interest and power drive the behaviour of states across all eras and cultures. Winston Churchill put it even more starkly when he observed that “the story of the human race is war”. China, like every civilisation before it, is not exempt from these truths. We must be clear-eyed instead of viewing China through rose-tinted glasses. Power, when unchecked, has always sought expansion. That lesson is as relevant today as it was in antiquity. China’s rise to become a powerful country was never peaceful. It is therefore pointless to pontificate whether her continued rise will be peaceful. It can never be. If we ignore this simple truth and choose to be hypnotised by the smiling Tiger mouthing multi-literalism, we do so at our peril. In a subsequent post, I shall explain how China has continued with her hard-edged expansionism even in the 20th and 21st centuries."
Roman Baber on X - "The Chinese Communist Party has 2 million muslims in labour camps. The Liberal/Left pretend it's not happening, while Canadian media is fear mongering a US invasion. I lived in USSR for almost 9 years. Canadians are now subjected to Soviet level lies."
Someone claimed this was Russian propaganda. Time to abolish Amnesty International!
Meme - "Is homelessness common in China? I imagine the PRC has social programs to combat this no?"
"No it isn't."
"It's incredibly rare that's why Chinese tourists are always shocked by how many homeless people there are in western cities like Paris or New York"
"For Chinese people, and anyone influence by Confucian thought, homelessness Is heavily looked down upon and is to be prevented as much as possible. It is seen as a sign of a mismanaged or failing society."
"as someone living in china, have seen a lot of homeless people, heck i could probably go outside right now and within a few minutes find 4 or 5
https://ibb.co/rGxbqV5 there you go"
Melissa Chen on X - "YIKES China just posted a record-breaking $1.2 trillion global trade surplus. The EU's is up 18.1%. Germany's numbers are BONKERS - a staggering 108% surge in surplus, meaning that it now accounts for nearly a third of China's entire EU surplus. The US has been aggressively correcting its own trade imbalance with China through tariffs and restrictions. The result? China's exports to the US plummeted 20% in 2025, with imports from the US down 14.6%. Those diverted goods are flooding into Europe, especially Germany. Beijing is redirecting its export machine to softer targets, exploiting the EU's open markets while building dependencies in critical sectors like EVs, batteries, and solar panels. Germany, with its auto giants like Volkswagen and BMW deeply entangled in the Chinese market, is particularly vulnerable. China's mechanism is through excess production capacity. It identifies a key industry, builds the capacity to produce 90% of global demand, and then flood markets with subsidized exports priced at marginal cost, backed by a 20% undervalued currency. Domestic markets are decimated. Germany is de-industrialized. Germany can either admit "Trump was right" or continue getting teabagged by the Chinese."
Pete North on X - "I don't think people truly understand the extent to which China has been plundering and deceiving the West, or the extent to which their own governments let them. The Chinese economy is built on fraud that would make Somalians blush. Virtually everything China sells us is based on stolen IP with fraudulent certification, and made with slave labour, while plundering the world's oceans and polluting the planet like no other. Then as Europe deindustrialises and offshores its manufacturing to China (along with the knowledge economy that goes with it), it passively allows China to subvert its customs enforcement and tariff regime, and rolls out the red carpet for industrial scale data theft. Make no mistake. China IS at war with the West. This is an economic war that's been going on for thirty years or more. But Western liberals would rather align with China because Orange man bad. That's the mentality we're dealing with here. For sure, China isn't planning on invading the West, but they don't need to - because we're already handing over everything of value without a fight."
