The Western world is currently like a man lost in a jungle who is preoccupied with the grass stains on his pants when he should be paying attention to the tiger behind him.
“China – Communist Slave State”
Xi Jinping goes full 1984
The CCP’s inner sanctum is in Beijing this week to hold its annual closed-door meeting. But this time it’s done something rare by announcing one item on the agenda: an official resolution to revise China’s historical narrative under its reign, to reflect Xi’s take on the “correct” interpretation of party history — and by extension China’s.
What the party comes up with won’t just be an anodyne internal document only CCP nerds will obsess over. Xi’s historical revision will influence everything in China — from foreign policy, to what’s taught in schools or shown on TV and in films, to what constitutes the ultimate crime of disloyalty to the party — for an entire generation, if not longer.
Pentagon: China’s navy is now world’s largest with 460 warships by 2030
China‘s navy is now the world’s largest maritime military force and will deploy 460 warships by the end of the decade, according to the Pentagon‘s latest annual report on Chinese military power.
The current warship arsenal for the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) includes 355 naval platforms, including major surface ships, submarines, aircraft carriers, amphibious warships and mine warfare craft.
German engine technology found in Chinese warships — report
Engines developed in Germany can evade export control bans due to their status as a so-called dual-use technology, a German media investigation has revealed.
Several types of Chinese navy warships are powered by engines that were either developed or built by German manufacturers, an investigation by public broadcaster ARD and the Welt am Sonntag newspaper revealed Saturday.
The two companies involved are MTU in Friedrichshafen and the French branch of the Volkswagen subsidiary MAN, according to the report.
Both companies told the media they have always complied with export control regulations and have put into the public record that they have been involved with China’s military.
The Battle for Taiwan
Seventy-two years ago, the Communist Party seized control of China after a bloody struggle. The defeated Nationalist government fled to Taiwan, frustrating Beijing’s desire to capture the island. Since then, China has arisen as a superpower rivaling America; Taiwan has blossomed into a self-governing democracy and high-tech powerhouse with Washington’s backing. Now, after decades of tenuous stalemate, there is a renewed risk of conflict. While it is impossible to know how this long rivalry will play out, in some respects the battle for Taiwan is already underway.
As Reuters reported in December, the Chinese military – the People’s Liberation Army – is waging so-called gray-zone warfare against Taiwan. This consists of an almost daily campaign of intimidating military exercises, patrols and surveillance that falls just short of armed conflict. Since that report, the campaign has intensified, with Beijing stepping up the number of warplanes it is sending into the airspace around Taiwan. China has also used sand dredgers to swarm Taiwan’s outlying islands.
Chinese Spy Convicted of Conspiracy to Steal Cutting-Edge US Aviation Technology
A jury in Cincinnati has convicted a Chinese intelligence agent over his role in a scheme to recruit spies and steal sensitive American aviation technology for Beijing.
Xu Yanjun, a deputy division director at the Chinese Ministry of State Security, Beijing’s top intelligence agency, was found guilty on all counts, including conspiring to and attempting to commit economic espionage and stealing trade secrets, according to the Justice Department.
China’s Weaponization of Space
“China has moved aggressively to weaponize space…” These were the words of U.S. Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall at the 36th Space Symposium on August 24.
“Both conventional deterrence and conventional operations depend on access to communications, intelligence, and other services provided by space-based systems. As a result, our strategic competitors have pursued and fielded a number of weapons systems in space designed to defeat or destroy America’s space-based military weapons systems and our ability to project power.”
Space has become crucial: so much of what happens there now affects life on earth.
Canadian brands sold clothing from Communist Chinese factory suspected of secretly using North Korean forced labour
Retail giant Reitmans brought more than 100 shipments of clothing into Canada from a Chinese factory suspected of secretly using North Korean forced labour, a months-long CBC Marketplace investigation has found.
And they’re not alone.
YM Inc., which owns well-known brands such as Sirens, Stitches, Bluenotes and UrbanKids, also did business with the same factory, Dandong Huayang Textiles and Garment Co. Ltd., up until 2019. Although a smaller volume, the company imported clothing at least 21 times, according to U.S. shipping records.
China Has No Interest in Climate Change
Nothing better summarises Chinese President Xi Jinping’s attitude to the West’s obsession with tackling climate change than the old Chinese saying, “Hide a knife behind a smile.”
As world leaders gathered for the COP26 summit in Glasgow, Western leaders were desperately trying to reach a deal on cutting carbon emissions, which United Nations climate experts claim is a major cause of climate change.
There was no shortage of dire predictions in the run-up to the summit, with John Kerry, President Biden’s climate envoy, warning that this is the world’s “last best chance” to stop a climate catastrophe and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson talking in apocalyptic terms about the world’s failure to tackle the issue placing modern civilisation at risk.
The Evidence Mounts: A new NIH letter reinforces the lab-leak hypothesis for the origins of Covid-19.
The origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19 remains unclear, but recent revelations reinforce the likelihood that the true source was a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
A letter from Lawrence Tabak, the National Institutes of Health’s principal deputy director, to Kentucky congressman James Comer confirms that the NIH funded research at the WIV during 2018–2019 that manipulated a bat coronavirus called WIV1. Researchers at the institute grafted spike proteins from other coronaviruses onto WIV1 to see if the modified virus was capable of binding in a mouse that possessed the ACE2 receptors found in humans—the same receptor to which SARS-CoV-2 binds. The modified virus reproduced more rapidly and made infected humanized mice sicker than the unmodified virus.
China increasing nuclear arsenal much faster than was thought, Pentagon says
China is expanding its nuclear force much faster than US officials predicted just a year ago, highlighting a broad and accelerating buildup of military muscle designed to enable Beijing to match or surpass US global power by mid-century, according to a new Pentagon report.
The number of Chinese nuclear warheads could increase to 700 within six years, the report said, and may top 1,000 by 2030. The report released on Wednesday did not say how many weapons China has today, but a year ago the Pentagon said the number was in the “low 200s” and was likely to double by the end of this decade.
Opposition parties want documents on Communist Chinese scientists who infiltrated Winnipeg virus lab when Parliament resumes
Opposition parties plan to resume their parliamentary battle for the disclosure of documents on the firing of two scientists from Canada’s highest-security laboratory, a dispute that has pitted the Trudeau government against the House of Commons.
In June, the federal government took House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota to court in an unprecedented move to prevent the release of documents to MPs that could offer insight into why Ottawa expelled and then fired Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng, from Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg.
China urges families to store basic supplies in case of emergency
China’s government has urged families to stock up on essential supplies in case of emergencies.
No reason was given for the notice from the Ministry of Commerce, but it came amid ongoing coronavirus lockdowns and concerns over vegetable supplies after unusually heavy rain damaged crops.
The ministry also asked local authorities to keep supply chains running smoothly and prices stable.
State media later sought to quell concerns amid reports of panic buying.
Iranian Oil Sales to China Skyrocket as Experts Say Biden Admin Turns Blind Eye to Sanctions Enforcement
Illicit Iranian oil sales to China have soared in recent months as the Biden administration attempts to reenter the 2015 nuclear accord, raising concerns from Iran experts that the United States is turning a blind eye to sanctions violations in a bid to entice Iran back to the bargaining table.
China imported nearly 800,000 barrels of Iranian crude per day on average during the last three months, almost double the amount it was illegally buying from Iran during the same period last year when the Trump administration was pressuring Iran with a crippling sanctions campaign. The increase comes amid an effort by China and Iran to boost diplomatic ties and force the Biden administration into removing sanctions on the Islamic Republic.
China and the Crisis Presidency of Joe Biden
Less than a year in and Joe Biden’s presidency is beset by crises. Domestically, his increasingly unpopular agenda has been stalled by his own political party in Congress. On the international front, the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle continues to reverberate along with Europe’s growing frustration in dealing with the administration. Even on matters where we can agree, such as the submarine deal and our alliance with the Australia and the United Kingdom to counter China, the announcement was so badly handled it became just another friction point in U.S.-European relations. Then there is China itself. From the origins of COVID to its recent hypersonic missile test — an event the Pentagon’s top general Mark Milley concedes was a near “Sputnik moment” — and China’s ability to crush all US satellites as “debris,” the challenges between the U.S. and China only continue to grow.