Here Comes China

This is a very curious news item that most of us probably did not know about that Godfree Roberts reported in his extensive newsletter.

Typhoid Angie? Chancellor Angela Merkel at Wuhan lab the day a lab leak allegedly occurred.

What an incredible coincidence that the German Chancellor was visiting Wuhan’s Tongji Hospital at precisely the time when, according to CDC Director Redfield, a potentially catastrophic event was taking place across the river at the Wuhan Institute of Virology! This was, moreover, merely three months before the first officially acknowledged cases of Covid-19 began to turn up in the city.

But the coincidence is even more incredible. For when those first cases began to turn up in Wuhan in early December 2019, they did not turn near the Wuhan Institute of Virology on the right bank of the Yangtze at all, but rather in the immediate vicinity of Tongji Hospital on the left bank!

There is another virus research lab in Wuhan that is located right in the area of the initial cluster: the “Essen-Wuhan Laboratory for Virus Research, whose Chinese host institution is the Tongji-Hospital Medical College. Tongji Medical College is located one kilometer due north of the hospital. Have a look at the map, keeping in mind the indicated scale. This would put it nearly right at the epicenter of the outbreak. It is worthwhile to read the full full article →

Editorial from Godfree Roberts:

“The size of China’s displacement of the world balance is such that the world must find a new balance. It is not possible to pretend that this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of the world”.  Lee Kwan Yew.

Effective Diplomacy

The Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, praised China’s approach to peace in Ukraine and Spain’s Prime Minister will be in Beijing Tuesday to support Mr. Rutte.

This minor rebellion has so upset the US Government that Secretary of State Anthony Blinken confessed to Congress, “We feel backed into a corner”. His public confession – that American vassals’ open support the Chinese proposal – empowers EU leaders, weakens American prestige, and enhances China’s in the Middle East. Chinese diplomacy has finally swung into action.

A retired SE Asian diplomat told me that he witnessed a diplomatic campaign in 2012, when the US sought to invade Afghanistan. Beijing supported the invasion for its own purposes (Uyghur terrorists trained there and a shared land border) and persuaded Pakistan and Russia to handle 90% of America’s military logistics. The diplomat chuckled, “They really greased the skids for that war. It’s classic Sun Tzu! Encourage the barbarians to fight the barbarians”.

America withdrew from Afghanistan last year to focus on competing with China, but the China of 2012 is long gone: its economy and its navy now dwarf America’s in size and power. America is less powerful for its loss in Afghanistan, being outfoxed in the Middle East and on the brink of losing in Ukraine.

If Secretary Blinken feels pressured, the growing mismatch between China’s bigger, steadier, more productive economy provides no relief:

Xi Jinping’s six principles of finance:

1. Serving the real economy is the inherent mission and purpose of finance.
2. Finance is an important tool for resource allocation and macroeconomic regulation.
3. Managing currency and credit well is the basic guarantee for a healthy economic cycle.
4.  We must adhere to a prudent monetary policy, accurately expand effective demand while preventing “flooding” [of credit], solidifying structural distortion, increasing debt and leverage levels, and weakening the momentum of sustained economic growth.
5. Financial security is an important part of national security.
6. Financial development must always adhere to a people-centered approach. Read more → 

The Governance Gap – by Godfree Roberts

First, enrich the people. Confucius

Imagine a continuous civilization on the other side of the world, unchanged for millennia, ruled by Imperial dynasties grander than Rome’s, unaware of Greek philosophy, the alphabet, democracy, Christianity, individualism, feudalism, the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, whose people surpass ours in intelligence and whose institutions surpass ours in effectiveness. Now picture it thriving today, exceeding us in every field of endeavor. F. W. Mote, Imperial China.

In the West, where the State is regarded with varying degrees of suspicion–even hostility–and, as a consequence, an outsider. In China the state is seen as an intimate, a part of the family. Indeed, as the head of the family. Martin Jacques.

Cut to the chase

China is winning because it is run by honest geniuses and its people make stuff. We are losing because the West is run by professional liars, we’ve stopped making stuff, and we’ve run out of countries to plunder. Let us count the ways:

96% of Chinese own their homes.

Their incomes double every decade. We haven’t had a raise in 50 years.

Their median net worth is much higher than Americans’.

Their wealth and income inequality are much lower.

Their streets are a hundred times safer.

They live much longer, healthier lives than Americans.

Their kids graduate 3 years ahead of ours in math and science.

They have a ‘stunning lead in 37 out of 44 critical and emerging technologies’

140 IQ is cutoff for a government job (and a PhD in theoretical physics).

Their government does not lie to them.

Their government keeps its promises.

Their productive (wartime) economy is three times bigger than America’s.

Covid Zero was the greatest display of governance and social cohesion ever.

There are more hungry children, drug addicts, suicides, executions, and illiterate, incarcerated, poor, homeless people in America than in China.

Do the Math

Every year, twelve million Chinese babies are born with IQs averaging five points above ours, and ten million youngsters graduate high school three grades ahead of our kids and eight million of the brightest graduate college. And every year, the top one-million graduates take the ferocious, three-day guokao, the civil service examination and. every year, 27,000 get jobs. So rare is this honor that it is a cause for clan celebration and a ceremonial entry in their Family Books – some of which predate the birth of Christ.

Every year, the government offers its new hires a choice of career tracks. The ambitious, who choose the leadership track and are promptly dispatched to the nation’s poorest villages with the vague instruction to double their residents’ incomes. Those who succeed are transferred to the opposite side of the country and asked to repeat their performance for an entire county. That’s how Xi started. That’s how they all start.

In 2021, China’s government accomplished far more than all Western nations combined because, as Chairman Rabbit explains, “In China, the government must solve problems by all means and take all responsibility – and its responsibility is both political and moral”.

That’s another major difference: Chinese officials are expected to set a moral example and civil service promotions are determined partly by KPIs, but candidates’ moral maturity is the determining factor for reasons entirely familiar to John Quincy Adams, “Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net”.

Planning

In 1951, Mao refined the Confucian model, adding democratic oversight, local experimentation, and endless surveys run by four-thousand full-time researchers at the Academy of Social Sciences’ fifty research centers and two-hundred sixty social disciplines. Says author Jeff J. Brown, “My Beijing neighborhood committee and town hall are constantly putting up announcements, inviting groups–renters, homeowners, over seventies, women under forty, those with or without medical insurance, retirees–to answer surveys. The CPC is the world’s biggest pollster for a reason: China’s democratic ‘dictatorship of the people’ is highly engaged at the day-to-day, citizen-on-the-street level. I know, because I live in a middle class Chinese community and I question them all the time. I find their government much more responsive and democratic than the dog-and-pony shows back home, and I mean that seriously”.

Planners tour the country, hold meetings, listen to local opinions, and formulate proposals which specialists evaluate and budget. Then twenty-seven levels of bureaucrats responsible for implementation submit feasibility analyses. Says a planner, “Computers have made huge improvements in collecting and analyzing the information. Still, thousands of statisticians, actuaries, database experts and technicians with degrees in urban, rural, agricultural, environmental and economic planning invest thousands of hours interpreting and analyzing this vast trove of data, statistics and information. Needless to say, for a continent-sized country with over a billion citizens, it takes hundreds of thousands of people to develop a Five-Year Plan”. Think tanks formulate policies, provincial field trials test them. Successful solutions are rolled out nationwide and their sponsors become front-page heroes.
Come to think of it, almost all of China’s heroes – and even some of its Gods – were real-life government officials. If that doesn’t explain the governance gap, I don’t know what does.

Let people see that you only want their good and the people will be good. The relationship between superiors and inferiors is like that between the wind and the grass. The grass must bend when the wind blows across it. If good men were to govern a country continually for a hundred years they would transform the violently bad and dispense with capital punishment altogether. Analects.

We hear from Mr Lavrov that they have no wish to interact with Europe and NATO countries until these countries display sobriety.

A similar process is in effect in Chinese Circles.

Blinken meeting with Wang Yi in Munich described as the most antagonistic US-China encounter since Anchorage. Chinese delegation refused to respond to US meeting requests, forcing US to track down Wang in person at the Bayerischer Hof @Reuters https://t.co/DpQppkRCl4 pic.twitter.com/UhcaGeYM7i

— Noah Barkin (@noahbarkin) March 26, 2023

On a positive note: 

In 2022, China planted 3.83 million hectares of trees and treated 3.21 million hectares of degraded grasslands. China has only 6.6% of the world’s vegetated area, but it accounts for a quarter of the world’s net increase in green areas and its forest cover rate is around 24%, or about 231 million hectares; this year, the government plans to increase forested areas by 3.2 million hectares, and plant and/or restore 3.46 million hectares of grass. Read full article →