WEST ATTACKS CHINA’S SOCIAL CREDIT SYSTEM TO DEFLECT FROM ITS FASCIST PANOPTICON.

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

Jeff J. Brown

THIS IS A REPOST • Originally published on March 24, 2018

P A R T  T W O

This is Part 2 of our special series on The Chinese Social Credit System—Fact vs. (Western) Myth. See Part One here.  Read Part One here.   / Read Part Two here / Read Part Three here

WEST ATTACKS CHINA’S SOCIAL CREDIT SYSTEM TO DEFLECT FROM ITS FASCIST PANOPTICON. CHINA RISING RADIO SINOLAND 180325

March 24, 2018
 

By Jeff J. Brownpale blue horiz

Pictured above: the panopticon Illinois State Prison, near Joliet. For every Westerner out there, just look out your window. It’s even worse. Your every move, every communication and transaction, monetary and otherwise, is being tracked, recorded and stored by a faceless, multilayered, fascist corporate-government octopus. One-hundred-eighty degrees to the east in China, it’s all posted on the internet, TV and print media, for every citizen to follow and comment on, upon which Baba Beijing will respond in kind. Now, that’s what I call real, participatory democracy.

Downloadable SoundCloud podcast (also at the bottom of this page), as well as being syndicated on iTunes and Stitcher Radio (links below),


[dropcap] W [/dropcap]estern propaganda brilliantly and ceaselessly employs what is known as psychological reflection. This is a mental health term meaning that if you are guilty of being a pedophile or tax cheat, for example, you get on your soapbox about the evils of child molestation or fiscal crooks, respectively, while doing exactly that. Another great example is homophobia. Many homophobes, especially the most violent ones are repressed, closeted gays and lesbians, who internally loathe themselves.

Be it war, invasions, occupation, genocide, massacres, exterminations (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2018/03/17/wilfred-burchett-explains-why-like-all-good-fascists-every-day-is-my-lai-for-americans-china-rising-radio-sinoland-180319/), the use of chemical and biological weapons (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2018/03/12/noose-of-truth-is-tightening-around-milton-leitenberg-co-s-collective-neck-china-rising-radio-sinoland-180310/), institutionalized corruption, election fraud, pollution, CIA drug cartels, CIA organized crime (https://ganxy.com/i/113798/), ad nauseam, the West aggressively attacks all its enemies for being guilty of these and the rest of the world’s criminality, when in fact Eurangloland is the most brazen and bald faced Global Enemy #1 in every one of these categories, with the rest of humanity being its long-suffering victims.

Sadly, the West’s psychological reflection works so well that its endless tsunami of shameless lies and propaganda continues to win over the long term. Just look at how Eurangloland has completely perverted the opinions of the vast majority of the world’s people, at least those who do not live in communist-socialist countries, when it comes to Russia, the Russian people and its president, Vladimir Putin. Ditto Iran, Venezuela, North Korea (DPRK), Cuba, the Philippines and any other country (or its leader) that does not allow itself to be a craven whore for capitalist empire.

The effectiveness of western psychological reflection in the mainstream media is so thorough, that people I know who should see through this withering fog of propaganda are completely brainwashed. I call it being behind the Great Western Firewall. Yet, most Westerners I know who live overseas are just as clueless, due to their innate sense of racial superiority (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2017/11/10/all-the-chinese-people-want-is-respect-aretha-franklin-diplomacy-on-china-rising-radio-sinoland-171110/) and their unwillingness to look beyond CIA-MI6 CNN, New York Times, BBC, the Economist and all the other rubber stamp ventriloquist dummies that shill for their deep state masters. It is a demoralizing fact of life, something I passionately wrote about in Book #2 of The China Trilogy (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2017/05/19/the-china-trilogy/), China Rising – Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations (https://ganxy.com/i/113798/).

Eurangloland’s owners are throwing everything they have trying to destroy Russia, Iran, Venezuela and DPRK (let’s call them the Fearless Four) and too many others to name. You may notice that three of these four countries are some of the biggest hydrocarbon producers in the solar system, and that’s what the West’s elites really want to do, is bring down their respective governments and install puppet Boris Yeltsin’s, to commence with the rape of their citizens and plunder of their natural resources. It’s called capitalism, if you haven’t already figured it out or have yet to reluctantly accept the truth.

After 500 years of global tyranny and dictatorship, cracks in Western empire’s game plan are starting to show. The Fearless Four keep exposing Westerners for the racist buffoons and ideological zealots that they are. Almost nothing is working as planned near home base Europe (Russia and Iran) and America (Venezuela) Even North Korea’s very astute Kim Jong-Un is besting the West on the diplomatic front (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2017/08/28/why-dprk-will-n-e-v-e-r-stop-its-nuclear-arms-program-china-rising-radio-sinoland-170828/), having gotten Trump to agree to a joint summit (https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/03/trump-kim-jong-un/555323/).

How much worse can it get for Western empire? It must be time to bomb another country into the Middle Ages, or invade a small, helpless, poorly defended country full of dark skinned people. Like Iraq, how about Grenada II? That’ll keep the beer and popcorn flowing in front of Westerners’ 25%-interest-installment-plan-purchased widescreen TVs, for a week of Hunger Games bread and circuses.

Way out east, OMG, along comes Baba Beijing (China’s leadership) to really make a mess for Eurangloland (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2017/11/23/china-tech-is-unstoppable-from-noodle-shops-to-outer-space-china-rising-radio-sinoland-171123/). It too continues to run circles around racist, greedy and let’s face it, incredibly hubristic Westerners, at least the deep state and its stooges who occupy positions of power in its “democratically elected” puppet governments (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2017/10/25/how-can-western-capitalism-beat-this-thats-the-rub-it-cant-china-rising-radio-sinoland-171022/

and http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2017/12/10/china-loves-being-number-two-behind-the-us-officially-of-course-china-rising-radio-sinoland-171210/).

Thus, the mainstream media Wehrmacht undoubtedly has on the boards to try to bring down Baba Beijing, but it is being held up. Why? Three’s company and the Fearless Four are already a crowd. You can only spread your resources of destruction and chaos so far. As any good fascist will tell you, the Big Lie means staying laser focused and relentlessly on-message. Given with how it’s currently playing out and knowing the ultimate goal is taking control of these Others’ human and natural resources, the propaganda tsunami against the Fearless Four is already reaching the point of diminishing marginal returns. Adding a fifth behemoth target like China (which is just as savvy and patient as the Fearless Four) has probably been deemed too much by the West’s owners.

Therefore, Baba Beijing has gotten off pretty lightly up to now, compared to the fascist Big Lie against the Fearless Four. But in the interim, that still doesn’t mean China gets off Scot-free. The CIA-MI6 mainstream media juggernaut sees a chink in China’s armor (sorry, I couldn’t resist the awful, off-color pun), with its rapidly developing (Chinese) Social Credit System (CSCS – http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2018/01/11/chinas-public-social-credit-system-versus-the-wests-secret-panopticon-china-rising-radio-sinoland-180111/).

Patrice Greanville, Editor-in-Chief of The Greanville Post (https://www.greanvillepost.com/) sent to Godfree Roberts and me a hatchet piece about CSCS (https://forbiddenknowledgetv.net/china-banning-people-from-transit-for-bad-social-credit-scores/). It originally came from Reuters, a CIA-MI6 chop shop from way back (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-credit/china-to-bar-people-with-bad-social-credit-from-planes-trains-idUSKCN1GS10S). James Corbett has a rabid, irrational fear of all things China-socialism-communism, so he piled on (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6Buhli5MYk). Then Forbidden Knowledge ran with Corbett’s propaganda video, adding insult to injury.

Corbett is so cartoonishly bad about this subject, I even commented on it in China Rising – Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations (https://ganxy.com/i/113798/). It’s too bad, because otherwise he does some really good journalism. But then again, “liberal”, “progressive”, “alternative” journalists who have epileptic seizures at the mere whiff of China, socialism, communism or false flags (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2017/05/06/a-us-government-lie-exposed-the-1995-oklahoma-city-bombing-china-rising-radio-sinoland-170505/) are a renminbi a thousand. It takes courage and conviction to look outside your own bigoted, ideological blinders to admit that there are different points of view and squirm-in-your-seats, smoking gun evidence.

I sometimes wonder if journos like this get PayPal hongbao (red envelopes full of money given during Chinese New Year) from Langley and Vauxhall Cross, to post anti-Chinese propaganda. Or, maybe they are just your plain vanilla, subconscious racists (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2018/01/06/slavs-and-the-yellow-peril-are-niggers-brutes-and-beasts-in-the-eyes-of-western-empire-china-rising-radio-sinoland/). Forbidden Knowledge possibly didn’t notice it, but they allowed Godfree’s thoughtful and reasoned riposte to be published below their piece. If they nuke it, I have posted it below, safe for posterity.

In closing, here is a prime example of the difference between the West’s real life, fascist panopticon versus China’s open, honest and forthright Social Credit System. This month, China Central Television (CCTV) cooperated with Tencent Research (of Wechat fame) to do a national survey, talking to 8,000 citizens. The results were broadcast on CCTV, picked up by all the print and social media and it was the topic-of-the-country for a few days. Why? Because 76.3% of the respondents think that some kinds of artificial intelligence (AI) are a threat to their privacy (https://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2018/03/06/the-increasing-use-of-artificial-intelligence-is-stoking-privacy-concerns-in-china/). As the world’s largest user of surveys and polls (I wrote a whole chapter on this in China Rising and here is an article that touches on it: http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2016/05/22/china-has-the-worlds-most-popular-government-for-a-reason-china-rising-radio-sinoland-160522/), I can guarantee you that the results of this poll and many others like it were/are put on President Xi Jinping’s desk, as well as in the hands of thousands of other decision makers in China’s government. Unlike the West, Baba Beijing and Chinese democracy are proactively responsive to the citizens’ concerns, hopes and aspirations (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2017/11/30/do-you-see-what-i-see-depends-on-where-you-look-china-rising-radio-sinoland-171130/). Thousands of poll results are synthesized, analyzed and end up in laws passed and policies changed. China’s is real people’s participatory democracy, not the elitist, Potemkin Western version (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2017/12/27/china-has-democracy-and-the-west-has-dictatorship-171227/).

Herewith is Godfree Robert’s comment about the Reuters/Corbett Report/Forbidden Knowledge fearmongering yarn about China’s SCS. It is a great combo with my aforementioned article on the same subject (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2018/01/11/chinas-public-social-credit-system-versus-the-wests-secret-panopticon-china-rising-radio-sinoland-180111/).

I would like to preface Godfree by saying that in the CSCS, if you have substantial back taxes, delinquent loans, unpaid financial court settlements and the like, you can be banned from flying, or taking costlier highspeed trains here. They may even take your passport. The logic being, if you can afford to buzz all over the place, then why can’t you pay your debts? These are usually well-heeled citizens who have the assets to live the high life. They can always drive their (chauffeured) cars on China’s 131,000km of motorways, more than any other country in the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_road_network_size and http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2017/08/26/china-is-the-most-plugged-in-big-economy-in-the-world-china-rising-radio-sinoland-170824/). I have never heard of not being able to take the metro or standard trains, unless you are out of prison and on parole.

These kinds of restrictions and much more onerous ones are put upon citizens in the West. The United States is now routinely imprisoning poor people who owe money, East St. Louis being just one of many examples (https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/debtors-prison/462378/). That’s just the tip of the American iceberg for loss of freedoms and due process. The Oklahoma Department of Education (ODE) refuses to give me my updated teacher’s certificate, because I have sent in my tax returns to the IRS three times, and due to its incompetence, my returns have never been official registered in its database. Last summer, I even went to the Oklahoma Tax Commission and hand delivered my returns to them, but that’s not good enough. The feds say no go, so I’m out $50 at ODE for nothing but frustration and insults.

These kinds of governmental limits on freedom and due process are legendary in the West (I lived and worked in France for five years), often preying on the powerless, voiceless and dark skinned members of society. As Godfree explains below, the Chinese are getting legal recourse for the CSCS. I know experientially that they already have it in local courts for small claim redresses, because I threatened to sue my landlord in Beijing and he backed down, a true life story I detailed in China Is Communist Dammit – Dawn of the Red Dynasty (https://www.amazon.com/China-Communist-Dammit-Dawn-Dynasty/dp/6027354380/).

Godfree’s turn:

 Erm, no. China’s very public Social Credit program is not America’s very secret No Fly List. Not even close.

Our media are interpreting yet another Chinese policy, Social Credit, in Western terms but China does things differently and, usually, better.

First, Social Credit is a popular initiative: the Chinese are the most trusting society on earth yet don’t have credit ratings so they’re tired of being scammed online for billions each year. 

First [II], they trust the government–not private credit agencies like Equifax–to run projects that impact everyone because they trust their government far more than we trust ours: 86% of them say it works for everybody and not just for a fortunate few.

Second, Social Credit doesn’t just rate citizens. It rates everyone from government departments and individual officials to cops, corporations, Supreme Court justices, Congresspeople–absolutely everyone and every enterprise gets a social credit rating that arises naturally from their interactions with others. 

Third, doesn’t this sound better than being secretly rated by private corporations who sell your information to other private corporations and secretly share it with government agencies–without your permission? And charge us for access to our own information? And offer no reciprocity? Ask TRW for a vendor’s credit history and current rating and what it costs you.

Fourth, Social Credit is 90% carrot and 10% stick: the higher your score the easier your life becomes. Japan and the Netherlands already offer expedited visa processing for tourists with scores above 750 and landlords and car rentals waive deposits if you’re over 800. It’s intended to be a magic carpet for those who play straight with everyone they encounter. 

Fifth, all the rules are public and anyone can play and all changes to your SC rating are transparent to you, in real time. For free. 

Sixth, China already has a prototype running, an online Social Credit Arbitration Court where, for a few dollars, you can have your case heard and receive a binding verdict that corrects mistakes. Millions of people use it and are refining it. It will go national in 2020.

Seventh, There’s an idealistic element: it’s part of China’s 2,000-year-old plan to create a ‘datong’ society in which (to be brief) everybody is taken care of and nobody needs to lock their doors at night: a goal every Chinese supports and which the government hopes to deliver by 2120. Imagine the effects of 100 years of Social Credit on the entire culture…

Customers applying for visas for developed countries, like Luxembourg or Japan, with scores above 750 need not submit bank records and enjoy perks like expedited airport security checks: a consumers’ magic carpet that reduces transaction fees and credit losses and builds consumer confidence. By 2018, more than 1,100 government officials had been blacklisted. 

More carrot than stick, corporations with strong social credit can expect government contracts and low-interest loans and raises small corporations’ credit if they observe consumer and product safety regulations, while debiting them for unreliability, dishonesty, excess emissions and even poor worker safety. Regulators say that, when the system becomes integrated it will generate corporate scorecards directly from sensor data, CCTV cameras, government and court records and consumer reviews. 

The program comes with a sting in its tail, as Oxford University’s Rogier Creemers says, “When rules are broken and not rectified in time you are entered in a list of ‘people subject to enforcement for trust breaking’ and denied access to things. Rules broken by corporations can lead to them being unable to issue corporate bonds and individuals being unable to become company directors. Trust-breakers can face penalties on subsidies, career progression, asset ownership and the ability to receive honorary titles from the Chinese government. Those who fail to repay debts are punished by travel restrictions”. 

A typical travel restriction made the news in 2017 when a real estate developer attempted to book a first class ticket to London and found that the system would only issue him a tourist seat. When he investigated he found that his restriction stemmed from several court judgements whose penalties he had not paid. By 2018, the People’s Court had banned six million defaulters from traveling by air and was working with government departments to ensure that they would be ‘limited on multiple levels’. A local court got creative: when someone calls a delinquent debtor in Dengfeng, Henan Province, instead of a ringtone they hear, “The person you are calling is listed as dishonest by the Dengfeng People’s Court. Please urge them to fulfill their obligations”. 

Social Credit gives consumers the same access to corporate and government ratings as corporations and governments have to consumers and make a highly trusting society transparent. Since it will be operational by 2020 and will doubtless arouse Western fears of Orwellian control, here is the official summary of the State Council’s Basic Plan for Establishing and Improving Systems of Joint Incentives for Trustworthiness [I posted the link to the whole document in my related article- http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2018/01/11/chinas-public-social-credit-system-versus-the-wests-secret-panopticon-china-rising-radio-sinoland-180111/]:

Praise creditworthiness, discipline untrustworthiness. Fully utilize credit incentives and constraints, increasing the extent of incentives for trustworthy entities and of disciplinary actions for seriously untrustworthy entities, letting the trustworthy receive benefits and the untrustworthy be subject to restrictions, forming systemic mechanisms for praising honesty and disciplining untrustworthiness.

Coordinate departmental and social action. By disclosing and sharing credit information, establish cross-region, interdepartmental, and cross-sector mechanisms for joint incentives and joint disciplinary action, forming a common governance structure in which government departments coordinate their concerted action, industry organizes self-discipline and management, credit service organizations actively participate–all broadly supervised by public opinion.

Protect rights and interests in accordance with laws and regulations. Strictly follow laws, regulations and policies to scientifically delineate trustworthy and untrustworthy conduct, develop joint incentives for trustworthiness and joint disciplinary action for untrustworthiness.

Establish complete mechanisms for credit restoration, objections, appeals and so forth to protect all participants’ lawful rights and interests [the Social Credit Arbitration Court].

Focus on key points, coordinate advancement. Persist in being problem-oriented, striving to resolve credit issues in key industries that are currently harmful to the public interest and public safety, on which many people have given strong feedback [recall all the polls and surveys discussed above], or which have caused serious negative impacts on economic and social development.

Encourage and support innovations and demonstrations by local people’s governments and relevant departments and gradually expand mechanisms for jointly incentivizing trustworthiness and jointly discipline untrustworthiness to every area of the economy and society.

This is another Big Chinese Experiment, a revolutionary way for people and institutions to relate to one another so let’s give it a chance. Who knows? We might learn something.

 ###

About the author(s)
Punto Press released China Rising - Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations (2016); and for Badak Merah, Jeff authored China Is Communist, Dammit! – Dawn of the Red Dynasty (2017).
Jeff can be reached at China Rising, jeff@brownlanglois.com, Facebook, Twitter and Wechat/Whatsapp: +86-13823544196.

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China Rising with Jeff Brown: The Chinese Social Credit System—Fact vs. (Western) Myth. Part I

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

Jeff J. Brown

THIS IS A REPOST OF AN ORIGINAL DISPATCH PUBLISHED ON JANUARY 11, 2018

bestselling books on China, and the contributions of Godfree Roberts, another respected observer of Chinese affairs, we inaugurate this special dossier in our Virtual University section dedicated to one of the most controversial and disinformation-laden subjects, the Chinese Social Credit System. To Western ears, accustomed to dishonest and often downright criminal governance, the Chinese social credit system sounds like a true Orwellian nightmare, and, indeed, such state capabilities in the wrong hands can encompass a big threat to human liberty.  Of course, formidable as such systems may seem, nothing yet has defeated the ability of humans to outwit all forms of surveillance and repression. In the end, the triumph of propaganda against imperial targets is also a question of irreducible cultural matrices: the Chinese, as author Jeff Brown explains, have their own age-old way of relating to the state, and authorities in general. To comprehend the modern Chinese state, therefore, westerners have to leave at the door most if not all their preconceptions. Despite their apparent universality, Western memes and philosophical constructs are nearly useless. The Chinese way of life, rooted in the millennial Chinese experience, now fortified, not weakened, by decades of communist construction, is probably almost impossible to accurately translate to most Westerners, even those who, by character and formidable intellect can usually tear apart most elaborate deceptions. So, please read these dispatches with an open mind, and see if you can leave behind the individualist capitalist values implanted in all of us, and much of the fear that any decent mind will have when confronting something as formidable and seemingly inscrutable as the Social Credit System, Chinese style. —P. Greanville

P A R T    O N E
Read Part One here.   / Read Part Two here / Read Part Three here

CHINA’S PUBLIC SOCIAL CREDIT SYSTEM VERSUS THE WEST’S SECRET PANOPTICON. CHINA RISING RADIO SINOLAND 180111

January 11, 2018

By Jeff J. Brown

pale blue horiz

Above: the sobering fact of the matter is, artificial intelligence (AI), big data, deep learning, facial and voice recognition, wall to street surveillance, supercomputers, drones and robots are now a reality facing all of humanity. Right here, right now, and China is racing ahead of the rest of the world to make it happen. But, every government and their elites in the world are using these technologies, whether we like it not. It is an unstoppable wave and rapidly swelling into a tsunami.

Downloadable SoundCloud podcast (also at the bottom of this page), as well as being syndicated on iTunes and Stitcher Radio (links below):

 

 

Note: When finished reading, listening to and/or watching this column and podcast, sharing is caring about humanity’s future and getting the non-mainstream truth out to a wider audience. Please tell your family, friends and colleagues about China Rising Radio Sinoland (www.chinarising.puntopress.com – @44_Days – https://www.facebook.com/44DaysPublishing), post and follow it on all your social media. Sign up for the email alerts on this blog page, so you don’t miss a beat. Then, read The China Trilogy, to understand your world and where you are headed into the 21st century (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2017/05/19/the-china-trilogy/). You will be so glad you did!

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ehind the Great Western Firewall, if you have come across any news about China’s Social Credit System (SCS), it was probably not very flattering. Mainstream propaganda is using all the usual trigger words to elicit within you a Pavlovian revulsion: totalitarian, Orwellian, Big Brother, New World Order, nightmare, disturbing, troubling, dystopia, police state, fascism, abusive, insidious, Panopticon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon) – and those are the terms I found in just a few articles. It’s not worth linking them, but if you wish to, just search “(China/Chinese) social credit system/score”. They are all about the same. The West’s propaganda foghorn is blasting away in synchronized, symphonic goosestep.

One article blared the headline, “China’s “Social Credit System” Will Rate How Valuable You Are as a Human, which is total bollocks. The SCS’s purpose is to determine for anyone who lives in China or any company doing business, their reputation for good citizenship, not their intrinsic or spiritual value.

Are you a person or company who helps your community at large to cooperate and seek harmony? Do you volunteer your time and money to help others? Do you better your neighborhood? Are you conscientious about your surroundings, your environment and public property? Do you drive responsibly? If you find something valuable, do you turn it in to the police? Do you pay your financial debts in a timely fashion? For companies, do you take good care of your employees, properties, environment, neighborhoods and communities? Do you pay your taxes accurately?

There are a thousand examples that could be listed. If you do all of the above, your SCS will be very high and you will be blessed with many privileges, like paying a much smaller down payment for a house, no questions asked loans, discounts, lower taxes and fees; moving up in waiting lists for public services, an increased chance of getting into a better university, scholarships, job offers, help with starting a business and the like. On the other hand, if you or your company is the mirror image of all the above, then you can expect just the opposite: higher taxes, fines and moving down the totem pole for loans, services and opportunities.

The sobering fact of the matter is, artificial intelligence (AI), big data, deep learning, facial and voice recognition, wall to street surveillance, supercomputers, drones and robots are now a reality facing all of humanity (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2017/11/30/do-you-see-what-i-see-depends-on-where-you-look-china-rising-radio-sinoland-171130/). Right here, right now, and China is racing ahead of the rest of the world to make it happen. But, every government and their elites in the world are using these technologies, whether we like it not. It is an unstoppable wave and rapidly swelling into a tsunami.

So, the key issue is,

Will your government and elites use these surveillance technologies for the betterment of society and its citizens, or to turn the whole show into a totalitarian, Orwellian, Big Brother, New World Order nightmare; a disturbing, troubling dystopia; a fascist police state; an abusive, insidious Panopticon?

Having lived in China for almost 15 years, I can state with total confidence that compared to Eurangloland’s owners, Baba Beijing is going to use all this technology much more constructively and fairly for its people and the rest of humanity. First, China’s Social Credit System law is totally public and fully available to every citizen. Don’t believe me? The actual first draft law came out in 2014 and it is expected to be implemented by 2020. Here is the English translation (https://chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com/2014/06/14/planning-outline-for-the-construction-of-a-social-credit-system-2014-2020/). It is regularly discussed in the media and any Chinese person who can fog a mirror has at least heard about it, if not gotten up to speed. It’s a very big deal here, as it should be, given how much it is going to shape and move society and business.

Baba Beijing is giving every citizen a chance to critique the law and make recommendations, for which millions have surely been submitted. Not only that, but any foreigner or foreign company or government has the same opportunity to comment and criticize all proposed legislation in the National People’s Congress (NPC: https://cpcchina.chinadaily.com.cn/2011-10/28/content_13996130.htm). Numerous tweaks, deletions and additions will surely be made over time. To see what I mean, read this 2016 article, a public discussion about the lines of thinking that have been hammered out between the masses and all levels of government (http://www.chinalawtranslate.com/7079-2/?lang=en). Imagine your government treating you like a thinking adult. How refreshing!

Did American citizens have any input into the post-911 false flag Patriot Act? None. Even their supposed legislative representatives received the 900-page dictate in the middle of the night and were told to sign it the next day (https://sunlightfoundation.com/2009/03/02/congress-had-no-time-to-read-the-usa-patriot-act/). This was done for a reason. Obviously already written up by the CIA/NSA/DIA complex and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) before the planned 911 false flag, it stripped Americans of any rights they had as citizens. Did Americans have any say in the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA: https://www.naturalnews.com/034537_NDAA_Bill_of_Rights_Obama.html) and the updated 2014 version, both which officially turned the United States into a military police state? Of course not. The same thing has happened and is happening in the rest of Eurangloland, with fascist laws being passed without so much as a whimper. This is the West’s phony, Potemkin “democracy” writ large. You think I want to move back to Eurangloland? Get outta here!

Yet, in China’s vibrant, open and inclusive communist-socialist democracy, all of its 1.4 billion citizens have been called upon to help shape this extremely important and consequential SCS law and how it will affect them and Baba Beijing’s ability to govern the country. This is why I can easily say that China has the most effective and participatory democracy in world, and Baba Beijing offers the best leadership of any country on the map. You can appreciate why I enjoy living in China so much, as I experience countless other examples of this on a daily basis. Read The China Trilogy (see up top) for all the juicy details and boots-on-the-ground-with-the-locals experiences.

Thus, in China there are no surprises about the SCS. Everybody is reading from the same page. Every person and business in China knows exactly what they need to do and not do to be reputable or disreputable. Everybody has the same chances to be a good citizen. They all know the benefits and consequences. No secrets, no black holes. It’s all spelled out. Every person and every company can see their information and for sure if you are disreputable, especially companies, your score will be available for all to see too. Who can see whose score is still being debated across the country, but it’s an open system. In fact, phone apps are even being developed to do just that, in real time (https://www.wired.com/story/age-of-social-credit/).

Just as importantly, contrition and redemption are highly reputable. Did you get caught cheating on a college exam, get drunk and vandalize a public park or wreck your car? Did a company dump pollution into a river or underreport income to pay less taxes? Did a bad apple CEO screw over the employees, only to tarnish the company’s reputation? Well, now is the time to compensate and pay back to society by doing good works, volunteering, contributing to charities, building or doing something for the community, going green, etc. Payback or paichang in Chinese is a huge facet of Chinese culture and I wrote a great chapter about it in Book #3 of The China Trilogy, China Is Communist Dammit! Dawn of the Red Dynasty (see up top).

Compare this to the West. All of this surveillance technology is being used to its maximum capacity, just like in China. Do Euranglolanders know how it’s being used? No. Who is using it? No. Why it is being used? No. Where it’s being used? No. Have people living in West been given the chance for public input? No. We know the West is secretly vacuuming data on potentially every person in the world. Have they had any input? No.

Americans should know that the CIA, NSA, DIA and fourteen other spy agencies (http://www.businessinsider.com/17-agencies-of-the-us-intelligence-community-2013-5?IR=T) are probing into every nook and cranny of their private and public lives, while data sweeping every detail about them, but it is opaque, secretive and downright fascist frightening. Do Joe and Jane Sixpack know what’s in their files? No. Who has them? No idea.

As I wrote in Book #3 of The China Trilogy, (see up top), the Chinese have known and accept that Baba Beijing has been keeping tabs on them, going back 5,000 years. The Heavenly Mandate stipulates that the leadership must guarantee social harmony and economic stability, and knowing what and who is going on in the Sino-hood, is critical to make it happen. Same need, different millennia and technology.

Nor is this a new problem in the US. The FBI, starting in 1908 and the CIA in 1947 began collecting vast storerooms of information on any citizen they saw fit to probe, with the occasional, meaningless “Congressional hearing” be damned. This fascism trickles down to state bureaus of investigation, county sheriffs and city police. Now all of these decades of information are being harvested en masse at the federal level.

I know several people, going back to the 1970s-1980s, who requested their “files” from the FBI and CIA, through the less and less viable Freedom of Information Act (FOIA: https://www.propublica.org/article/delayed-denied-dismissed-failures-on-the-foia-front). It took months and months to get anything. When they finally opened the packages received, they saw that big, fat black markers were used to censor much, and in some cases, most of the information. Even though they couldn’t read a lot of it, they were surprised to see how thick their files were. For that matter, was it all there?

Untold thousands of Americans and non-Americans have been refused visas, entries, exits, or get knocks on their home and office doors, for “a little chat”. They are often not told why. It’s all buried in fascist “national security” mumbo jumbo. Sometimes they get shot and killed, or framed for crimes they did not commit. Using the same excuse, kangaroo courts are held and the accused cannot even see their accusers and/or evidence. How many US citizens have been disappeared to god knows where, for torture and secret imprisonment? How many have been assassinated? Nobody knows and no one is accountable. The US Constitution and Bill of Rights are gutted, gone, disappeared into lawless, corporate-governmental gangsterism (https://www.veteranstoday.com/2014/03/24/defense-authorization-act-has-destroyed-americas-bill-of-rights/). The rest of Eurangloland is merely a decade or two behind empire’s American slide into a full-fledged police state. The UK (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/19/extreme-surveillance-becomes-uk-law-with-barely-a-whimper) and France (http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/10/anti-terrorism-law-boost-security-france-171002073720302.html) are next in line.

Whether Westerners want to admit it or not, their elite owners and governments have been giving them clandestine social credit scores for decades, with often brutal, life changing consequences and no legal recourse. Since the whole process of surveillance and information collection in Eurangloland is a complete black hole, the people living there have absolutely no idea what their unspoken, unreported, unknown scores really are. And Westerners have secret scores, unwillingly.

In my interview with Leanne Lindsay in Australia, she recounted how her daughter was refused employment in another city, because the employer found out Leanne was a member of the Communist Party (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2017/06/02/leanne-lindsay-is-ready-for-communism-like-yesterday-baby-china-rising-radio-sinoland-170602/). Think back to all the populist, labor, union, environmental, socialist and communist movements since the 1870s that were crushed in the West, with untold thousands being killed, handicapped, imprisoned, jobs lost and lives destroyed. It’s still ongoing in Eurangloland. Anybody who has been a guest on www.RT.com is blacklisted (http://wallstreetonparade.com/2016/12/u-s-journalists-and-professors-appearing-on-rt-america-get-blacklisted/) and don’t get caught being associated with mainstream media’s fake news fake news list (http://www.propornot.com/p/the-list.html), everyone of them who are speaking truth to empire power, including The Greanville Post (https://www.greanvillepost.com/), for which I am a Senior Editor and China Correspondent. I guess all of these people, going back 150 years, including me I’m proud to say, must have had or currently have terrible secret Western social credit scores. But, I can never know, whereas in China, I can and I can rectify mistakes.

If a person living in China feels there is a mistaken event in their SCS file, the law provides all the measures needed to refute and fix it. If there is reasonable doubt and an accuser is involved, measures are being adopted so you can confront this person or company. If the accusing person/company was wrong, they are going to take a big drop in their social score. Meanwhile in the West, if you are barred from leaving the country, lose your job, get railroaded and arrested with bogus charges, or are flown off to a torture center and then murdered, a reason is almost never given. It’s all shrouded in a black haze of secret national security.

It reminds me of the great dystopian movie, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (https://www.allmovie.com/movie/brazil-v6977). In it, a housefly falls into to a state security bureau typewriter, gumming up a key and misspelling someone’s name. The hero involved, Sam Lowry (played by Jonathan Pryce) becomes a victim of the Panopticon state apparatus, by trying to help this victim’s family. Totally innocent, he is eventually tortured and goes insane. There are untold numbers of Sam Lowry’s in the West, but not China.

As I wrote in Book #2 of The China Trilogy, China Rising -Capitalist Roads Socialist Destinations (see up top), China got rid of its labor camps years ago and in Book #3, I analyze how its judicial system works better than America’s. People get brought in for questioning and in a few high-profile cases, their whereabouts may not be known by their families for a few days, during the investigation. These cases get the usual anti-China Western propaganda smear (http://time.com/4716175/taiwan-missing-activist-china/).

But, China does not have people disappearing in torture prisons around the world, rotting in Guantanamo Gulag (https://www.thenation.com/article/guantanamo-gulag/) nor committing assassinations across the globe. No justice system is perfect, but as a person of modest financial means, I’d much rather take my chances as a defendant in China than the West, especially the United States. It’s one of the reasons many companies around the world are contesting their litigation in Chinese courts, for patents, for instance, since they are considered to be more faithful to the rule of law and less corruptible than Western venues (https://www.chinalawblog.com/2016/11/china-litigation-for-foreign-companies-its-a-good-thing.html).

Which citizens have a better chance with their government using 21st century social management technology?  The ones where all the laws and expectations are completely open to the public and subject to accountability and debate, or the ones whose elites shroud the whole bureaucracy behind an iron curtain of national security secrecy? It is light versus darkness and I don’t need to tell you which one is China and the other Eurangloland.

Instead of getting brainwashed by anti-China, anti-communism-socialism propaganda behind the Great Western Firewall, take a few minutes and read the follow articles, translated from the Chinese, to get this country’s point of view of its own SCS law and customs (http://www.chinalawtranslate.com/giving-credit/?lang=en and http://www.chinalawtranslate.com/giving-credit-2-carrots-and-sticks/?lang=en). These Chinese articles calmly address the hysteria being whipped up in Eurangloland, as well as the frank concerns among the nation’s citizens. Remember, by exaggerating and distorting a non-issue in China, the West’s owners are doing a brilliant job of keeping you focused on and fearful of a foreign canard, instead of realizing that true fascism is right outside your window.

Let’s close out today’s column and podcast with the final scene of the movie Clockwork Orange. It’s a Western totalitarian, Orwellian, Big Brother, New World Order nightmare; a disturbing, troubling dystopia; a socialist state gone fascist trying to reform the unreformable young ruffian Alex, as per the imagination of anarcho-conservative writer Anthony Burgess (yes an oxymoron, but that was Burgess, who also openly thought socialism was "ridiculous," while adding that no civilised state could exist without socialised medicine). While Burgess is correct in sounding the alarm about the possible excesses of a hypocritical "nanny state", he provides no solution for the obvious issues caused by the brutal hooliganism of alienated youth, product of a clearly still deeply unequal system. 

 

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ABOUT JEFF BROWN

Punto Press released China Rising - Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations (2016); and for Badak Merah, Jeff authored China Is Communist, Dammit! – Dawn of the Red Dynasty (2017).
Jeff can be reached at China Rising, jeff@brownlanglois.com, Facebook, Twitter and Wechat/Whatsapp: +86-13823544196.

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WHAT IS IT LIKE WRITING AND REPORTING ABOUT CHINA? Our China correspondent provides some insight.

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Jeff J. Brown

WHAT IS IT LIKE WRITING AND REPORTING ABOUT CHINA? HERE ARE MY ANSWERS THAT AN MSM JOURNALIST DID NOT LIKE AT ALL. CHINA RISING RADIO SINOLAND 200322

Dateline: March 22, 2020

Pictured above: my dealings with MSM journalists are entirely too predictable. It’s the nature of their industry.

Sixteen years on the streets, living and working with the people of China, Jeff

Downloadable SoundCloud podcast (also at the bottom of this page), YouTube video, as well as being syndicated on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, RUvid and Ivoox (links below),


 

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] was recently contacted by a freelance journalist, who said they were writing a story on video blogging (vlogging) in China, and wanted to interview me, to be included.

First, a note about freelancing journalists. They are only free in the sense that they do not get a paycheck. They are contract workers who get paid by the article or podcast. In order to get paid, they have to pitch ideas and content to editors who give the thumbs up or down. This means having to write what the editors think is appropriate, what the red lines are and what will be censored. In the West’s MSM, there are thousands of red lines and taboo topics that are censored by the Big Lie Propaganda Machine (BLPM). I don’t call it the Great Western Firewall for nothing.

This freelance journalist interviewed me for about 80 minutes total. I could tell that they did not like what I was saying. I knew that my real-life China experiences would not make it across all those MSM red lines, nor pass muster in the BLPM. They were calling from far away in the United States, a huge geographical and cultural chasm.

Reporting anything that says something truthful or factual about global capitalism’s many anti-imperial enemies is strictly verboten: China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, Eritrea, Iran, Syria, DPRK, and on and on, unless it can be spun in the most negative and critical manner possible.

The duopoly's Democrat wing—"the liberals"—has numerous assets willing and ready to carry any story favoring their side. An identical phenomenon happens with the rightwing media, headed by the Murdoch properties (Fox News) and the fungal reactionary radio networks. The liberals, however, do have some powerful radio, too, beginning with their flagship, NPR.

If you are a friend, fan or follower of China Rising Radio Sinoland, you might predict that I didn’t figure much in this person’s article. In fact, they were able to gin two articles that got published in the MSM. Out of all that, I got a one-line quote and was branded as a “French communist”. For most brainwashed Euranglolanders, that was a signal that I am no better than an intellectual leper, and my one sentence could not be valid or trusted.

To really get a true idea about what an open sewer MSM really is, be sure to watch/listen to my interview with JP Leonard and Andrew Schlademan, about the book they published,

Presstitutes: In the Pay of the CIA-A Confession from the Profession. Book interview with John-Paul Leonard and Andrew Schlademan. China Rising Radio Sinoland 200214     

https://chinarising.puntopress.com/2020/02/14/presstitutes-in-the-pay-of-the-cia-confession-from-the-profession-book-interview-with-john-paul-leonard-and-andrew-schlademan-china-rising-radio-sinoland-200214/

Before we talked, I wrote out my answers as a matter of record. Herewith are this freelance journalist’s questions and my replies,

Interview

Question:  How long have you been vlogging in China? Is vlogging in and about China different than doing so in other South and East Asian countries?

Jeff: I started blog writing in 2010, audio blogging in 2014, then video blogging in 2017. Since then, I typically do all three for each article/podcast. After living and working in China for 16 years, starting in 1990, my wife and I just moved to Thailand, to a fresh perspective on Asia. In both countries, the biggest vlogging challenge is bandwidth. Recording video interviews gobbles up a lot of megabytes and slow internet can make producing and uploading videos more challenging.

Q: What has your experience been vlogging in China? Good? Bad? Welcoming? Harassing?

Jeff: Wonderful. China is the Greatest Show on Earth, accomplishing so many things for so many people, which in human history have never been done on such a monumental scale. Since I blog in English, my fanbase in China is small, compared to the rest of the world. However, those who do follow me tell me there and around the world that they love my work. That’s why I do three media for the same piece: written, audio and video, to reach as many fans as possible, around the planet.

Q: Do you know any of the other western vloggers in China? What is your impression of that community? Is it even a community in any real sense?

Jeff: Vlogggers specifically, not really. But China-focused journalists, authors, bloggers, podcasters and vloggers as an unofficial collective, absolutely. I have regular contact with too many fellow journalists, authors and bloggers to count.

More directly, I started an Outlook group, called China Writers’ Group, with both Westerners and Chinese members, where we exchange a lot of information.

Q: Do you feel constrained at all in what you post online while in China? Do you feel the need to censor yourself?

Jeff: Never, but I am very impressed by what Baba Beijing and the country’s 1.4 billion citizens are accomplishing, so I’m positive and truthful about what I produce.

Q: What, in your experience, is the average Chinese person’s awareness of or attitude toward the Great Firewall?

Jeff: Excellent question. In the West, it’s one of the most misunderstood Chinese government policies and deserves thorough, honest explanation.

First, the citizens demand and want the Great Firewall. It’s discussed at length in the national and social media. The Chinese government treats its citizens like adults, telling them everything: censorship, cameras, face and voice recognition, data gathering, etc. The Chinese expect Baba Beijing to maintain social harmony, political stability and economic prosperity for all. They are generally socially conservative and would not accept an endless avalanche of mind numbing, Western “tittytainment”.

Second, if the Great Firewall were not in place, the CIA-MI6 complex and all its umpteen NGOs would create thousands of bogus Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts, vomiting fake news and sensational Big Lie propaganda targeted to the Mainland. Chinese citizens defiantly reject all this color revolution sabotage against them, which has been going on nonstop, since 1949, when China gained its liberation, freedom and independence from Western imperialism and colonialism.

Don’t take it from me. Pew Research Center, which is 100% US-owned, has its ongoing Global Attitudes Survey. Year after year, around 70% of Chinese approve of their media, the highest in the world. In the US, it’s in the low 30s. After living and working 16 years in China, I know that its citizens have a much more truthful and realistic perspective on world affairs, than Westerners, hands down.

Third, the Great Firewall is fantastic national policy, showing visionary foresight, since it has allowed China to develop its own thriving internet and social media infrastructure, businesses, economy and culture. As a result, the PRC has some of the world’s biggest and most profitable IT corporations, like Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, the last which is now ranked among the World’s Top Ten biggest companies. There are hundreds of other smaller, but just as successful entities. In 2018, China had nine of the Top 20 global tech companies, with the US taking the other eleven. It’s probably even-steven in 2019. Without the Great Firewall, none of this could have ever happened. A case in point is our interview using China’s WeChat. Without the Great Firewall, we would be using the US’s WhatsApp.

Q: Have you had any experience with the so-called wumao [note: people who are paid to leave comments online, at the end of articles]?

Jeff: No, but every government around the world, at least the bigger countries, use paid online commenters, as well as censoring unwanted comments. Eurangloland is no exception.

Q: Some prominent China YouTubers have reported being solicited by people in China to promote certain themes or messages on their channels. Have you ever been paid, approached, or directed by any organization to speak in defense of China and/or the CCP?

Jeff: I have been paid by Chinese entities to write articles for them, which is quite normal for journalists to do. But, I have never been asked to skew my reporting to favor China. However, every government worth its salt tries to mold all concerned media to project a certain image and message. I just read Udo Ulfkotte’s sensational book, “Presstitutes: In the Pay of the CIA – A Confession from the Profession”. I will be interviewing the publisher and translator later this month. It’s shocking and disgusting. The worst offenders are Westerners. When I interviewed James Bradley, he said that the US media is government controlled and corporate managed (https://chinarising.puntopress.com/2020/02/07/james-bradley-talks-about-his-new-podcast-program-untold-pacific-china-rising-radio-sinoland-200207/). He sure got that right, and all the other Western countries are just as Orwellian.  

ABOUT JEFF BROWN

Punto Press released China Rising - Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations (2016); and for Badak Merah, Jeff authored China Is Communist, Dammit! – Dawn of the Red Dynasty (2017).
Jeff can be reached at China Rising, jeff@brownlanglois.com, Facebook, Twitter and Wechat/Whatsapp: +86-13823544196.

• check this page on his special blog CHINA RISING RADIO SINOLAND

The battle against the Big Lie killing the world will not be won by you just reading this article. It will be won when you pass it on to at least 2 other people, requesting they do the same.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]f you find China Rising Radio Sinoland's work useful and appreciate its quality, please consider making a donation. Money is spent to pay for Internet costs, maintenance, the upgrade of our computer network, and development of the site.
Just use the donation button below (yes, click on Sylvester the Kitty)—OR, just as easy, SCAN our QR code!



 

 

 

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China locked in hybrid war with US

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

Pepe Escobar

Fallout from Covid-19 outbreak puts Beijing and Washington on a collision course

 

Chinese President Xi Jinping has made his position clear. Photo: AFP

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]mong the myriad, earth-shattering geopolitical effects of coronavirus, one is already graphically evident. China has re-positioned itself. For the first time since the start of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1978, Beijing openly regards the US as a threat, as stated a month ago by Foreign Minister Wang Yi at the Munich Security Conference during the peak of the fight against coronavirus.

Beijing is carefully, incrementally shaping the narrative that, from the beginning of the coronovirus attack, the leadership knew it was under a hybrid war attack. Xi’s terminology is a major clue. He said, on the record, that this was war. And, as a counter-attack, a “people’s war” had to be launched.

Moreover, he described the virus as a demon or devil. Xi is a Confucianist. Unlike some other ancient Chinese thinkers, Confucius was loath to discuss supernatural forces and judgment in the afterlife. However, in a Chinese cultural context, devil means “white devils” or “foreign devils”: guailo in Mandarin, gweilo in Cantonese. This was Xi delivering a powerful statement in code.

When Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, voiced in an incandescent tweet the possibility that “it might be [the] US Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan” – the first blast to this effect to come from a top official – Beijing was sending up a trial balloon signaling that the gloves were finally off. Zhao Lijian made a direct connection with the Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019, which included a delegation of 300 US military.  [Which begs the question why Beijing would even allow US soldiers on its soil!— major faux pas in policy.—Ed]

He directly quoted US CDC director Robert Redfield who, when asked last week whether some deaths by coronavirus had been discovered posthumously in the US, replied that  “some cases have actually been diagnosed this way in the US today.”

Zhao’s explosive conclusion is that Covid-19 was already in effect in the US before being identified in Wuhan – due to the by now fully documented inability of US to test and verify differences compared with the flu.

Adding all that to the fact that coronavirus genome variations in Iran and Italy were sequenced and it was revealed they do not belong to the variety that infected Wuhan, Chinese media are now openly  asking questions and drawing a connection with the shutting down in August last year of the “unsafe” military bioweapon lab at Fort Detrick, the Military Games, and the Wuhan epidemic. Some of these questions had been asked – with no response – inside the US itself.

Extra questions linger about the opaque Event 201 in New York on October 18, 2019: a rehearsal for a worldwide pandemic caused by a deadly virus – which happened to be coronavirus. This magnificent coincidence happened one month before the outbreak in Wuhan.

Medical assistance teams from other Chinese provinces leave hard-hit Hubei as epidemic wanes. While the world is rapidly entering the epidemic with ominous prospects, China is already largely exiting it.

Event 201 was sponsored by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum (WEF), the CIA, Bloomberg, John Hopkins Foundation and the UN.  The World Military Games opened in Wuhan on the exact same day.

Irrespective of its origin, which is still not conclusively established, as much as Trump tweets about the “Chinese virus,” Covid-19 already poses immensely serious questions about biopolitics (where’s Foucault when we need him?) and bio-terror.

The working hypothesis of coronavirus as a very powerful but not Armageddon-provoking bio-weapon unveils it as a perfect vehicle for widespread social control – on a global scale.

Cuba rises as a biotech power

Just as a fully masked Xi visiting the Wuhan frontline last week was a graphic demonstration to the whole planet that China, with immense sacrifice, is winning the “people‘s war” against Covid-19, Russia, in a Sun Tzu move on Riyadh whose end result was a much cheaper barrel of oil, helped for all practical purposes to kick-start the inevitable recovery of the Chinese economy. This is how a strategic partnership works.

We are still barely starting to understand the consequences of Covid-19 for the future of neoliberal turbo-capitalism. What’s certain is that the whole global economy has been hit by an insidious, literally invisible circuit breaker.

The chessboard is changing at breakneck speed. Once Beijing identified coronavirus as a bio-weapon attack the “people’s war” was launched with the full force of the state. Methodically. On a “whatever it takes” basis. Now we are entering a new stage, which will be used by Beijing to substantially recalibrate the interaction with the West, and under very different frameworks when it comes to the US and the EU.

Soft power is paramount. Beijing sent an Air China flight to Italy carrying 2,300 big boxes full of masks bearing the script, “We are waves from the same sea, leaves from the same tree, flowers from the same garden.” China also sent a hefty humanitarian package to Iran, significantly aboard eight flights from Mahan Air – an airline under illegal, unilateral Trump administration sanctions.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic could not have been more explicit: “The only country that can help us is China. By now, you all understood that European solidarity does not exist. That was a fairy tale on paper.”

Under harsh sanctions and demonized since forever, Cuba is still able to perform breakthroughs – even on biotechnology. The anti-viral Heberon – or Interferon Alpha 2b – a therapeutic, not a vaccine, has been used with great success in the treatment of coronavirus. A joint venture in China is producing an inhalable version, and at least 15 nations are already interested in importing the therapeutic.

Now compare all of the above with the Trump administration offering $1 billion to poach German scientists working at biotech firm Curevac, based in Thuringia, on an experimental vaccine against Covid-19, to have it as a vaccine “only for the United States.”

Social engineering psy-op?

Sandro Mezzadra, co-author with Brett Neilson of the seminal The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism, is already trying to conceptualize where we stand now in terms of fighting Covid-19.

We are facing a choice between a Malthusian strand – inspired by social Darwinism – “led by the Johnson-Trump-Bolsonaro axis” and, on the other side, a strand pointing to the “requalification of public health as a fundamental tool,” exemplified by China, South Korea and Italy. There are key lessons to be learned from South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore.

The stark option, Mezzadra notes, is between a “natural population selection,” with thousands of dead, and “defending society” by employing “variable degrees of authoritarianism and social control.” It’s easy to imagine who stands to benefit from this social re-engineering, a 21st century remix of Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death.

Amid so much doom and gloom, count on Italy to offer us Tiepolo-style shades of light. Italy chose the Wuhan option, with immensely serious consequences for its already fragile economy. Quarantined Italians remarkably reacted by singing on their balconies: a true act of metaphysical revolt.

Not to mention the poetic justice of the actual St. Corona (“crown” in Latin) being buried in the city of Anzu since the 9th century. St. Corona was a Christian killed under Marcus Aurelius in 165 AD, and has been for centuries one of the patron saints of pandemics.

Not even trillions of dollars raining from the sky by an act of divine Fed mercy were able to cure Covid-19. G-7 “leaders” had to resort to a videoconference to realize how clueless they are – even as China’s fight against coronavirus gave the West a head start of several weeks.

Shanghai-based Dr. Zhang Wenhong, one of China’s top infectious disease experts, whose analyses have been spot on so far, now says China has emerged from the darkest days in the “people’s war” against Covid-19. But he does not think this will be over by summer. Now extrapolate what he’s saying to the Western world.

It’s not even spring yet, and we already know it takes a virus to mercilessly shatter the Goddess of the Market. Last Friday, Goldman Sachs told no fewer than 1,500 corporations that there was no systemic risk. That was false.

New York banking sources told me the truth: systemic risk became way more severe in 2020 than in 1979, 1987 or 2008 because of the hugely heightened danger that the $1.5 quadrillion derivative market would collapse.

As the sources put it, history had never before seen anything like the Fed’s intervention via its little understood elimination of commercial bank reserve requirements, unleashing a potential unlimited expansion of credit to prevent a derivative implosion stemming from a total commodity and stock market collapse of all stocks around the world.

Those bankers thought it would work, but as we know by now all the sound and fury signified nothing. The ghost of a derivative implosion – in this case not caused by the previous possibility, the shutting down of the Strait of Hormuz – remains.

We are still barely starting to understand the consequences of Covid-19 for the future of neoliberal turbo-capitalism. What’s certain is that the whole global economy has been hit by an insidious, literally invisible circuit breaker. This may be just a “coincidence.” Or this may be, as some are boldly arguing, part of a possible, massive psy-op creating the perfect geopolitlcal and social engineering environment for full-spectrum dominance.

Additionally, along the hard slog down the road, with immense, inbuilt human and economic sacrifice, with or without a reboot of the world-system, a more pressing question remains: will imperial elites still choose to keep waging full-spectrum-dominance hybrid war against China? 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pepe Escobar-nova-menor

Distinguished Collaborator Pepe Escobar is an independent geopolitical analyst. He writes for RT, Sputnik and TomDispatch, and is a frequent contributor to websites and radio and TV shows ranging from the US to East Asia. He is the former roving correspondent for Asia Times Online. Born in Brazil, he’s been a foreign correspondent since 1985, and has lived in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Washington, Bangkok and Hong Kong. Even before 9/11 he specialized in covering the arc from the Middle East to Central and East Asia, with an emphasis on Big Power geopolitics and energy wars. He is the author of “Globalistan” (2007), “Red Zone Blues” (2007), “Obama does Globalistan” (2009) and “Empire of Chaos” (2014), all published by Nimble Books. His latest book is “2030”, also by Nimble Books, out in December 2015. 

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The lockdown: One month in Wuhan

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This essay is part of a series on cultural, scientific and esoteric matters.

The Wuhan lockdown entailed one of the most complex and gigantic operations in human history. Accomplished in record time.

 
 

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