Let’s start with continuity – and stability. There’s no question after the plenum that Xi Dada, or The Big Panda, will stay on the helm until 2029 – the end of the current five-year economic drive.

And if Xi is healthy enough, he stays up to 2035: the fateful and uber game-changing target year for China to exhibit a GDP per capita of $30,000, with massive around-the-world reverberations.

Here we see the confluence between the progression of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and the defining contours if not of a Pax Sinica, at least of the non-Hegemon-centric, multi-nodal world (italics mine).

The proverbial U.S. Think Tankland/Sinophobia axis has been hysterical on China not being able to sustain a 5% a year growth rate for the next few years – the target once again stressed at the plenum.

A Russian analysis by the Center for Geopolitical Forecasts makes a crucial point: “The Chinese themselves have not bothered about the growth rate for a long time, since in 2018 they switched to a strategy of so-called qualitative development, that is, not at the expense of traditional industries, but on the basis of high technologies and the creation of new areas, such as the production of new energy sources and artificial intelligence.”

Pres. Xi

Made in China 2025 – which is being implemented at breakneck speed: high-tech development leading the way towards a “high-level socialist market economy”, to be consolidated by 2025 and fully constructed by 2035.

The next step will be to attain the status of “modernized socialist power” by 2049, at the 100th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

The plenum proved once more that “socialism with Chinese characteristics” – or, for the recalcitrant, Chinese-modified capitalism – is “people-centric”. The supreme values are national interest and the people’s interests – attested by the fact that large private corporations remain under the strategic control of the CPC.

It’s idle to try to find in the final communique at the end of the plenum any restrictions on private capital on the path to “universal prosperity”. The key point is that the role of capital should always be subordinated to the concept of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”.

Watch the reform ship steadily sailing

Everything is explained here in nearly didactic terms, chronicling the birth of the “Decision of the CPC Central Committee on further comprehensive deepening of reforms to promote Chinese modernization”.

What is now already referred to colloquially all across China as “The Decision” spreads across 15 parts and 60 articles, divided into three main sections, proposing more than 300 important reforms.

Take a look, for instance, at this passage:

“To ensure that the reform ship sails forward steadily, the ‘Decision’ proposes that further comprehensive deepening of reform must implement the “six principles”: adhere to the party’s overall leadership, adhere to the people-centered approach, adhere to the principle of maintaining the integrity and promoting innovation, adhere to system building as the main line, adhere to the comprehensive rule of law, and adhere to a systematic approach.”

Most of the “Decision” – 6 parts in a total of 13 – is about economic reform. Will China pull it off? Of course it will.

Just look at the precedents. In 1979 the Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping started to transform a nation of farmers and peasants into a well-oiled machine of efficient industrial workers. Along the way, GDP per capita was multiplied by no less than 30 times.

Now the ramifications of Made in China 2025 are turning a nation of factory workers into a nation of engineers. Of 10,5 million university graduates a year, a third are engineers.

The emphasis on AI has led, among other examples, to the automobile industry being able to produce a $9,000 EV in complete automation and make a profit. China is already a global leader in EVs (BYD building plants in Brazil, Thailand, Turkey, Hungary), solar power, drones, telecom infrastructure (Huawei, ZTE), steel, shipbuilding – and soon, also semiconductors (thank you, Trump sanctions).

While the Hegemon spent at least $7 trillion – and counting – on unwinnable Forever Wars, China is spending $1 trillion in an array of Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects across the Global South: the emphasis is digital/transportation connectivity corridors. Geoeconomic imperatives intertwined with rising geopolitical influence.

Hegemon hysteria aside, the fact is the Chinese economy will grow by a whopping $1.7 trillion only in 2024. That is more than in all but the last three years – because of the Covid effect.

Researcher Geoff Roberts has compiled a very useful list of what China is doing right.

And when it comes to the nitty-gritty, the numbers are staggering. Here are just a few, apart from GDP growth:

• Foreign goods trade is up 6.1% to $2.9 trillion year-on-year.

• The trade surplus is at $85 billion, up 12% compared to 2023.

• China had a record crop, 150 million tons, of cereal grains.

• The courier sector handled 80 billion parcels, up 23% year-on-year.

• SMIC is the world’s number two pure-play foundry, after Taiwan’s TSMC.

• China Telecom paid $265 million for 23% of QuantumCTek, patenter of Micius, the world’s first quantum communications satellite.

• Commercial aerospace launched 39% of China’s 26 rockets.

• Invention patents rose 43% to 524,000. China is the first country with 4 million domestic invention patents in force.

• Baidu’s 1,000 robotaxis in Wuhan will break even in Q4, and will be profitable next year.

• China has 47% of the world’s top AI talent. It added no less than 2000 AI courses to school and college curricula since 2019.

• On world-class institutions doubling as research leaders, 7 out of 10 are Chinese, including the top one: the Chinese Academy of Sciences, ahead of Harvard.

Exceptionalist China “experts” believe their own fantasy that the U.S. allied with occupied Japan, Germany and South Korea would be able to match and surpass China’s pull with the Global Majority, because they have more resources and more capital.

Nonsense. Even more nonsense is to believe that the Hegemon’s NATO “partners” – as in vassals – will follow the leader in creating cutting edge technology.

The high-speed train that matters has already left the station. The 21^st century is shaping up to be the Asian, Eurasian, Chinese century.

We are the world. We are the people. We are NATO. And we’re comin’ to get ya – wherever you are, whether you want it or not.

Call it the latest pop iteration of the “rules-based international order” – duly christened at NATO’s 75^thbirthday in D.C.

Well, the Global Majority had already been warned – but brains under techno-feudalism tend to be reduced to mush.

J. Stoltenberg—careerist merchant of mass murder.

So a gentle reminder is in order. This had already been stated in the first paragraph of the Joint Declaration on EU-NATO Cooperation, issued on January 9, 2023:

“We will further mobilize the combined set of instruments at our disposal, be they political, economic, or military, (italics mine) to pursue our common objectives to the benefit of our one billion citizens.”

Correction: barely one million, part of the 0.1% plutocracy. Certainly not one billion.

Cut to the 2024 NATO Summit Declaration – obviously redacted, with stellar mediocrity, by the Americans, with the other 31 assorted vassal members duly assenting.

So here’s the main 2024 NATO “strategic” trifecta:

1. Forceful imposition of extra military spending on all members.
2. Massive hyping up of the “China threat”.

As for the theme song of the NATO 75 show, there are actually two. Apart from “China Threat” (closing credits), the other one (opening credits) is “Free Ukraine”. The lyrics go something like this: it looks like we are at war against Russia in Ukraine, but don’t be fooled: NATO is not a participant in the war.

Well, they are even setting up a NATO office in Kiev, but that is just to coordinate production for a Netflix war series.

Those malignant authoritarians

The outgoing epileptic slab of Norwegian wood posing as NATO Secretary-General – before the arrival of his Dutch Gouda replacement – put on quite a performance. Highlights include his fierce denunciation of “the growing alliance between Russia and its authoritarian friends in Asia”, as in “authoritarian leaders in Iran, North Korea and China”. These malignant entities “all want NATO to fail”. So there’s much work to do “with our friends in the Indo-Pacific”.

The joint declaration directly blames China for fueling Russian “aggression” in Ukraine: Beijing is described as a “decisive enabler” of the Kremlin’s “war effort”. NATO scriptwriters even directly threaten China: China “cannot enable the largest war in Europe in recent history without this negatively impacting its interests and reputation”.

To counter-act such malignity, NATO will expand its “partnerships” with “Indo-Pacific” states.

Even before the summit declaration, the Global Times was already losing their cool with these inanities: “Under the hype from the U.S. and NATO, it seems that China has become the ‘key’ to the survival of Europe, controlling the fate of the Russia-Ukraine conflict like a ‘decisive power.’”

The tawdry rhetorical fest in D.C. definitely won’t cut it in Beijing: the Hegemon just wants “to reach more deeply into Asia, trying to establish an ‘Asia-Pacific NATO’ to help achieve the U.S.’ ‘Indo-Pacific Strategy.’”

Southeast Asia, via diplomatic channels, essentially agrees: with the exception of bought and paid for misguided Filipinos, no one wants serious turbulence across Asia-Pacific like NATO has unleashed across Europe.

Zhou Bo, senior fellow at Tsinghua University’s Center for International Security and Strategy and a retired PLA officer, also dismissed the Indo-Pacific shenanigans even before the summit: we had an excellent exchange about it late last year at the Astana Forum in Kazakhstan.

Whatever happens, Exceptionalistan will remain on overdrive. NATO and Japan have agreed to establish a “highly confidential security information” line, around the clock. So count on meek Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to enhance Japan’s “pivotal role” in the building of an Asian NATO.

Everyone with a brain from Urumqi to Bangalore knows that the motto across Asia, for the Exceptionalists, is “Today Ukraine, Tomorrow Taiwan”. The absolute majority of ASEAN, and hopefully India, will not fall for it.

What is clear is that the NATO at 75 circus is absolutely clueless and impervious to what happened at the recent SCO summit in Astana. Especially when it comes to the SCO now positioned as a key node in bringing on a new, Eurasia-wide collective security arrangement.

As for Ukraine, once again Medvedev Unplugged, in inimitable style, delivered the Russian position:

“The Washington Summit Declaration of July 10 mentions ‘the irreversible path of Ukraine’ to NATO. For Russia, 2 possible ways of how this path ends are acceptable: either Ukraine disappears, or NATO does. Still better, both.”

In parallel, China is conducting military exercises in Belarus only a few days after Minsk officially became a SCO member. Translation: forget about NATO “expanding” to Asia when Beijing is already making it clear it is very much present in NATO’s alleged “backyard”.

A declaration of war against Eurasia

Michael Hudson once again has reminded everyone with a brain that the running NATO warmongering show has nothing to do with peaceful internationalism. It’s rather about “a unipolar U.S. military alliance leading toward military aggression and economic sanctions to isolate Russia and China. Or more to the point, to isolate European and other allies from its former trade and investment with Russia and China, making those allies more dependent on the United States.”

The 2024 NATO declaration actually is a renewed declaration of war, hybrid and otherwise, against Eurasia – as well as Afro-Eurasia (yes, there are promises of “partnerships” advancing everywhere from Africa to the Middle East).

The Eurasia integration process is about geoeconomic integration – including, crucially, transportation corridors connecting, among other latitudes, northern Europe with West Asia.

For the Hegemon, this is the ultimate nightmare: Eurasia integration driving Western Europe away from the U.S. and preventing that perennial wet dream, the colonization of Russia.

So only plan A would apply, with absolute ruthlessness: Washington – literally – bombed Russia-Germany integration (Nord Stream 1 and 2, and more) and turned the vassal lands of frightened, discombobulated Europeans into a potentially very dangerous place, right beside a raging Hot War.

So once again, let everyone go back to that first paragraph of the January 2023 EU-NATO joint communiqué. That’s what we’re facing today, reflected on the title of my latest book, Eurasia v. NATOstan: NATO – in theory – fully mobilized, in military, political and economic terms, to fight against any Global Majority forces that may destabilize Imperial Hegemony.

So Le Petit Roi in Paris was predictably crushed in the European polls. He has called parliamentary snap elections, dissolving the Assemblée Nationale in an act of blind, puerile revenge on French citizens, de facto attacking French institutional democracy.

That doesn’t mean much anyway, because the lineaments of “liberty, equality, fraternity” have long been usurped by a crass oligarchy.

The second round of these fresh French elections will be on July 7 – nearly coinciding with the British snap elections on July 11, and only a few days before the slow-burning urban catastrophe which will be the Olympics in Paris.

Paris salons are ablaze with intrigue on why the little Rothschild stooge with a Napoleon complex is throwing all his toys out of the pram now because he’s not getting what he wants.

After all what he really craves is to become a “War President” – together with the Cadaver in the White House, Starmer in the UK, Rutte in the Netherlands, the Toxic Medusa von der Lugen in Brussels, Tusk in Poland, without having to answer to the French people.

Bigger things though are in play. Following the – auspicious – game-changing messages to the Global Majority coming out of the St. Petersburg forum last week, anchored on openness and inclusiveness, the BRICS 10 meeting of Foreign Ministers in Nizhny Novgorod carried the baton early this week.

Foreign Minister Lavrov stressed three key points:

1. “The countries of the Global South no longer want to be dependent on the double standards of the West and its whims.”
2. “Everyone knows that the BRICS countries already serve as the locomotive of the world economy.”
3. “We [at the BRICS FMs meeting] stressed the need for consistent efforts to create a new world order, where the equality of independent states will be the key.”

Now compare it with the shrinking G7 meeting later this week in Puglia in southern Italy: the same old song, from a “tough new warning” to Chinese banks (“Don’t do business with Russia or else!”) to vociferous threats against the China-Russia strategic partnership.

As for U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell – the man who invented the defunct “pivot to Asia” during Harpy Hillary Clinton’s tenure in the early 2010s – he had already advanced that Washington will sanction Chinese companies and banks over Beijing’s relations with Russia’s military-industrial complex.

False flags and perfect symmetry

By several metrics, Europe is about to implode/explode not with a bang but an agonizing whimper anytime within the next few months. It’s crucial to remember that the snap elections in France and Britain will also coincide with the NATO summit on July 11 – where Russophobia-fueled warmongering will reach paroxysm.

https://twitter.com/businessgamesai/status/1768412916724945149?s=61&t=yxNVCSjcU1Wun7EKr7fpww

The fact remains that the only way these “leaders” across NATOstan plus their lowly MI6 agent in a green sweaty T-shirt in Kiev will survive is by manufacturing a casus belli.

October will be too late: too close to the U.S. elections.

So be prepared for the Summer of Living Dangerously.

Meanwhile, The Bear is not exactly hibernating. President Putin, before and during the St. Petersburg forum, elaborated on how “symmetric” Moscow’s response will be to attacks by Kiev using NATOstan missiles – already ongoing.

There are three NATOstan members which are supplying missiles with a range of 350 km and more: U.S., UK and France.

So a “symmetric” response would imply Russia providing Global South nations with advanced weaponry – capable of causing serious damage to nodes of the Empire of Bases.

And here are the top candidates to receive these weapons – as extensively debated not only on Russian TV channels but also in the St. Petersburg forum corridors.

Central, Northeast, Southeast Asia: Afghanistan, Myanmar (these two were present in St. Petersburg) and North Korea.

Latin America: Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua (just look at the current Russian foray in the Caribbean).

Africa: Central African Republic, Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia, Southern Sudan and Zimbabwe (just look at Lavrov’s recent African tour).

Mr. Zircon says hello

And that brings us the jolly matter of a Russian naval force hangin’ out in the Caribbean, headed by the hypersonic missile-armed frigate Admiral Gorshkov and the Kazan nuclear submarine.

The indispensable Andrei Martyanov has noted how the Gorshkov “carries 32 Onyx, Zircon, Kalibrs and Otvet. These are the most advanced and deadly cruise missiles in history, with a serious combat pedigree. Kazan, which is Yasen-class SSGN carries also 32 VLS and, in addition, has 10 torpedo tubes which can shoot not just torpedoes.”

Well, this naval force is obviously not there to launch WWIII. Martyanov explains that “while both can strike all of the Eastern seaboard of the U.S. and Canada, they are there not for that reason. God forbid if it comes to real WWIII there are plenty of Bulavas, Avangards, Sarmats and Yarses to deal with this horrifying business. No, both Gorshkov and Kazan are there to show that they can reach any combat ship or strategic sea lift vessel carrying any military combat set from North America to Europe in case of some nutjob deciding to try to survive a conventional war with Russia in 404.”

What’s even more intriguing is that after spending time in Havana, the naval force will remain in the Caribbean for a series of exercises – and will be joined by other Russian Navy vessels. They will remain in these waters until the end of The Summer of Living Dangerously. Just in case some nutjob has fancy ideas.

Meanwhile, the possible escalation towards Hot War in Europe proceeds unabated, with NATO via its epileptic slab of Norwegian wood radically changing the established rules of proxy wars with one nonsense outburst after another.

The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) are already capable, via NATO, to destroy both military and civilian Russian assets – oil storage, airports, energy facilities, railway junctions, even concentration of troops.

Everyone and his neighbor will be waiting for the “symmetric” responses.

For all practical purposes the crucial decision has been made by the rarified plutocracy which really runs the show: force Europe into war on Russia. That’s the rationale behind all the rhetorical kabuki about a “military Schengen” and a New Iron Curtain from the Arctic through the Baltic chihuahuas all the way to rabid Poland.

The plutocracy actually believes that afterwards they can buy the whole thing for a pittance while flies are still laying eggs in radioactive European carcasses.