Wednesday, May 4, 2022

China Delenda Est?

 

Philip Lenczycki, "Did China Just Signal That It’s On The Brink Of War?"
China held an emergency meeting to examine how it could protect itself from potential future sanctions, the Financial Times reported on Monday.

“I’m surprised that it took them so long to figure out they needed to develop anti-sanction strategies,” Ambassador John Bolton told the Daily Caller News Foundation on Tuesday.

“Beijing is planning to go to war,” Gordon G. Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China,” told the DCNF.

China is exploring how to avoid economic sanctions in preparation for war, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation on Tuesday.

China convened an emergency internal conference on April 22 seeking to determine how the nation might avoid future sanctions similar to those levied against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, the Financial Times reported on Monday. That meeting likely betrays China’s intention to launch a military offensive in the foreseeable future, experts told the DCNF.

Ambassador John Bolton, former President Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor, told the DCNF he believes the meeting signals China’s militaristic ambitions.

“I’m surprised that it took them so long to figure out they needed to develop anti-sanction strategies,” Bolton said. “I’m surprised they haven’t prepared defenses more adequately before, but that certainly seems to be what they’re trying to do here.”

“It’s not just my assessment, it’s China’s assessment: they believe Biden is weak,” Bolton said, noting how former President Bill Clinton dispatched two aircraft carriers to the Taiwan Strait during the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1996 as a show of force. “I don’t think anybody believes Joe Biden would do that today.”

While China might resort to military action, Bolton told the DCNF he believes sanctions can also be used as deterrence.

“The Chinese would always prefer to get their objectives without having to use military force. It’s one reason I think they’re deterrable, if we’re prepared to use economic measures against them effectively,” Bolton said. “They may be prepared to use military force if we look weak enough, but that’s why it’s important that if we want to avoid hostilities to make sure there are economic weapons to be used effectively.”

The U.S. has spearheaded efforts to sanction Russia for its warmongering, targeting its largest banks, state-owned enterprises, as well as Russian elite, according to a White House statement.

However, while Bolton said that the U.S. would be wise to prepare for economic pain if it intends to use sanctions against China, Chang said China has more to fear from sanctions than the U.S.

“[Sanctions] would have a greater effect on China than the United States because China needs us far more than we need China,” Chang said.

Yet Derek Scissors, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told the DCNF he didn’t believe China’s alleged emergency conference was particularly revealing.

“I don’t think the Chinese evaluating financial sanctions on Russia tells us much about [China’s] short-term intentions,” Scissors said. “It’s easy for the U.S. to freeze Russian reserves because there are so few American assets in Russia to be seized in return. This is not true for American assets in [China], with new money pouring in 2017-2020.”

29 comments:

  1. Likely good news as far as you're concerned. Something else you can blame President Joe Biden for.

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  2. Ah, the demographics are destiny argument... which is true until the day it isn't anymore. All it would take is a minor nuke exchange and poof, in ten minutes the demographics are radically different.

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  3. China and Taiwan exchanging non-nuclear ordinance could also radically alter the balance, depending upon targets struck.

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  4. Another pandemic and "poof" there go all the old people.

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  5. ...and then you have a bunch of young people with no energy, no food, no job skills, no hope, trying to make a difference with military equipment that was obsolete 20 years before they mass produced knockoff copies of it 30 years ago

    One of the things that disqualified Trump from serious consideration (aside from shitting himself relentlessly when Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes pointed a question at him) was his outsized fear of China.

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  6. What parts of Oswald Spengler's "Man and Technic" and "Decline of the West" did you fail to read, beamish?

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  7. (((Thought Criminal))May 5, 2022 at 7:32 AM

    The part that didn't acknowledge reality?

    The Walton family in Fayetteville, Arkansas says "jump" and Chairman Xi says "how high?"

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  8. That only means that the Walton's are making a cut from a system that needs eliminating so that there are less Sam Walton's and more mom & pop merchandise emporiums.

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  9. You could always move to Venezuela and get away from all the naughty successful people

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  10. Venezuela's nice. There is no base of consumer spending there to keep all the rugged individual baby boomers from starving to death.

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  11. Provided you like all the products you produce price controlled and an inflation rate of 284%, it's an f'ing economic paradise.

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  12. (((Thought Criminal)))May 5, 2022 at 3:01 PM

    Well, when you put it like that, maybe globalism's cheap goods and teeny boppers preventing boomer-starving recessions here at home ain't so bad ;)

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  13. (((Thought Criminal)))May 5, 2022 at 3:26 PM

    Somebody's gotta pay the Boomer's bills. Maybe aborting 10+ million of my generation was a bad idea.

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  14. (((Thought Criminal)))May 5, 2022 at 3:37 PM

    We could really set things right if we just seized the assets of and gassed and burned everyone born before 1965. ;)

    Buncha financially inconvenient motherf*ckers.

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  15. Maybe if Sam Walton's family wasn't paying Millenials minimum wage to be WalMart Greeters and the Chinese to produce all their products for less than minimum wages there would be opportunities for Milenials to own business that make and sell American made sh*t here in America.

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  16. ...but please, what are those opportunity costs when millenials can just sit on their hands and whine about boomers drawing surplus salaries that are slightly larger than the surplus salaries of the millenials.

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  17. (((Thought Criminal)))May 6, 2022 at 7:54 AM

    As a member of Generation X, I'm sandwiched in the middle of boomers and millennials. Our retirement savings have been wiped out five times already by recessions from 1981 onward. Boomers are struggling with how to pay for their retirement. Gen X doesn't get to retire. So, even the boomer's big box of not my problem will get less sympathy from the millennials.

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  18. (((Thought Criminal)))May 6, 2022 at 8:03 AM

    There is a "light" at the end of the tunnel. Globalism will have run its course in the 2030s. The millennials won't have it as easy as the boomers. We will need to make video game controllers nutritious.

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  19. (((Thought Criminal)))May 6, 2022 at 8:08 AM

    Huxley's Brave New World trumps Orwell's 1984. We will amuse ourselves to death.

    Ask your doctor if Zyclon-B is right for you.

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  20. Our problem is that our savings weren't wiped out 20x times. The "stability" from Fed monetary policy since Reagan has lulled the salaried bourgeoisie to sleep. Weak corporations needed to get weeded out by frequent recessions. We need an anti-fragile economy of small business, not "too big to fail" behemoths.

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  21. Inflation is a "tax" on savings as well. The boomers retiring should have created a rise in unemployment that would curb inflation, making interest rate hikes unnecessary. That didn't happen, as many boomers stayed working because they didn't have any money to retire on.

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  22. You used to not need money saved for retirement, beamish. That was before the 401k/ IRAs.... not that a bankrupt Bethlehem Steel was ever not going to go bankrupt and have their pension commitments taken over by the PBGC.

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  23. (((Thought Criminal)))May 7, 2022 at 10:09 PM

    401(k) retirement savings became law in 1978. They should have privatized Social Security instead.

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  24. ...we'd all be millionaires today.

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