An interesting new article in the prominent American journal, “Foreign Affairs”, by three academics from Georgetown University, argues that “Washington should place less emphasis on slowing down China and more on improving its own innovative prowess.” (more…)
Richard Cullen
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The great reversal: Britain and China
Kerry Brown is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London. He recently spoke about his important new book, “The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400 Year Contest for Power” (Yale University Press, 2024) with Richard Cullen. A fundamental reality, which this stimulating book stresses, is how significant British interaction with China pre-dates the British takeover of Hong Kong Island, in 1842, by around 250 years. The British colonisation of Hong Kong was an important turning-point during the 400-year contest captured in the title – but not more than that. (more…)
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AUKUS submarine deal will damage Australia’s interests
The now-notorious AUKUS agreement was secretly conceived between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States prior to being publicly announced in September 2021 by the Morrison government in Canberra. It was aimed at eventually allowing Australia to acquire at least eight nuclear-powered submarines at an exceptionally high, initial estimated cost of up to A$368 billion ($249.1 billion), with the joint assistance of the US and the UK. (more…)
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What China could teach America
Some years ago, the internationally respected, American academic, Professor Joseph Weiler, argued that there are three types of governance legitimacy: process or input (democratic) legitimacy, performance or output legitimacy, and vision legitimacy. Now a prominent Harvard academic has employed a related analytical framework to compare the contemporary operational performance of the US and China, especially with respect to foreign policy. (more…)
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America’s anti-China psyop programs a 24/7 menace to the Philippines
Major Western news outlets are currently reporting how the Pentagon ran a secret anti-vaccination campaign in order to undermine China’s life-saving COVID vaccination programme in the Philippines – and beyond – from the spring of 2020 to mid-2021. (more…)
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Could the rise of China eclipse the enlightenment
According to the dominant Western narrative, the history of the entire modern world has been prodigiously shaped by Western historical turning points beginning with the Renaissance and running through the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the science-driven, first Industrial Revolution. A recent, US-published book, “China’s Age of Abundance: Origins Ascendence and Aftermath” by Professor Wang Feng, from the University of California, argues that the Rise of China needs to be added to this revered Western turning-point list. (more…)
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Israel’s Gaza hallucination
One reason Israel is constantly criticised, even from within its obedient posse of Global West backers, is that it has failed to articulate what it has planned for the “day after” the completion of its Gaza-cleansing, genocide project. The respected historian, Adam Tooze, recently revealed that future planning for “Gaza 2035” has, however, been a focus of intense, surreal Israeli attention. (more…)
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Washington’s hope: will rabid penguins eat the BRI?
China keeps building infrastructure in other countries that is needed by those other countries. Surely this is sinister. But all is not lost. As Joe Biden wonders if cannibals may have eaten his uncle Ambrose during World War II, Washington discovers remarkable new instruments in its geopolitical tool kit. (more…)
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The New York Times explains how gangsters now govern Israel
The rather timid headline for a recent aggressive story in the New York Times (NYT) introduced a detailed investigation by that newspaper of how the governance of Israel has been captured by brutalised backers of apartheid. (more…)
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War is Peace
“War is Peace” was an anchoring concept within the astonishing dystopia portrayed in George Orwell’s “1984”. This extraordinary, ground-breaking novel was a warning to the world, which drew on Orwell’s deep understanding of Stalin’s USSR. But even Orwell, in 1984, did not conceive of a Nobel Peace Prize recommendation pivoting on active preparations for a new war. For that instructive breakthrough, we are, in 2024, in debt to America. (more…)
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Washington’s new man in Manila eases the burden on Canberra
In an essay entitled “Australia’s Choice” published in Australian Foreign Affairs in 2022, the leading Singaporean commentator on international relations, Kishore Mahbubani, highlighted how Australia needed to choose whether to be “a bridge between East and West in the Asian Century – or the tip of a spear projecting Western power into Asia” It transpires that certain events may have eased this pressure to choose. (more…)
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China: Beyond socialism and capitalism – LSE Economist Keyu Jin explains the Middle Kingdom
The Westminster Town Hall Forum in Minneapolis in the US recently hosted the leading economist, Professor Keyu Jin, from the London School of Economics, where she spoke insightfully on where China has come from – and why – and where it is headed – and why. (more…)
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America bombs while China builds
It is sometimes said that America bombs while China builds. What’s the evidence, and where are the statistics? (more…)
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Shielding the dollar by bashing China
Ian Bremner argues convincingly that the American Dollar remains embedded as the global reserve currency since: “you can’t replace something with nothing”. Nevertheless, intensifying US misuse and abuse of the dollar’s standing has expanded the worldwide search for one or more “alternative somethings”. Now an intriguing argument has been advanced that a central reason Western scolding of China remains so incessant is to help protect the vulnerable dollar. (more…)
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Morally damaged America still wagging its righteous finger
Very recently, the leading British daily, The Guardian, ran remarkably informing side-by-side stories covering official United States perspectives on the Gaza genocide. (more…)
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Geopolitical grand larceny and its risks
One of the Ten Commandments says, with awkward bluntness: Thou Shalt Not Steal. Predictably, some are inclined to read certain qualifications in to this prohibition. As it happens, this sort of adaptive-thinking underpins arguments made in a recent article in the leading US journal, Foreign Policy. (more…)
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Scholar or ideologue?
The Economist, a leading British weekly, enjoys wide global readership. It recently covered the thoughts and written work of two scholars, both Chinese, one now government-based, in Beijing and the other based in an academic institution in the US. Only the former, was branded as an “ideologue” however. Paraphrasing Professor Julius Sumner Miller: Why is this so? (more…)
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Thinking intensely about the holocaust, Israel and Gaza
The vengeful, scheming, genocidal response unleashed since October last year in Gaza, by Israel, has prompted a profoundly intensified global review of the punishing history related to the establishment of the State of Israel and its colonial-settler expansion ever since 1948. (more…)
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Pearls and Irritations in the Pearl River Delta
Pearls and Irritations is widely read outside Australia. In particular, its content is now reviewed by certain media writing and presenting in Chinese in Hong Kong. (more…)
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Amidst rising American poverty, $6M per missile response in US war on Yemen
In October last year, Time Magazine reported a serious lift in poverty levels across America. You can read the full chilling report here. (more…)
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A remarkable Hong Kong media story
In Hong Kong, a vibrant Chinese media-oasis is forming within the vast territory long staked-out by the exceptionally dominant Mainstream Western Media. (more…)
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Does China want Trump to win in 2024?
Agathe Demarais is a senior policy fellow on geoeconomics at the European Council on Foreign Relations and a Foreign Policy columnist. She recently argued in that journal (with a clear anti-Trump tilt)-that “China is Rooting for Trump” (more…)
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What’s ruining America?
David Brooks describes himself as a moderate-conservative. Born in Canada but long resident in America, he is a respected, outspoken columnist for the New York Times and a range of other outlets. He has now explained what he believes is devastating America. (more…)
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The BRI gets it right
China’s Belt and Road initiative (BRI) operates on a huge scale and is the focus of rarely halted negative coverage across many prominent outlets in the Global West. A new extended article in the leading US journal, Foreign Policy, however, provides a measured, informed exception to this general rule.
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The state of Israel: A critical Swedish assessment
Around two decades ago, the Swedish writer, Henning Mankell, took an increasingly close interest in the wretched condition of Palestinians living under punishing Israeli domination. What he saw convinced him that Israel was maintaining an apartheid state very like those he had previously visited, at length, in Southern Africa. (more…)
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The remarkable global impact of the Chinese car industry: Trade beats war every time
Around 25 years ago, wise commentators said China may, in due course, be able to produce acceptable basic, manufactured white-goods but making motor cars that would sell globally was not conceivable. Far too many complex inputs went into making a modern family sedan compared to a refrigerator. As for landing a rover on the Moon and Mars – unimaginable. Those rovers successfully landed in 2013 and 2021 respectively. And now China has become the largest builder and exporter of motor cars on the planet. The Global West, especially, is widely surprised, indeed, startled. (more…)
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Henry George: more comebacks than Dame Nelly Melba
Henry George (1839 – 1897) was a remarkable, self-taught radical American political-economist who developed a theory of land taxation, which evolved to become, in essence, a programme for applying a single, substantial annual tax on all land – but not on improvements to the land such as buildings – while abolishing all other taxes. (more…)
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The American war on global capitalism
In January, 2023, Ezra Klein from the New York Times interviewed Yuen Yuen Ang. Professor Ang is a widely published, China scholar at Johns Hopkins University in the US. Towards the end of this long interview, Ang provided an acute summary of what US-China competition came down to. What matters most, she argued, is: Which of these two countries is going to make the best use of their political system to solve the problems of capitalism? Less than a year after Professor Ang laid out her concise test, America has verified that it is currently the one least able to measure up to this challenge. (more…)
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Living with the Sino nemesis
China’s economy today is around 50 times larger, in real terms, than it was 50 years ago. A World Bank report in 2022 confirmed that during this period, China lifted at least 800 million people out of extreme poverty, contributing close to 75% of the total reduction in extreme poverty, globally. (more…)
