Meanwhile in China

[TwiceHorn 31486]

On 5/24/2023 at 7:06 AM, Hate said:

Wait a minute…racism exists outside of the US????

 

On 5/24/2023 at 7:13 AM, JesusSweatDuck said:

Unpossible, America is the great Satan and the only country with issues

The issue isn't racism vel non. 

The issue is applied racism, specifically as applied to people of African American descent.  Due to slavery within our national borders (as opposed to far-flung colonies like the rest of the world), we had a much larger population of blacks, the vast majority of whom were here unwillingly (as opposed to immigrants).

Upon emancipation, we proceeded to oppress them de jure and de facto for the next 100 years (largely eliminating the de jure) and to the present (de facto).

The US is no more racist than any other nation.  Due to the circumstances of slavery (so self-inflicted), we probably have one of the worst records of racism expressed as racial oppression than anyone, except maybe China and Japan.

Everyone else got to gradually integrate minorities, which works out much better and is why other racial minorities in the US have fared better (that and they voluntarily immigrated for the most part instead of just being stuck here).

[Parliament 14260]

2 hours ago, Schulz2.0 said:

 

Why didn't they build a oil pipeline and gas pipeline to Russia 30 years ago.  I know it's a long way across Europe, and the topography to get there is very bad.  But come on.  It coulda been done.

[Schulz2.0 28957]

47 minutes ago, Parliament said:

Why didn't they build a oil pipeline and gas pipeline to Russia 30 years ago.  I know it's a long way across Europe, and the topography to get there is very bad.  But come on.  It coulda been done.

I don't believe Russia really wants to be overly dependent on China. Now they're being forced in that direction.

[butthurt 1525]

https://twitter.com/GwarWorin/status/1663242285255933954?t=PYbjk1ig6EOQHgSIy1BVjw&s=19

[Parliament 14260]

Not sure why your Tweet didn't embed.  And your argument is invalid anyway: 

[Post Oak 20217]

Interesting thoughts on China and Taiwan.  China can take Taiwan before we can help but what happens next is the deterrent.

 

I like Zeihan but I'm not sure what to think when he talks in absolutes and the fall of nations. 

 

[Parliament 14260]

(No CR)

He talks about about how President Biden "accidentally" calls Taiwan a real country, only for his people to walk it back.  But the interval between the faux pas and apology is getting longer and longer.  If that's all on purpose, it's high-tier diplomatic trolling.

[Schulz2.0 28957]

 

[Texzilla58 4738]

I don't believe Russia really wants to be overly dependent on China. Now they're being forced in that direction.

The Russians hate the Chinese with a deep seated cultural fear of them. Goes back to the Mongol invasions. Russians hate the “yellow horde” and will never trust them. Any current dependence is strictly a neccessary situation.

[Brisketexan 105151]

The Russians hate the Chinese with a deep seated cultural fear of them. Goes back to the Mongol invasions. Russians hate the “yellow horde” and will never trust them. Any current dependence is strictly a neccessary situation.

Russia may not have a choice. Their FAFO consequence may be that China bends them over in 1,000 different ways.

[Bevo 13577]

6 hours ago, Schulz2.0 said:

 

How about Germany trying these pilots for treason, taking away their military credentials and pensions, and taking away their citizenship?

[RPM 26322]

[KeysPhoneWallet 807]

Russia + China fit together well from a trade point of view. Russia is a huge exporter of food/energy, China is a huge importer, they also can shit that stuff over their land border so no navy can interfere. Seems like a perfect match.

[Brisketexan 105151]

Russia + China fit together well from a trade point of view. Russia is a huge exporter of food/energy, China is a huge importer, they also can shit that stuff over their land border so no navy can interfere. Seems like a perfect match.

It is. Except today, Russia needs China’s cash and tech more than China needs Russia’s resources. Asymmetrical power = a smooth buttfucking for Russia.

[InkaUtexas 25951]

Yeah, not a cool move. Asian driver joke must be here somewhere. 

 

 

[crash_davis 23113]

I have never thought of this before. Interesting.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/141foid/why_chinese_yuan_will_never_become_an/

 

[crash_davis 23113]

i know a guy who won the lottery and married a Chinese woman who is the daughter of some high ranking CCP official. Many years ago during the construction boom, she "started" a company which sold electrical supplies to all of the skyscraper builders for all the major cities. Basically her dad got her all of the supplier contracts.

A few years after marrying her, he went home to France for Christmas. He gave his mom $2M Euros for a Christmas present.

They are uber rich but my understanding is that they are peasants compared to mega rich. 

[Brisketexan 105151]

Yeah, not a cool move. Asian driver joke must be here somewhere. 
 
 

Whatever -- that happens 500 times on Lake Travis on any given Saturday.  Some bro was at the wheel of the Chinese ship, hammered off of Coronas.
Also, any of y'all follow the "Chinese police secretly set up shop in places around the world where Chinese citizens are concentrated to monitor them" stories?  The boy is at the University of Glasgow, which has a LARGE Chinese student population (like 30% of the total enrollment.  So he just sent us this:



 
He's run around with a few of the Chinese students, and according to them, when they go back to China they are tested for EVERYTHING.  Even a trace of any kind of drug, and they're in deep shit.  Super fun way to live.

[JesusSweatDuck 17781]

On 6/5/2023 at 11:02 AM, crash_davis said:

I have never thought of this before. Interesting.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/141foid/why_chinese_yuan_will_never_become_an/

 

Jack Ma

[Horn of Gabriel 1614]

Great article from The Times (UK version) on COVID's origins.  Paywalled link to original ... non-paywalled link

There's some good summary in here of stuff we already know.  And some new details I hadn't heard, and I follow this story closely.  But TL;DR:

• Wuhan Institute of Virology was doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses as far back as 2008
• WIV was indirectly funded by the US Gov't NIH via EcoHealth Alliance, to the tune of millions of $'s over many years
• The US got progressively more cautious about funding GoF over the past 10 years, but, surprise!  Peter Daszak at EcoHealth found loopholes by either lying, feigning ignorance, or convincing allies in NIH that what he was funding wasn't actually dangerous or was just so worth it that they should bypass restrictions on funding
• WIV was doing their research on coronaviruses at BSL2, which is basically the standard for a dentist's office.  US Biosafety Lab guidelines state this research should be BSL3 at a minimum, which is full PPE (spacesuits) and partitioned air supplies for researchers, with independent medical supervision for researchers if they show symptoms.
• WIV had a parallel weaponization program running with the People's Liberation Army (PLA), who had staff onsite.  Essentially the US Gov't was funding PLA bioweapons research /epic facepalm
• The virologist community is small and closely collaborative, and apparently doesn't think at all about the consequences of their actions.  A US researcher at the Univ. of North Carolina provided specific advanced knowledge to WIV scientists on how to insert the furin cleavage to viruses, which makes the many times more infectious to humans.
• WIV run a "serialization" program on humanized mice (mice with human DNA) to both test infectiousness (standard) but also to rapidly induce mutations in viruses to make them deadlier.  They'd expose humanized mice to a coronavirus (the closest natural relative to COVID taken from the bats in mines in China), see which mice died or got the sickest.  Then harvest THOSE viruses from those mice and repeat the experiment over and over, accelerating and compounding natural evolution process that would take years/decades into weeks/months.
• WIV researchers and their families came down with COVID-like symptoms in Oct/Nov 2019.
• The original hot spot of infections was not the wet market, but in a radius directly around WIV, per research done by US intelligence
• A PLA vaccine specialist working at WIV applied for a patent for a COVID vaccine in February 2020.  US researchers say such rapid progress would only be possible if they were already working the vaccine in Nov 2019.  Oh and that vaccine specialist died a few months later after "falling off the roof of the WIV building."

Anyway if you still believe a natural crossover, I'm not sure what could convince you at this point.  I'm clearly on the side of lab release, probably accidental but still a massive problem.  The article also talks about how the strain that escaped from WIV was one of the more mild versions.  They had another version that killed 75% of the humanized mice it touched.  That would have been fun.

Imagine every nuke in every silo in the world going off simultaneously.  Now imagine a big red button that could do that, but that button exists in every lab performing GoF research in the world.  That's what we have now.

Quote

What really went on inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid erupted

 

Fresh evidence drawn from confidential files reveals Chinese scientists spliced together deadly pathogens shortly before the pandemic, the Sunday Times Insight team report

 

Jonathan Calvert

|

George Arbuthnott

 

Saturday June 10 2023, 4.00pm BST, The Sunday Times

Scientists in Wuhan working alongside the Chinese military were combining the world’s most deadly coronaviruses to create a new mutant virus just as the pandemic began.

Investigators who scrutinised top-secret intercepted communications and scientific research believe Chinese scientists were running a covert project of dangerous experiments, which caused a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and started the Covid-19 outbreak.

The US investigators say one of the reasons there is no published information on the work is because it was done in collaboration with researchers from the Chinese military, which was funding it and which, they say, was pursuing bioweapons.

The Sunday Times has reviewed hundreds of documents, including previously confidential reports, internal memos, scientific papers and email correspondence that has been obtained through sources or by freedom of information campaigners in the three years since the pandemic started. We also interviewed the US State Department investigators — including experts on China, emerging pandemic threats, and biowarfare — who conducted the first significant US inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak.

Whether the virus emerged as a result of a leak from a laboratory or from nature has become one the most controversial problems in science. Researchers who have attempted to find conclusive proof have been hampered by China’s lack of transparency.

However, our new investigation paints the clearest picture yet of what happened in the Wuhan laboratory.

The facility, which had started hunting the origins of the Sars virus in 2003, attracted US government funding through a New York-based charity whose president was a British-born and educated zoologist. America’s leading coronavirus scientist shared cutting-edge virus manipulation techniques.

Covid-19 is widely believed to have originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology

REUTERS

The institute was engaged in increasingly risky experiments on coronaviruses it gathered from bat caves in southern China. Initially, it made its findings public and argued the associated risks were justified because the work might help science develop vaccines.

This changed in 2016 after researchers discovered a new type of coronavirus in a mineshaft in Mojiang in Yunnan province where people had died from symptoms similar to Sars.

Rather than warning the world, the Chinese authorities did not report the fatalities. The viruses found there are now recognised as the only members of Covid-19’s immediate family known to have been in existence pre-pandemic.

They were transported to the Wuhan institute and the work of its scientists became classified. “The trail of papers starts to go dark,” a US investigator said. “That’s exactly when the classified programme kicked off. My view is that the reason Mojiang was covered up was due to military secrecy related to [the army’s] pursuit of dual use capabilities in virological biological weapons and vaccines.”

According to the US investigators, the classified programme was to make the mineshaft viruses more infectious to humans.

They believe this led to the creation of the Covid-19 virus, and that it leaked into the city of Wuhan after a laboratory accident. “It has become increasingly clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in the creation, promulgation and cover-up of the Covid-19 pandemic,” one of the investigators said.

They found evidence that researchers working on these experiments were taken to hospital with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019 — a month before the West became aware of the pandemic — and one of their relatives died.

An investigator said: “We were rock-solid confident that this was likely Covid-19 because they were working on advanced coronavirus research in the laboratory. They’re trained biologists in their thirties and forties. Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza.”

Separate analysis shows the centre of the initial outbreak of Covid-19, which has killed more than seven million people, was close to the institute’s laboratory, rather than at the city’s “wet” wildlife market as had been thought.

Chinese medical workers in protective suits in early February 2020

REUTERS

The US investigators also revealed how they had been given evidence indicating the institute had been working on a vaccine before the pandemic. “I interviewed scientists in Asia who have close relationships with the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” the source said. “They told me it is their belief that there was vaccine research going on in the fall of 2019, pertinent to Covid-19 vaccination.”

Foreign experts who have sought to identify the source of the pandemic have been blocked from investigating by the Chinese state.

A team led by British bat expert Alice Hughes, who was an associate professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which oversees the Wuhan institute, had been working in the mines. Hughes said she was barred from speaking to the media about her research and was being watched by China’s security service. The restrictions forced her to leave China and move to Hong Kong.

The microbiologist Professor Richard Ebright, of Rutgers University’s Waksman Institute of Microbiology, is a long-standing opponent of the type of high-risk work undertaken at Wuhan.

He reviewed some of the experiments and describes them as “by far the most reckless and dangerous research on coronaviruses — or indeed on any viruses — known to have been undertaken at any time in any location”.

Railway workers disinfect the main station in Wuhan in March 2020

GETTY IMAGES

Experiment that diced with death: inside the Wuhan lab 

In November 2002, farmers and food workers in the Chinese province of Guangdong began to fall ill with severe respiratory symptoms. Medical staff soon followed suit. The Sars virus spread rapidly through 29 countries, infecting 8,000 people and killing 774. It was the first serious epidemic of the new century — and a wake-up call to scientists.

Sars was identified as a coronavirus, which until then had mostly caused mild symptoms, such as a common cold. If it could mutate like this, so could other viruses. A vaccine was needed.

The job of finding out how Sars had emerged was taken on by the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its most famous scientist, 39-year-old Dr Shi Zhengli. She and her team zoned in on bats, which had been linked to other deadly viruses, such as rabies, nipah and marburg. She began searching for bat colonies in caves in southern China in 2004, earning her the nickname “Batwoman”. Faecal samples were sent back to Wuhan to be tested for viruses.

They began conducting experiments with Sars and other viruses. Shi was joined by a British bat expert, Dr Peter Daszak, who would become a close friend and collaborator. Born in Dukinfield, near Manchester, he obtained a degree in zoology at Bangor University and later moved to New York, where he took a management position in the Wildlife Trust, a non-profit organisation.

Its work protecting pets and endangered species did not attract substantial funding. But after the September 11 terror attacks and the Sars outbreak, the US began to see the importance of funding work combatting bioterrorism and pandemics. The trust began to focus on how viruses might cross from animals to people and spark a pandemic.

Shi’s team provided the fieldwork for the trust’s campaign and the laboratories to test and experiment on the viruses. In 2009, the trust was given $18 million over five years from a new programme, called Predict, to identify pandemic viruses. Shortly afterwards, the trust was rebranded as the EcoHealth Alliance and Daszak assumed the role of president. The Chinese collaborators who helped put him on the map were also rewarded: $1 million of the Predict grant was redirected to the Wuhan institute.

Mice were “humanised” with genes that allowed them to develop lungs and vascular systems similar to ours

GETTY IMAGES

Tests on humanised mice

The truly cutting-edge experiments were being done in the US by the veteran virologist Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina. He used a technique to fuse together different pathogens by mixing their genes. To test the effect of these lab-created mutant viruses on people, he created “humanised” mice by injecting them with genes that allowed them to develop lungs and vascular systems similar to ours. His ultimate aim was to create a universal vaccine against Sars-type viruses — an objective still not achieved.

Baric was aware this type of “gain of function” work, so-called because it can enhance virus potency, was controversial and could have a sinister application.

“Ominously, tools exist for simultaneously modifying the genomes for increased virulence [and] transmissibility,” he had written in a 2006 paper. “These bioweapons could be targeted to humans, domesticated animals or crops, causing a devastating impact on human civilisation.”

By 2012, campaigners and scientists were starting to wake up to the profound risks inherent in coronavirus work. Lynn Klotz, a senior fellow at the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, in Washington, called for research on live Sars coronaviruses to be stopped.

“About 30 labs now are working with live Sars virus worldwide. The probability of escape from at least one laboratory is high,” Klotz wrote in a co-authored article. “Would one in ten escapes lead to a major outbreak or pandemic? One in a hundred? One in a thousand? No one knows. But for any of these probabilities, the likelihood-weighted number of victims and deaths would be intolerably high.”

Shi Zhengli in 2017 with other researchers in a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology

AP

Bioweapons warnings

In 2012, in a cave called Shitou in the remote mountains of Yunnan province, southern China, Shi’s team made a breakthrough. They recovered a virus that was the closest match to Sars of those found at the time. They labelled it WIV1, using the initials of the institute, and demonstrated through laboratory work that it was able to infect human cells.

But they were unable to grow sufficient quantities of a second Sars-like virus found in the cave, labelled SHC014, to do similar tests.

Shi needed Baric’s expertise. She contacted him in 2013 and he agreed to help. The Wuhan Institute provided Baric’s team with the genetic sequence for SHC014 so he could recreate the genes from the microscopic spikes that protrude from its sides. The American scientists then inserted SHC014’s “spike gene” into a copy of the original Sars virus Baric had created in his lab and tested the new mutant on his humanised mice.

In May 2014, EcoHealth Alliance was awarded a $3.7 million publicly funded grant by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). More than $500,000 of it went to the Wuhan lab for equipment and a further $130,000 was spent chiefly on pay and benefits for Shi and her assistant.

Pressure was being exerted on the lab work, however. That year, Barack Obama announced a moratorium on all gain-of-function experiments that would be “reasonably anticipated” to increase a pathogen’s infectiousness or lethality. This included Sars-related work.

It could have been the end of the Wuhan-North Carolina collaboration, but a loophole allowed gain-of-function work to proceed if deemed urgent and safe. Baric made the argument to the NIH, which gave approval.

The results of Baric’s experiment with the genetic sequence given to him by Shi were published in co-authored research in November 2015. The combined Sars copy and SHC014 virus was a potential mass killer. It caused severe lung damage in humanised mice and was resistant to vaccines developed for Sars. The paper acknowledged this might have been an experiment that was too dangerous.

It caused a big stir. “If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” warned Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

A scientist at the Wuhan laboratory handling virus samples from a laboratory-grade deep freezer without face or eye cover

Safety fear at Wuhan labs

The Wuhan institute began stepping up its own lab work using Baric’s techniques. It created two new mutants by fusing viruses with the WIV1 pathogen it had found in the Shitou cave. These experiments were mentioned in Daszak’s progress report for the year to May 2016, which he submitted to the US government funders. The same report disclosed the institute planned to create an infectious version of the camel pathogen Mers by combining it with bat viruses. Mers had killed 35 per cent of people infected during a 2012 outbreak in Saudi Arabia.

This triggered alarm bells for the US government because it would have involved the type of gain-of-function experiments that were still barred. According to documents obtained by freedom of information campaigners, Daszak argued the Mers experiment was not gain of function because it was unlikely to make the virus more pathogenic. A compromise was reached whereby the scientists would stop work and report to US officials if they created a new mutant virus that grew ten times faster than the natural virus it was created from.

That same year, Daszak announced to a New York conference that Shi was moving “closer and closer” to obtaining a virus “that could really become pathogenic in people”.

By 2017, according to a paper published by Shi, her scientists had sought to create eight mutant viruses from the Sars-like coronaviruses found in the Shitou cave. Two of the mutant viruses were found to infect human cells. Most of this work was carried out in the institute’s biosafety level 2 (BSL-2) laboratories, which took only light precautions that have been compared to those used in a dental surgery.

By contrast, the US guidelines require level 3 (BSL-3) precautions for similar work, including self-closing doors, filtered air and scientists equipped with full PPE while under medical supervision.

The US embassy found out about the experiments in Wuhan and sent diplomats with scientific expertise to inspect the institute in January 2018, according to diplomatic cables leaked to The Washington Post. They observed “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory”.

Before Covid-19 the Wuhan institute investigated whether mutant viruses they had created had the potential to spark a pandemic

EPA

Creating a mutant virus

Around the same time, the Wuhan institute took another perilous leap forward with its work on the Shitou viruses. It began what Professor Richard Ebright describes as the most dangerous coronavirus experiment ever undertaken. The scientists selected three lab-grown mutant viruses, created by mixing Sars-like viruses with WIV1, which had all been shown to infect human cells. These mutants were then injected into the noses of albino mice with human lungs.

The aim was to see whether the viruses had the potential to spark a pandemic if they were fused together, as they might do naturally in a bat colony. The original WIV1 virus was injected into another group of mice as a comparison.

The mice were monitored in their cages over two weeks. The results were shocking. The mutant virus that fused WIV1 with SHC014 killed 75 per cent of the rodents and was three times as lethal as the original WIV1. In the early days of the infection, the mice’s human-like lungs were found to contain a viral load up to 10,000 times greater than the original WIV1 virus.

The scientists had created a highly infectious super-coronavirus with a terrifying kill-rate that in all probability would never have emerged in nature. The new genetically modified virus was not Covid-19 but it might have been even more deadly if it had leaked.

The Sars epidemic had proved how lethal these types of virus were, and Sars itself was ten times as deadly as Covid-19. But Sars had been brought under control by quarantining, because the people who were infected exhibited symptoms a day or so before they could pass it on.

The experiment’s results suggested the new lab-made virus would be more difficult to stop if it leaked into the population, according to Ebright. It appeared to be highly infectious early in the illness.

The researchers’ tests also showed vaccines and other treatments developed to combat Sars were not effective against the new virus. The results of the experiment were not shared with other scientists in any scientific journal or paper.

The experiment was part-funded by EcoHealth’s grant money, but the FOI documents show that, while the Wuhan institute’s experiments were described in Daszak’s April 2018 annual progress report to the NIH, he did not refer to the deaths of the humanised mice.

There was also no mention of the mouse deaths in the grant renewal application Daszak filed to the NIH later that year. In this account, he said the mice had experienced “mild Sars-like clinical signs” when they were infected with the mutant virus. It had actually killed six of the eight infected humanised mice.

Daszak eventually provided details of the experiment’s deadly results to the US authorities in a report after the Covid-19 pandemic. He now says his 2018 statement about the “mild” illness was based on preliminary results — even though the experiment in which the mice died had taken place several months before he issued the statement.

Firefighters disinfecting Wuhan airport in April 2020, after the coronavirus had gone global

GETTY IMAGES

US defence funds rejected

By March 2018, the Wuhan institute was keen to press ahead with more experiments. Daszak applied for more funding from the US. He made a pitch for $14 million over three years from the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), which is responsible for emerging technology for use by the military.

The application, entitled Defuse — which names Daszak, Shi and Baric — proposed the Wuhan laboratory find large numbers of new Sars viruses and mix some of them with their two deadly strains from the Shitou cave — WIV1 and SHC014 — to see what would happen. Darpa declined to fund the research.

One specific experiment involved inserting a furin cleavage site, a tiny section of a virus’s genetic order that makes them more infectious, into the pathogens. Daszak and the Wuhan laboratory say they did not go ahead with the work. But when Covid-19 emerged the following year, it was notable for being the first Sars-like coronavirus with a furin cleavage site.

Last week, Daszak denied the EcoHealth-related experiments were dangerous. He said the NIH did not view the experiments as gain of function and that laboratory safety rules in China were followed at all times. The NIH said it “has never approved any research that would make a coronavirus more dangerous to humans”.

In 2012 six men who fell ill after an encounter with a large bat colony tested positive for antibodies to an unknown coronavirus

ALAMY

Finding Covid’s origins

While the US funders had been kept informed about the work on the cave viruses, investigators believe the Wuhan institute was running a shadow project that it kept secret, even from Daszak.

The root of this project goes back to an incident that allegedly drew the attention of the Chinese military to the work of scientists in Wuhan. In 2012, the Wuhan institute’s researchers investigated an abandoned copper mine with a large bat colony in the Mojiang region of south China. Six men clearing out bat guano there were struck down by a mystery illness that caused fever, coughs and pneumonia.

All the men required hospital treatment and three died. Tests on the men for various illnesses came back negative but they tested positive for antibodies to an unknown coronavirus.

It has been possible, however, to piece together what happened from a master’s thesis by a medic at the hospital that treated the men and a PhD paper by a student of the director of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention.

The incident happened while the institute was working on EcoHealth’s Predict programme, which was aimed at finding this type of virus crossover between animals and humans. But the Wuhan institute withheld information about the mine deaths from EcoHealth and the US government. Shi’s team spent four years stripping the Mojiang mine, collecting 1,300 samples from the bats, and discovered 293 coronaviruses.

The work on the mine appears to have ended in May 2015. A year later, Shi published a scientific paper referring to the discovery at the site of a coronavirus that was from a lineage of Sars never seen before. She called it RaBtCoV/4991.

The paper did not mention the deaths of the miners or that the scientists had found in the mine eight other Sars coronaviruses from the same previously undiscovered family.

After the pandemic began, the 4991 virus took on ever-greater significance. It was identified as the closest known relative to Covid-19. It meant the nine viruses found in the mine were the only members of Covid-19’s lineage known to have existed prior to the pandemic. When the Wuhan institute was forced to admit the existence of 4991 — having listed a section of its genome sequence on an international database in 2016 — it changed the name to RaTG13, which meant it could not easily be linked to the mine.

In 2021, after sustained pressure, Shi published the genomic sequences of the eight other mine viruses, claiming they were more distant from Covid-19 than RaTG13. However, the sequences’ veracity has been called into question.

Dr Monali Rahalkar, a microbiologist at the Agharkar Research Institute in Pune, India, swiftly tweeted: “Looks like cheating . . . May be they changed [the sequences] so people drop the trips to Mojiang mine.”

Many parts of China were still enduring lockdowns by late last year

GETTY IMAGES

A shadow project 

As the world emerged from lockdown, US State Department investigators were given access to secret intelligence on what had been happening in China in the months and years before Covid emerged.

More than a dozen investigators were given unparalleled access to “metadata, phone information and internet information” from intercepts collected by the US intelligence services.

The investigators’ report was published in early 2021. It made two assertions: that Wuhan scientists were conducting experiments on RaTG13 from the Moijang mine, and that covert military research, including laboratory animal experiments, was being done at the institute before the pandemic. But the published report was brief — just 700 words — and was stripped of all sourcing and detail because so much of it was confidential.

The Sunday Times has spoken to three members of the team. The intelligence they saw suggests the types of risky experiments undertaken on the Shitou cave Sars viruses were also conducted in secret on RaTG13 and the other Covid-19-like viruses from the mine.

“They were working with the nine different Covid variants,” one of the investigators said. They believe one virus at the Wuhan institute was an even closer match to Covid-19 than RaTG13. “We are confident they were working on a closer unpublished variant — possibly collected in Mojiang,” the source added.

The investigators spoke to two researchers working at a US laboratory who were collaborating with the Wuhan institute at the time of the outbreak. They said the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa.

The investigators also saw evidence that the institute was conducting “serial passaging” experiments on at least one of the mine viruses. This is a process in which lab animals are infected with viruses and monitored to see which strain is harmful to their health. The most damaging strain is selected for repeat experiments to encourage the pathogens to mutate into something more deadly.

The investigators spoke to a Wuhan institute insider who alleged serial passaging experiments were being carried out on RaTG13. “Humanised mice with the serial passaging is a toxic combination,” said a source. “It speeds up the natural mutation process. So instead of taking years to mutate, it can take weeks or months. It guarantees that you accelerate the natural process.”

Dr Steven Quay, a US scientist who advised the State Department on its investigation, believes the Wuhan institute’s secrecy about the mine virus never made sense. “There has never been an example of a bat virus directly infecting humans and killing,” he said. Sars was a bat virus that infected people via an intermediary animal. “If those miners died from a bat virus, that was the first time in the history of human science that that happened. And the Chinese didn’t publish it,” he added. The investigators think Daszak was kept in the dark about this part of the work.

Quay believes Covid-19 was created by inserting a furin cleavage site into one of the mine viruses and then serial passaging it through humanised mice. He submitted a statement to the US Senate explaining the process. “You infect the mice, wait a week or so, and then recover the virus from the sickest mice. Then you repeat. In a matter of weeks this directed evolution will produce a virus that can kill every humanised mouse.”

This explains why from the beginning of the outbreak, he says, the pandemic virus was so remarkably well adapted to infect humans.

Chinese military staff were given positions of responsibility in the Wuhan institute long before Covid-19 emerged, according to a US Senate report

GETTY IMAGES

Working with the military 

One of the reasons there is no published information on such work, according to all three investigators, is because the shadow project on the mine viruses at the Wuhan institute was being funded by the Chinese military.

The State Department investigators wrote in their report: “Despite presenting itself as a civilian institution, the United States has determined that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military. The Wuhan Institute of Virology has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”

One of the investigator sources said the secret military-funded experiments on the mine virus, RaTG13, began in 2016. At around that time, the Wuhan institute became even less open about its work and mostly stopped revealing any new coronaviruses it discovered. In the lead-up to the pandemic, the Wuhan institute frequently experimented on coronaviruses alongside the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, a research arm of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). In published papers, military scientists are listed as working for the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, which is the military academy’s base.

The military was also given positions of responsibility in the Wuhan institute, according to a US Senate report. A book published in 2015 by the military academy discusses how Sars viruses represent a “new era of genetic weapons” that can be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed”.

The authors are PLA researchers, and one of the book’s editors has collaborated on numerous scientific papers with Wuhan scientists. They discuss how Sars can be weaponised by fusing it with other viruses and “serial passaging” the resulting mutant to make it more dangerous.

A vaccine to shift power

The investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power.

The PLA had its own vaccine specialist, Zhou Yusen, a decorated military scientist at the academy, who had collaborated with the Wuhan scientists on a study of the Mers coronavirus and was working with them at the time of the outbreak.

Suspicion fell on him after the pandemic because he produced a patent for a Covid vaccine with remarkable speed in February 2020, little more than a month after the outbreak of the virus had first been admitted to the world by China.

A report published in April, co-authored by Dr Robert Kadlec, who was responsible for the US’s vaccine development programme, concluded that Zhou’s team must have been working on a vaccine no later than November 2019 — just as the pandemic began. One of the US investigators said testimony from scientists connected to the Wuhan institute’s collaborators suggested Covid-19 vaccine work was going on at the laboratory before the outbreak.

In May 2020, aged just 54, Zhou appears to have died, a fact mentioned only in passing in a Chinese-media report and in a scientific paper that placed the word “deceased” in brackets after his name. Witnesses are said to have told the US investigation that Zhou fell from the roof of the Wuhan institute, although this has not been verified.

Three scientists at the Wuhan lab fell ill with a mystery virus in November 2019

EPA

Did Covid leak in 2019?

The investigators also saw communications intercepts that allegedly show three Wuhan institute researchers working at its level 3 laboratory on coronavirus gain-of-function work had fallen sick with coronavirus symptoms in the second week of November 2019, when many experts believe the pandemic began. One of the researchers’ family members later died.

An investigator said: “We were rock-solid confident that this was likely Covid-19 because they were working on advanced coronavirus research in the laboratory of Dr Shi. They’re trained biologists in their thirties and forties. Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza.”

There was certainly much activity at the institute. It issued a patent on November 15 for a tourniquet to treat researchers who are “exposed accidentally, especially when wounds such as needle pricks and blade cuts occur”. A few days later, it sent out a procurement request for an incinerator to sanitise air being piped out of its laboratory complex.

On November 19, the safety director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences made a visit, according to the institute’s website. He addressed a meeting of the institute’s leadership with important “oral and written” instructions from China’s president, Xi Jinping, regarding “a complex and grave situation”.

A later study by academics at Wuhan University located the hotspots in Wuhan where people were reporting on social media that they needed treatment for Covid. At the time, the authorities were eager to play down the suggestion that the city’s Huanan seafood market was the source of the outbreak; the study was used to show that the initial hotspots in December and January were several miles away.

When the study was first published, the Wuhan institute was not marked on the map it provided. So a report by the US Senate did just that — and found the institute right next to the biggest hotspot in the month before the province was locked down on January 23. The first case in Britain was recorded a week later.

Even before the West was told a mysterious virus was killing people in Wuhan, the Chinese authorities were beginning an information clampdown.

If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power

AP

In the first months of the pandemic, there was a strong desire among Chinese scientists to head off to the bat caves in Yunnan to see whether they could find a place where Covid may have originated.

Dr Alice Hughes said: “Every CAS research institute was prioritised to go out and form these working groups to do more sampling.”

However, there was a no-go area: the Moijang mine. Seven of Hughes’s team headed to the mine in June 2020, including Camping Huang, the PhD student who had investigated the miners’ mystery illness soon after they died.

When they arrived, they were told the Moijang mine was closed, so they sampled bats in another abandoned copper mine nearby. On the first day of their work, police arrived, seized the samples and took them to their station, where they were interrogated and detained for 48 hours.

Officers also went to their hotel and seized the samples they had collected from elsewhere. Even though the team had approval to test in the area, they were ordered to leave. “We did provide documentation to show we were there legally,” said Hughes. “But there was just too much fear and so they didn’t release those samples.”

Shi has never revealed whether she returned to the Moijang mine or the surrounding area after the outbreak. She is still working at the Wuhan institute.

Hughes said she was barred from speaking to the media about the research and was being watched by China’s security service. She said: “I was told I was being monitored by the Yunnan Security Bureau for the work that we had done on bats, which isn’t something you want, especially as a foreigner in China.”

Eventually, there was a total clampdown on Covid origin work. Searching for bat viruses was banned in Yunnan in early 2021 and new restrictions on foreign researchers made it difficult for Hughes to continue her work. She left China to take up a post at Hong Kong University earlier this year.

Most coronavirus experts in China, she said, were too fearful of the consequences to examine Covid’s origins. “They haven’t touched it because of the risks associated with working on it.

“China has moved to a state where they can say what they want to be the case — they can cherry-pick data that fits that narrative and prevent the collection of data that could prove inconvenient. I think that it is very dangerous.”

 

[RDCanecutter 26446]

On 6/5/2023 at 11:41 AM, crash_davis said:

i know a guy who won the lottery and married a Chinese woman who is the daughter of some high ranking CCP official. Many years ago during the construction boom, she "started" a company which sold electrical supplies to all of the skyscraper builders for all the major cities. Basically her dad got her all of the supplier contracts.

A few years after marrying her, he went home to France for Christmas. He gave his mom $2M Euros for a Christmas present.

They are uber rich but my understanding is that they are peasants compared to mega rich. 

Sounds kinda like he married into the mob.

[Schulz2.0 28957]

 

[Horn of Gabriel 1614]

Another war game simulation about a cross strait invasion of Taiwan by China, this one put "most-favorable" conditions in place for China.  The goal here wasn't to see if the PRC could succeed, but rather what time window would the PRC need to capture Taipei before U.S. intervention arrived?  Prior war games have shown that once the US shows up, the best case for the PRC is a horrible stalemate where they destroy Taiwan's economy while lose tens to hundreds of thousands of soldiers and the bulk of their navy, air, and missile forces.  But that picture for the US is not much better, in an all-out, we'd lose a shit-ton of AF assets (mostly on the ground due to missiles).  

As someone (can't remember who) has pointed out multiple times up-thread, amphibious operations are really hard, prone to failure, the PRC has never done it, and their troop transports are "the size of cruise ships" with a radar cross section to match which makes them vulnerable to anti-ship missiles.  Those are all bad for the PLAN especially vs. the US, even though we are critically under resourced on anti-ship missiles with standoff range (see prior war game upthread).  But what happens if the PLA/N is able to get Taipai before our politicians decide to engage our military in response?  The window is shorter than you might think...

First, ROC navy is gone on day 1.  Out of the picture, destroyed by missiles.  Second, 90% of their air force is gone too, same story.

Quote

Similarly, as other studies have found, most of the ROCAF will be destroyed either on the ground or in the air after during the bombardment. It is important to note that this can be done with an estimated 60 – 200 Short Range Ballistic Missiles (SRBMs).¹⁶ With an assessed SRBM inventory of roughly 1,000 missiles, this estimated expenditure is extreme reasonable even if as much as 50 percent of PLA missiles are kept in reserve for a possible counter-U.S. intervention operation.¹⁷

ROC does have anti-ship missiles on land-based mobile launchers:

Quote

In recent years, Taiwan has significantly increased both its quantity of anti-ship missiles (ASMs) as well as diversified their firing units from ground-based launchers to air- and sea-launched systems. Amongst its ground-based forces, it had roughly 20 Hsiung Feng III missile launchers in 2020, with plans for 70 more in 2023. For this scenario, the ROC fields half of the new launchers by the time of invasion. This brings total ASM launchers to 55. With an average of 490 missiles built a year by 2023, there will be no shortage of munitions to target a PLA invasion fleet.¹³ Additionally, Taiwan just purchased 100 Harpoon Anti-Ship Cruise Missiles (ASCM) launchers with 400 missiles, bringing the total number of ground-based platforms for the PLA to target up to 155 launchers.¹⁴

However as soon as they fire they can be located and attrited.  And we have no idea about how experienced these teams are, same questions for the PLA/N also apply here.  But with the limited # of ASMs, the limited experience of the crews, and them being under constant fire, what if the "troop transports the size of cruise ships" are able to get through...?

Quote

...the above modeling shows the practical window for U.S. intervention in a Taiwan invasion prior to the seizure of Taipei and the displacement, dissolution, or capitulation of the ROC government effectively closes 31 days after the initial landings. In the scenario, this is 46 days after the start of the JFSO and 76 days after the “invasion likely” assessment, though both of those times were based on educated assumptions vice data-backed models. As stated, this analysis is based on a best-case-scenario timelines for the PLA, in which the Taiwanese resistance they encounter is more akin to that demonstrated by the beleaguered 2014 version of the Ukrainian military vice its more successful 2022 descendant. U.S. policy in the short run must be focused on ensuring Taiwan’s military is not the overwhelmed, underequipped, and unprepared former, but rather the well-equipped, well trained, and motivated latter.

I could easily see politicians debating intervention for 30+ days, easily.  And that assumes we are pre-positioned with everything we need to intervene, which is probably not true, there will be travel time, logistics, etc.

Oh on top of all that, Taiwanese aren't super motivated to defend themselves:

Quote

...a survey conducted by the Ministry of National Defense found that only 73 percent of Taiwanese would be willing to fight if Taiwan was invaded.³⁷

Again this isn't an assessment of how likely the PRC is to attempt invasion, which is a political decision.  This war game was about could they get it done before we move in, and it looks like the answer could be yes based on Taiwan's assets and willingness to fight.

A discussion of should the US intervene is also a political decision, but we need to get our shit straight on that ASAP one way or the other so we don't vacillate in the moment.  I'm on the intervene side, which is a whole other discussion but you can make a case for either.

 

[Schulz2.0 28957]

Did lol

 

[Captainant 27677]

29 minutes ago, Schulz2.0 said:

Did lol

“It is a handful of oatmeal mixed with low-fat yoghurt, with half an apple and a carrot. If such a meal is to extend life, what is the meaning of life?”

lulz they're not wrong

[Blotto 23523]

Quote

“It is a handful of oatmeal mixed with low-fat yoghurt, with half an apple and a carrot. If such a meal is to extend life, what is the meaning of life?”

Says the guy probably tucking into his lunch of living bird embryo with a side of sheep penis and chicken testicles. 

[Armybrat 40850]

2 hours ago, Blotto said:

Says the guy probably tucking into his lunch of living bird embryo with a side of sheep penis and chicken testicles. 

 Meanwhile, back in Austin….

 

[Bevo 13577]

Xi Jinping’s new world order is collapsing before our eyes

A tipping point is rapidly approaching that the West can use to its advantage

Matthew Henderson 15 June 2023 • 8:00am

China's faltering economic poses a fresh headache for president Xi Jinping Credit: NOEL CELIS/AFP

While the UK and US, each embroiled in democracy’s perverse consequences, struggle to thwart Putin’s mad ambitions in Ukraine, their respective China strategies face forceful challenge from Beijing. Xi Jinping is pushing brinkmanship to the edge in the Taiwan Straits and doubling down, as in Honduras, on its global efforts to isolate Taiwan.

Meanwhile, leading Western technology companies, alarmed by geopolitical uncertainty and facing hostile data “legislation,” are marching out of China in droves. Microsoft has already taken LinkedIn out and is moving an expert AI team to Canada to avoid local pressure on them.

Sub-par performance by the best-known Chinese stocks are compelling some seasoned Western asset managers to cut their exposure. Where is this debacle leading, and where might it end?

Risk has been defined as exposure to hostile intentions and capabilities. This dictum omits one vital issue: whether the party at risk is aware of what is going on. Arguably much of the “free” world is either ignorant, or in denial, about Xi Jinping’s policy drivers, intentions and capabilities.

This in itself is acutely risky. A tipping point in China Risk is rapidly approaching, and with it an opportunity to turn this to the West’s advantage.

Xi Jinping is forging ahead with plans for a revisionist New Era in which China becomes the sole super-power in an authoritarian, post-democratic world order. His immediate tactics include expedient alliances with other enemies of the West to defeat sanctions and other preemptive counter-measures short of military conflict.

He is striving to exploit Western political and economic division and disarray, not least through his tacit support for Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. His spuriously neutral Ukraine peace initiative lacks substance – indeed, this may be deliberate – but it symbolises his ultimate aspiration to global authority.

However, Xi is still a long way from achieving this. Though propaganda trumpets China’s triumph over the Covid virus and prospects for renewed growth, part of Xi’s aggressive haste stems from the realisation that the Chinese Communist Party state remains riddled with vulnerabilities.

China rapidly globalised its economic influence by exploiting the West’s illusion that, once admitted to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), it would engage in trade according to WTO rules and norms. But from the outset it denied foreign businesses free and fair access to its domestic market and used massive state subsidies to capture market dominance for its own products and systems across the world.

From 2018, the US has led a de facto trade war against this, while remaining uncomfortably tied to the Chinese economy by enduring debt and supply-chain dependencies.

Subsequent geopolitical and economic tensions have progressively worsened due to China’s human rights abuses, political interference, cyber espionage and IP theft, mistrust and sourcing disruption caused by the pandemic, alignment with Russia, and threats to Taiwan.

This has led to an accelerating exodus of major Western companies from China to more reliable regional bases in South-East Asia, India and Bangladesh. The low cost of factory labour in China, formerly a major draw for FDI, no longer applies. Factory wages in South China are now around three times higher than in equivalent South Asian industries.

The Chinese economy has long been struggling under Xi Jinping’s Marxist ideological chokehold. Covid lockdown early in the pandemic was a kneejerk CCP crisis management response to potential social disturbance. Imposed disastrously late, it slowed transmission but failed to boost immunity. 

“Zero Covid” proved powerless against the omicron variant but was not abandoned until the export-led national economy had been badly damaged by needlessly-prolonged coercive lockdowns.

Unsurprisingly, promised recovery has not been realised. Exports are depressed and the property market is in disarray, with more and more major players being delisted on the Shanghai stock exchange. The tech sector remains traumatised by Xi’s politically-motivated crackdown in 2021, which has wiped out many jobs for educated young workers at a time of serious youth unemployment.

Debt remains toxic, demographics are intractable (despite a huge surge in mortality among the under-immunised elderly soon after Zero Covid rules were abruptly relaxed). Environmental stresses, particularly water security, are worsening.

Seemingly ignoring these headwinds, Xi Jinping’s model for economic resurgence is a distinctly ideological formula called the Dual Cycle economy. The idea is to stimulate domestic technical innovation and production, leveraging this to give China a lead in global markets for cutting-edge technologies, while concurrently driving down dependency on technical cooperation with the West.

This construct ties in existing nationalist, anti-market measures and a protectionist, sanction-proofing subtext, sitting badly with claims that China is now open to the world for “business as usual”.  Recent use of arbitrary data-protection legislation to seize records, detain staff and freeze important ESG and other compliance work done by foreign consultancies in Shanghai and elsewhere also undermines this claim.

Xi is hoarding gold, securing energy supplies and building up China’s military capabilities, in particular those used to threaten Taiwan. To argue that he will not, for some time at least, invade Taiwan for fear of the economic consequences misses the real point.

Xi would prefer to annex Taiwan without a fight, but he needs to be able to flex enough military muscle to undermine US support to the point that the Taiwanese lose faith in it and accept the inevitable. But this will not pay for itself, and scaring off FDI won’t fill any coffers.

Xi shows little capacity to tackle the fundamental unsustainability of the Chinese economy.  Failure to do so could sweep away his dreams of a revisionist New Era. There has been much talk lately of “de-risking” from China. This is a two-way process; it should entail renewed, concerted economic pressure, including enhanced sanctions, against a regime that is already far more of a global threat than Russia.

As an Indian commentator has observed, the imperative is to reinforce national power and work in step with China’s sole global “balancer,” the US. The “Atlantic Declaration” is welcome; now it needs to grow some teeth.

[Brisketexan 105151]

Xi Jinping’s new world order is collapsing before our eyes

A tipping point is rapidly approaching that the West can use to its advantage
Matthew Henderson 15 June 2023 • 8:00am China's faltering economic poses a fresh headache for president Xi Jinping Credit: NOEL CELIS/AFP While the UK and US, each embroiled in democracy’s perverse consequences, struggle to thwart Putin’s mad ambitions in Ukraine, their respective China strategies face forceful challenge from Beijing. Xi Jinping is pushing brinkmanship to the edge in the Taiwan Straits and doubling down, as in Honduras, on its global efforts to isolate Taiwan.
Meanwhile, leading Western technology companies, alarmed by geopolitical uncertainty and facing hostile data “legislation,” are marching out of China in droves. Microsoft has already taken LinkedIn out and is moving an expert AI team to Canada to avoid local pressure on them.
Sub-par performance by the best-known Chinese stocks are compelling some seasoned Western asset managers to cut their exposure. Where is this debacle leading, and where might it end?
Risk has been defined as exposure to hostile intentions and capabilities. This dictum omits one vital issue: whether the party at risk is aware of what is going on. Arguably much of the “free” world is either ignorant, or in denial, about Xi Jinping’s policy drivers, intentions and capabilities.
This in itself is acutely risky. A tipping point in China Risk is rapidly approaching, and with it an opportunity to turn this to the West’s advantage.
Xi Jinping is forging ahead with plans for a revisionist New Era in which China becomes the sole super-power in an authoritarian, post-democratic world order. His immediate tactics include expedient alliances with other enemies of the West to defeat sanctions and other preemptive counter-measures short of military conflict.
He is striving to exploit Western political and economic division and disarray, not least through his tacit support for Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. His spuriously neutral Ukraine peace initiative lacks substance – indeed, this may be deliberate – but it symbolises his ultimate aspiration to global authority.
However, Xi is still a long way from achieving this. Though propaganda trumpets China’s triumph over the Covid virus and prospects for renewed growth, part of Xi’s aggressive haste stems from the realisation that the Chinese Communist Party state remains riddled with vulnerabilities.
China rapidly globalised its economic influence by exploiting the West’s illusion that, once admitted to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), it would engage in trade according to WTO rules and norms. But from the outset it denied foreign businesses free and fair access to its domestic market and used massive state subsidies to capture market dominance for its own products and systems across the world.
From 2018, the US has led a de facto trade war against this, while remaining uncomfortably tied to the Chinese economy by enduring debt and supply-chain dependencies.
Subsequent geopolitical and economic tensions have progressively worsened due to China’s human rights abuses, political interference, cyber espionage and IP theft, mistrust and sourcing disruption caused by the pandemic, alignment with Russia, and threats to Taiwan.
This has led to an accelerating exodus of major Western companies from China to more reliable regional bases in South-East Asia, India and Bangladesh. The low cost of factory labour in China, formerly a major draw for FDI, no longer applies. Factory wages in South China are now around three times higher than in equivalent South Asian industries.
The Chinese economy has long been struggling under Xi Jinping’s Marxist ideological chokehold. Covid lockdown early in the pandemic was a kneejerk CCP crisis management response to potential social disturbance. Imposed disastrously late, it slowed transmission but failed to boost immunity. 
“Zero Covid” proved powerless against the omicron variant but was not abandoned until the export-led national economy had been badly damaged by needlessly-prolonged coercive lockdowns.
Unsurprisingly, promised recovery has not been realised. Exports are depressed and the property market is in disarray, with more and more major players being delisted on the Shanghai stock exchange. The tech sector remains traumatised by Xi’s politically-motivated crackdown in 2021, which has wiped out many jobs for educated young workers at a time of serious youth unemployment.
Debt remains toxic, demographics are intractable (despite a huge surge in mortality among the under-immunised elderly soon after Zero Covid rules were abruptly relaxed). Environmental stresses, particularly water security, are worsening.
Seemingly ignoring these headwinds, Xi Jinping’s model for economic resurgence is a distinctly ideological formula called the Dual Cycle economy. The idea is to stimulate domestic technical innovation and production, leveraging this to give China a lead in global markets for cutting-edge technologies, while concurrently driving down dependency on technical cooperation with the West.
This construct ties in existing nationalist, anti-market measures and a protectionist, sanction-proofing subtext, sitting badly with claims that China is now open to the world for “business as usual”.  Recent use of arbitrary data-protection legislation to seize records, detain staff and freeze important ESG and other compliance work done by foreign consultancies in Shanghai and elsewhere also undermines this claim.
Xi is hoarding gold, securing energy supplies and building up China’s military capabilities, in particular those used to threaten Taiwan. To argue that he will not, for some time at least, invade Taiwan for fear of the economic consequences misses the real point.
Xi would prefer to annex Taiwan without a fight, but he needs to be able to flex enough military muscle to undermine US support to the point that the Taiwanese lose faith in it and accept the inevitable. But this will not pay for itself, and scaring off FDI won’t fill any coffers.
Xi shows little capacity to tackle the fundamental unsustainability of the Chinese economy.  Failure to do so could sweep away his dreams of a revisionist New Era. There has been much talk lately of “de-risking” from China. This is a two-way process; it should entail renewed, concerted economic pressure, including enhanced sanctions, against a regime that is already far more of a global threat than Russia.
As an Indian commentator has observed, the imperative is to reinforce national power and work in step with China’s sole global “balancer,” the US. The “Atlantic Declaration” is welcome; now it needs to grow some teeth.

Great piece.
To me, the wildcard is whether China can exploit Russia’s weakness to extract economic/resource concessions that are significant enough to truly alter China’s global position.
The opportunity is there, and China is taking SOME advantage of it, but from what I can tell, not nearly enough.
China in the past decade has not been thinking nearly long-term strategically enough. My working hypothesis is that China is showing that it’s not immune to the “strong man weakness” - when a country is ruled by one man, especially when that lasts for a significant period of time, they end up stuck with one man’s unquestioned thinking instead of a strategy that is developed by considering multiple inputs and ideas. Nobody questions Xi, so his worst ideas continue unchallenged. If a strategy isn’t working, many countries come around to that and pivot. Under a strongman, they can’t, because to acknowledge that a strategy isn’t working is a judgment that the strongman was wrong, and that cannot happen: vulnerability/fallibility it is the one thing a strongman can never admit.

[Armybrat 40850]

He should be learning something from Putin’s example.

[Brisketexan 105151]

He should be learning something from Putin’s example.

That’s the point: he can’t. The “strongman strategy” is an all-in proposition. It’s foundation is that the leader is infallible. Thus, positions and strategies are nearly impossible to change, because to change to path B is an admission that path A was. It the best choice…and the leader only makes the best choices.

[Armybrat 40850]

That has always been the weak point of longtime dictatorships.

[elfenix 34251]

3 hours ago, Bevo said:

Xi Jinping’s new world order is collapsing before our eyes

A tipping point is rapidly approaching that the West can use to its advantage

Matthew Henderson 15 June 2023 • 8:00am

 

if anyone has recent experience with collapsing empires its the brits

[Parliament 14260]

too soon

[Schulz2.0 28957]

 

[Schulz2.0 28957]

 

[KeysPhoneWallet 807]

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202306/1292985.shtml


Article on how boring white people food is and how awesome Chinese food is.

[Parliament 14260]

They've never had tacos.  Or brisket.

[CHIEF 5090]

1 hour ago, KeysPhoneWallet said:

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202306/1292985.shtml


Article on how boring white people food is and how awesome Chinese food is.

I remember the first day of my Freshman year Eastern Civ I class. The first thing my professor said was, "the Chinese will eat anything that doesn't eat them first."

CHIEF

[Brisketexan 105151]

38 minutes ago, CHIEF said:

I remember the first day of my Freshman year Eastern Civ I class. The first thing my professor said was, "the Chinese will eat anything that doesn't eat them first."

CHIEF

Chinese = Asian coonasses.

Respek.

[Handcruser 2805]

 

This week I had some hot ass Chinese girl contact me on linked in. Her name was “Laura Cox” and she messaged me about her Corp to see if we could “discuss”. I knew it was bullshit but I was on a conf call so I looked up the company and didn’t see anything that was active - no website or anything. I responded with “what do you want to discuss” and she said “I don’t know” then she asked if I could share my WeChat or whatever info and I said “what’s your Instagram?” And she said “what’s that” lolz.

I checked today and she had already deleted the profile. So this hits close to home.

[Parliament 14260]

Ask her for nudes.

[Orange&White 5528]

14 minutes ago, Parliament said:

Ask her for nudes.

This is the way.

[Schulz2.0 28957]

 

 

[DigglerontheHoof 21200]

Like they’d have a choice.

[YGIFS 19450]

So a guy that literally used to cook Chinese food for the ‘Stable Genius’ ruler so respected by our dear leader is helping organize a coup that will likely disrupt energy supply to China, and we are not living in a simulation?   This is going to be fantastic.  Dibs on Movie rights. 

[Midnight Ambler 75]

 

[Parliament 14260]

Begun, the gallium wars have.

[SL Xpress 7516]

5 minutes ago, Parliament said:

Begun, the gallium wars have.

We’ll see how far it goes. Both sides have a lot of weapons at their disposal. 

I’m all in favor for as much of a decoupling from China as we can manage, but I have no confidence the American people are ready for the pain that will involve. People have been sounding the alarm on this stuff for over 20 years, to no real avail. 

But make no mistake. China sees it as their destiny to replace the US at the top of the world’s pyramid. They see us as lazy, decadent, soft, and tired of the responsibility of being a world superpower. They’re ready to step in and remake the economic order to their advantage. They’ve done a great job of establishing an industrial base to do just that, but the problem with using weapons is that once you do, the other side starts coming up with counters. My hope is that Chiba overextended their hand and helps the west overcome their addiction to Chinese market incentives. 

Here’s a decent WaPo article on how we got here. Not exhaustive by any means. Many books have been written on the subject. But a decent quick overview. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/2023/07/03/why-the-fight-for-critical-minerals-is-heating-up/5e9959b6-19b2-11ee-be41-a036f4b098ec_story.html

[Gengs1 2583]

5 minutes ago, SL Xpress said:

We’ll see how far it goes. Both sides have a lot of weapons at their disposal. 

I’m all in favor for as much of a decoupling from China as we can manage, but I have no confidence the American people are ready for the pain that will involve. People have been sounding the alarm on this stuff for over 20 years, to no real avail. 

But make no mistake. China sees it as their destiny to replace the US at the top of the world’s pyramid. They see us as lazy, decadent, soft, and tired of the responsibility of being a world superpower. They’re ready to step in and remake the economic order to their advantage. They’ve done a great job of establishing an industrial base to do just that, but the problem with using weapons is that once you do, the other side starts coming up with counters. My hope is that Chiba overextended their hand and helps the west overcome their addiction to Chinese market incentives. 

Here’s a decent WaPo article on how we got here. Not exhaustive by any means. Many books have been written on the subject. But a decent quick overview. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/2023/07/03/why-the-fight-for-critical-minerals-is-heating-up/5e9959b6-19b2-11ee-be41-a036f4b098ec_story.html

How we got here;

Greed and slave labor (sort of how we operated for a long time)