Tag: China
Will we stand with the protesters of Hong Kong? Crucially would Australia, among others, be able to keep talking to Beijing, to keep diplomatic channels open?
The coronavirus crisis has brought front-and-centre the question of how the world lives with an increasingly-powerful authoritarian China. We have already seen a descent into insult and threat — from both sides.
It has been called a new Cold War, perhaps so, but China is far more critical to the global economy and more interconnected with our lives than the Soviet Union was.
The China challenge also comes at a time when freedom and democracy is weaker in the West. The world was always heading to this moment.
via Hong Kong and China’s fate has been clear all along. Xi Jinping is seeing it through – ABC News
Trump is smashing China and needs a war (ODT)
via Trump’s ‘Uncreative Destruction’ of the U.S.-China Relationship
This is our “Friends for Life” we go to war and die for (ODT)
China’s “incompetence” didn’t cause mass spread and deaths due to the disease 30% of the world’s current condition America’s and in particular is a result of DJ Trump’s personal and blind stupidity in not acting like other more responsible nation’s leaders did. Trump’s attempt at a pathetic excuse simply doesn’t hold water.(ODT)
via Donald Trump says China’s ‘incompetence’ on coronavirus led to ‘mass worldwide killing’ – ABC News
This move in the barley market have pushed other exporters up the ranks. France, Canada, even Argentina, seem like candidates for malt barley; the Black Sea appeals for feed barley. Australia, for its part, is considering the WTO for redress, something it did to India over claims of sugar subsidies. (That process grinds on in interminable slowness.) “China, we think in this case, has made errors of fact and law,” claims trade minister Simon Birmingham. But the hefty elephant in the room remains Canberra’s willingness to storm Beijing’s barricades on behalf of its chief security sponsor. This is coming across more as an act of misguided allegiance than valiant heroism.
via 
Righto. So we expect China to be open and transparent but not our fearless men in black. If our own Border Force won’t co-operate then why should another country, particularly considering the accusations being made and broadcast by the Murdoch muckrakers like Sharri Markson who now seems to have become the letter box for US propaganda.
What a joke.
And where is the call for an investigation into the handling of the outbreak in the US and the UK and our failure to stop them importing the virus into Australia?
via Scotty’s shirtfronting sophistry – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Australian intelligence agencies have grown increasingly concerned about the Trump administration’s efforts to link the virus to a Wuhan laboratory, saying it is hampering the push to eliminate dangerous wildlife wet markets.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has said the Australian government did not have strong evidence linking the Wuhan lab to the virus.
Related Article
Deputy Chief Medical Officer Professor Paul Kelly poses with the COVIDSafe app downloaded to his mobile phone.
Coronavirus pandemic
Coronavirus updates LIVE: COVIDSafe downloads continue to rise, global COVID-19 cases top 3.6 million as Australian death toll stands at 97US President Donald Trump last week said he had seen evidence that gives him a “high degree of confidence” that the virus began at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But the US government’s top infectious diseases expert, Anthony Fauci, has dismissed the idea, saying all the scientific evidence suggests the virus began in bats and then spread to humans.
These very labs were refunded by Trump in 2017 after Obama had stopped. Doesn’t anybody find it odd Trump fails to mention that? Pompeo is publicising Australia’s support of American suspicions whe the opposite is true. Let’s not forget American Intel ia an Oxymoron. Iraq proved that with the lies spread by Bush/Rumsfeld and Cheney. (ODT)
For weeks the Australian government had been growing concerned about the Trump administration’s promotion of the theory that experiments on bats at a Wuhan laboratory had unleashed COVID-19. This week that anxiety peaked.
Multiple diplomatic and political sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age the suggestions by our biggest ally that Chinese lab experiments on bats had unleashed the new coronavirus would undermine Australia’s calls to ban the sale of exotic live animals at wet markets around the world.
“We can’t repeat the mistakes of the past. The WMDs fiasco was not that long ago,” one former security official said, referring to the incorrect intelligence claims of huge Iraqi weapon stockpiles that formed the basis for the Iraq War in 2003.
It is impossible to pinpoint the exact moment concerns within local security and intelligence circles morphed into genuine anxiety, but an April 14 article in The Washington Post is regarded by some as a turning point. The article quoted leaked diplomatic cables detailing how US officials had in March 2018 raised concerns about the Wuhan Institute of Virology “conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats”. Shortly afterwards President Donald Trump began raising the “lab theory” during his press briefings.
via Coronavirus Australia: COVID-19 origin theory about Wuhan lab tests relationship with US
The level of Trump’s mendacity is far grosser than that used to sell the Iraq War by claiming that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Then too there were stories of secret laboratories developing biological weapons. Though Trump is purging US intelligence chiefs and replacing them with Trump loyalists, even they could not stomach his latest conspiracy theory. “The intelligence also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the Covid-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified,” said a statement from the office of the director of national intelligence, Richard Grenell.
The purpose of Trump’s lies is not to convince by rational argument but to dominate the news agenda by outrageous allegations. This simple PR trick has previously worked well for him, but scapegoating China may not be enough to divert attention away from the price Americans have paid for his calamitous mishandling of the pandemic. The casualty figures tell their own grim story: in China there have been 84,373 cases of the illness and 4,643 deaths while in the US there have been just over 1.1 million cases and 64,460 deaths. Trump loyalists will claim that the Chinese are lying, but then they must also explain away the lower loss of life in South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan.
“The proposition from Beijing is very simple. If you want to go ahead and make policies according to your own national interests, and not ours, we will cut your income. Specifically, China’s official representative to Australia threatened boycotts of four Australian industries’ sales to China: those of the wine, beef, tourism and education sectors.
Sovereignty or money. Simple. What’s Australia’s choice?” Hartcher
If this inquiry was based on genuine medical and scientific grounds then Hartcher might have an argument but it’s not and what he calls China’s “talking points” are as valid as those he aims at it. It’s this politicized Cold War bullshit and our American aping that led us to Korea Vietnam Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Our assistance in the slaughter of a million Indonesians. Black and white choices like this are better understood by asking why are we so eager to be a developing American colony in the Pacific? We are afterall an American military base.
Put in context how many wars have we entered at America’s behest puffed up and acting as one of the USA deputies. War today is America’s economy out of which oligarchs make money and we have subsidized. Was Abbott protecting our national interest when he sent troops to bomb the crap out of the Middle East or America’s oil interests threatened by ISIS? He wanted us in Ukraine and to “shirtfront” Russia to be the “pillock of the Pacific” and an honorary member of NATO. That was a global ambition but Climate Change was not. Whose cost and interest was he serving? What substantial gains have we made historically for always being on America’s side while pretending to be independant? Over the years we have seen all our institutuions becoming less British and more American not independant like New Zealand’s has.
The fact is America has a military presence in 149 countries and is forcibly sanctioning those where it doesn’t but wants the governments changed. Even Australia has a presence in more countries beyond it’s borders than China which has only one.
Apparently we argued strongly against the discovery we were the biggest pp planet warmers? Apparently that’s not in our interest and should be ignored. But not so a global pandemic. Diseases can be discovered like the Spanish flu was in Kansas why wasn’t it called the American flu as the German measles origins unkown. We and Trump want Covid to be called the China virus but like the others it’s origins have never been specifically pinpointed. There was no urgency back then to do so because it was impossible. Why the urgency now? Because the lens through which this demanded inquiry is being made is not purely out of scientific curiosity.
If the blame game had cast a shadow over all previous pandemics there’d be greater reason of national interests not to publicize or warn anyone of any discovery and simply let “herd immunity” run it’s course. The very opposite of what the Chinese did. The demand for this inquiry is a very specific one and not exactly at arms length from Trump. It’s easily seen as part of his scapegoating blame game and desperate excuse for his personal mismanagement. Even the WHO has been blamed and it appears his Australian shadow the LNP has fallen in step behind him. This is in nobody’s national interest America’s or ours but it is in party political interest and very individually specific. (ODT
“Australia has arrived at its moment of truth. It is now presented with the explicit choice between sovereignty and money. It arrived this week when the Chinese Communist Party publicly threatened Australia with trade boycotts for proposing an international inquiry into the global pandemic.”
Trump’s predictions are as solid as Swiss Cheese 60k to 70k now 100k and that’s after underquoting the numbers ” I did better than doing nothing” says Trump. Sorry Mr Trump but Ameriricans were left to scramble and they alone have done their best with minimal help from you. You did say “I’m not responsible”. They heve hed more help from China and your declaration “It’s not up to the Fed” proved actions speak louder than ” We are gaunna we have ordered”. false promises. (ODT)
“So, yeah, we’ve lost a lot of people. But if you look at what original projections were — 2.2 million — we’re probably heading to 60,000, 70,000,” Mr Trump said at a press briefing on Monday.
On Wednesday, the number of deaths passed 60,000, eclipsing the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War.
The death toll currently stands at 62,406, according to the latest figures provided by the US Centers for Disease Control.
The bipartisan China bashing is one more indication of the decline of the US empire. China has quickly grown to be the world’s second largest economy and is now pulling through the pandemic in far better shape than the United States.
As of April 22, China had more than 82,000 coronavirus cases and more than 4,600 deaths, and had gone six consecutive days without a COVID-19 death. The United States, a country with about one-fourth China’s population, had nearly 850,000 cases and more than 47,000 deaths. (While China has been accused of undercounting its casualties, so are most countries in the world, including the United States, according to a survey in The New York Times.)
via Trump trots out Blaming China for his own Pitiful Covid-19 Failures
Fact or fiction it’s of no matter to Trump and GOP it will be the center of their 2020 campaign because Covid -19 is bringing the US down and it can’t on any front be seen as Trump’s fault Sinophobia is their weapon of choice. (ODT)
The New Anti-China Campaign Is Built On Lies – The Greanville Post
CHINA GATE The GOP & Trump’s election strategy 2020 (ODT)
Hello ‘Chinagate’: Why blaming Beijing is all the rage this US election cycle — RT Op-ed
Personally, I’m not too worried about Chinese soft power. If Westerners look bad in comparison, that is only because of their own incompetence rather than the nefariousness of the Chinese. The Chinese State wants to make deals. The globalists want something much dearer: they want to bribe you into losing your national soul, your traditional values, your fighting spirit.
This crisis may come to be seen as the moment in which a declining and incoherent liberal-globalist West was geopolitically overtaken by an confident and organized national-authoritarian China. If so, we can also expect other countries may be tempted to change their political models.
via We Are All Totalitarians Now, by Guillaume Durocher – The Unz Review
United we stand divided we fall and in the English speaking world the division is clear on all global matters like Climate Change and the Coronavirus. China certainly is leading by action Trump is way behind vocalising. (ODT)
Not a word of the donations from China that Jack Ma has sent to America and possibly already arrived 1 million masks and 500,000 testing kits. Not a single thanks from Trump.(ODT)
“What we’re seeing, on a purely voluntary basis, based on the leadership of this administration, we’re seeing the greatest mobilization of the industrial base since World War II,” Navarro said at the presser.
via Trump Says He’s Mobilizing the National Guard in New York, California, and Washington – VICE
Chinese drivers are earning well above average income while Aussie Uber drivers can’t make minimum wage. Marcus Reubenstein reports.
Source: China’s ridesharing giant DiDi makes Uber look like a driver sweat shop – Michael West
There is no celebration in the act of 4 steps backwards which Trump initiated in the first place lying his tits off that tarriffs were an income producing policy. But then when the damage done was hurting moving 2 steps forward again to ease the pain and calling that a win.. That’s what Kim Jong un is an expert at. doing. Threatening, promising and then threatening again gaining regaining inches maybe but losing all respect the nation once had for being trusted. Republicans are doing it for themselves and not the country (ODT)
The US and China have declared an official truce in their two-year long trade war, signing a deal that will see the US reduce some tariffs and China purchase hundreds of billions of dollars worth of American goods and services.
US President Donald Trump and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He signed the “phase one” agreement at a ceremony at the White House on Wednesday morning (Thursday morning Australian time).
Morrison needs a distraction from a burning country Terrorism and China don’t cut it. News Corp calling this Normal doesn’t either. (ODT)
The anonymous author of a widely anticipated book on the Trump White House has described the US president as spiraling from crisis to crisis “like a 12-year-old in an air traffic control tower”, according to scathing extracts published by the Washington Post on Thursday.
The unnamed author, identified only as “a senior official in the Trump administration”, also says that colleagues considered resigning en masse in order to raise alarm about the president’s conduct, but ultimately decided against it, according to the Post.
via Trump quashes hopes of early resolution to US-China trade dispute | Business | The Guardian
Victoria has signed a fresh deal with the Chinese government and its global ‘Belt and Road’ infrastructure project with Premier Daniel Andrew urging other Australian governments to follow suit.
The agreement, signed in Beijing on Wednesday evening, will deepen cooperation between the state and the Communist-ruled country in the key areas of infrastructure, innovation, ageing and trade development.
Wednesday’s deal was signed only a few hours after federal Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton questioned whether the Premier’s trade efforts in China were in the “national interest”.
via Andrews signs new belt-and-road deal with China: ‘the right thing to do’
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