A new slant on RIMPAC Naval politics/The Fight To Control The South China Sea

[ikalugin]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

Well, let us hope the outcome is never put to the test....the current POTUS is yet to be fully understood/predictable on the worlds stage and the potential consequences could be very alarming.

With the deterioration of the power of nuclear deterence I don't think that the next large war is really avoidable.

[Mr Quatro]

Originally Posted by ikalugin

With the deterioration of the power of nuclear deterence I don't think that the next large war is really avoidable.

I doubt if there will be a really big war before there is a small war ...

It is written that there will be wars and rumors of war, but the end is not yet in sight and then later on it is written, "People will say peace, peace and then sudden destruction will come on them"

[Aktungbby]

The murderer of his own half-brother and uncle, ol' Kim Jong-Un is feeling the noose tighten....??!! In addition he is a thief.

Originally Posted by WSJ

SEOUL—North Korea slammed China’s “insincerity and betrayal” in a commentary published late Wednesday, calling statements in the official Chinese media “an undisguised threat” to Pyongyang, as it sought to stave off pressure from Beijing on its nuclear and missile programs.
“China should no longer try to test the limits of the DPRK’s patience,” North Korea said in the commentary published by the official Korean Central News Agency, using the acronym for its formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. “China had better ponder over the grave consequences to be entailed by its reckless act of chopping down the pillar of the DPRK-China relations.”
The commentary, which was attributed to a person identified only as Kim Chol, comes as China seeks to get North Korea to curb its weapons programs, amid pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump and other United Nations members. North Korea’s latest statements referred to recent articles in two official Chinese publications, the People’s Daily and the Global Times, that apparently alluded to the possibility of Beijing confronting North Korea militarily, or ending friendly ties between the two neighbors and Cold War allies, if it didn’t halt its weapons programs.
The commentary also referred to Chinese press statements about North Korea’s weapons programs threatening China’s northeast, which borders North Korea, and about how Pyongyang’s actions were giving the U.S. an excuse to deploy more strategic assets to the region. The article said that the U.S. military buildup in Asia was aimed at China, not North Korea.
China’s hardening line on North Korea, the commentary said, showed that Beijing was “dancing to the tune of the U.S.,” and that China was exercising “big-power chauvinism” that meant “the dignity and vital rights of the DPRK should be sacrificed for the interests of China.”
Last month, Mr. Trump met Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, where Mr. Trump says that he offered China more favorable trade terms in exchange for help on confronting the threat from North Korea.
In February, China said that it would suspend coal imports from North Korea until the end of the year, potentially depriving Pyongyang of a key source of revenue, a move that Mr. Trump has pointed to as a sign of China’s willingness to turn the screws on North Korea.
Mr. Trump has said that China holds the key to halting the North Korean weapons programs, citing the two countries’ close economic and historical ties.
Beijing in return has said its leverage is limited and has pressed the U.S. to enter into unconditional talks with Pyongyang.
China and North Korea have enjoyed friendly ties since the years immediately following World War II, when Communist parties in both countries took power and fought in one another’s wars. The two countries have described their ties as being as close as that of “lips and teeth.”
In recent decades, however, bilateral ties have become increasingly strained, as China opened its economy while North Korea grew more isolated and pursued a nuclear-weapons program that antagonized the region.
Wednesday’s article wasn’t the first time North Korea took rhetorical aim at China. In February, North Korea published a similar broadside, though in that case the commentary took a softer tone and didn’t call out Beijing by name, referring to China only as “a neighboring country, which often claims itself to be a ‘friendly neighbor.’ ”

Money is the 'sinews of war' and an economic attack is always preliminary: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/world/asia/treasury-imposes-sanctions-on-north-korea.html?_r=0

With private cybersecurity firms linking North Korea to recent computer attacks that absconded with at least $81 million, the Treasury Department moved on Wednesday to choke off Pyongyang’s remaining access to the global financial system, designating the country a “primary” money launderer.
The Treasury, employing sanctions techniques that helped pressure Iran to give up much of its nuclear program, said it would seek to impose what are known as secondary sanctions against the reclusive communist country. That means that it could cut off from the American financial system any bank or company that conducts banking transactions with Pyongyang.
As a practical matter, that would largely affect Chinese banks, which facilitate North Korea’s financial transactions with Beijing, its largest trading partner. It could also affect some institutions in the nominally autonomous Chinese regions of Macau and Hong Kong, as well as in Singapore, where Pyongyang has often gone to hide the true nature of its banking activities, and to pay for missiles, nuclear fuel and the huge infrastructure it has built around those programs.
The designation, officials said, was in the works long before evidence emerged linking the country’s aggressive hackers to the bank thefts, which involved stealing the credentials that banks use to access theSwift system, a global network that thousands of financial firms use to authorize payments from one account to another.
In interviews, administration officials said they were still sorting through the evidence that North Korea was involved, and left open the possibility that the thieves deliberately left evidence implicating the country to throw investigators off their trail. It could be months, the officials said, before they reach any conclusions, and in the end the perpetrators of the attack may not be definitively known...

[Mr Quatro]

^Did you put that in the wrong thread, Aktungbby ?

It is your thread, right? What about that little Chinese man made island in the South Pacific? How about a whole port now?

https://www.ft.com/content/e150ef0c-...4-0a1e63a52f9c

Sri Lanka has formally handed over its southern port of Hambantota to China on a 99-year lease, which government critics have denounced as an erosion of the country’s sovereignty.

The $1.3bn port was opened seven years ago using debt from Chinese state-controlled entities. But it has since struggled under heavy losses, making it impossible for Colombo to repay its debts.

[Aktungbby]

But Michael Fabey’s disturbing new book makes plain that China is now a muscular presence in its part of the world, and with clear ambitions to expand its role.
Mr. Fabey, a veteran defense writer, maintains thatChina and the U.S. are engaged in a “warm war” for naval dominance in the Pacific that we have “been losing.
The crux of the crisis is China’s claim of territorial sea rights far beyond those set by international conventions. The issue is complex. For centuries most maritime powers accepted that sovereign territory extended three nautical miles off the shoreline — the range of cannon shot.
After several changes, in 1982 the United Nations formalized “Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), which give coastal nations control over sea resources up to 200 nautical miles from its shores. (The U.S. did not sign the treaty, but recognizes EEZs in practice.)
Ignoring the international protocol,China has claimed expanded sea areas by constructing artificial islands as far as 600 miles from its own shores.
The work is centered around the Spratly Islands, 14 sandy outcrops ranging in area from one to 100 acres, spreading the South China Sea.
With Spratly ownership claimed by half a dozen other nations — all closer than China — Peking simply “built” its own island on an outcropping of coral, 14 miles long and four wide, almost completely submerged at high tide.
Chinese engineers dredged up coral and sand to create 86,000 square feet of dry land — enough to accommodate a military airstrip, rocket launchers and support troops. Other such “faux islands” are rising from the sea in the area. Adm. Harry Harris, U.S. naval commander in the Pacific, calls the islands the “Great Wall of Sand.”
Fishing and oil exploration by outsiders are forbidden within EEZs, but the treaty gives the “right of free passage” to all nations during peace. The Chinese, however, claim the rules forbid passage to “military operations,” which includes electronic signals gathering and reconnaissance — which the U.S. has long considered essential to prevent surprise attacks.
The Navy routinely ignores such warnings and insists on asserting its “right of passage” through contested areas. In 2003, the USS Cowpens, a cruiser, was forced to stop dead in the water to avoid ramming an harassing Chinese vessel. (The Navy calls such a stop a “crashback.” Hence Mr. Fabey’s title.)
Perhaps more dangerous is Chinese harassment of U.S. reconnaissance flights, its planes routinely coming within yards of contact. In 2001 a Chinese pilot collided with a U.S. reconnaissance plane. He crashed and died; the American craft made an emergency landing.
But the Chinese are buttressing their navy, building an aircraft carrier (replacing an obsolete ship the Soviets donated years ago) and developing dozens of vessels equipped with missiles.
Fortunately, the U.S. Navy is countering China’s ambitions with new technologies that modernize the missiles that are our dominant sea weapons. And despite the Chinese encroachments, Mr. Fabey’s description of the new weaponry — active and under development — warrants optimism. Some items:
• The electromagnetic rail gun, which uses electricity rather than gunpowder. Magnetic fields created by high electrical currents accelerate a sliding metal conductor between two to launch projectiles at speeds of up to 5,600 mph. The range is over 100 miles. The non-explosive solid projectile, essentially a chunk of steel, has such kinetic energy that “getting hit by one is like being hit by a small asteroid.”
• High-energy laser beams that counter incoming missiles by burning holes in their skins and causing thermal damage to their interiors. Another more powerful laser (30 kilowatts of power, versus 10) “can bore a hole through two inches of steel.” An even more powerful version should disable a battle ship or carrier.
• The Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LFASM) has an electro-optical terminal seeker which can match a ship’s imagery to a target database. Thus the missile can sort out a target vessel within a well-defended group of enemy vessels. Modifications in the works can propel a thousand pound warhead against a moving vessel at a range of 1,000 miles.
There is much more. Consider the Zumwalt-class destroyer, whose slope-sided superstructure bears close resemblance to the old Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia. Its profile makes the Zumwalt the naval equivalent of a stealth aircraft.
But the ever-present danger: a young pilot, whether American or Chinese, panics during a close-by flight and fires the shot that starts a war.
China’s “wall of sand” is a danger that must not be taken lightly...

As I pointed out earlier in this thread

Originally Posted by me

Not going to happen unfortunately...China is using a tried and true format as when they invaded the sovereign nation of Tibet; claiming territory once held in antiquity (Quing Dynasty?!!!). No one responded then and they're counting on the same here. Think marching into the Rhineland as A. Hitler did to reclaim Alsace/Lorraine-post Versailles, and kick it up to 1,401,586,609 Chinese people from a resource poor nation, 1/7 of the worlds population (7,324,782,225 =-), all looking for China's "place in the sun" as the Kaiser put it prior to WWI....Personally at this point the Chinese delegation to the UN should be removed from the Security Council and forced to do the 'Perp walk' in handcuffs; they hate a 'loss of face' worst of all. Basically "first Tibert and then the world"; Time to boot up and stop it in it's tracks

IN SHORT: We made mistake one over 50 years ago by not responding to China's eastward land expansion for Tibet's raw materials, probably in a racist fog over not caring about little brown people which afflicts American thinking and are now challenged at sea by China's westward expansion into international waters even as they use the 'little fat man' and his nuclear threat in N. Korea to their political advantage to divert attention. I seriously doubt if the US under worthless "Let's maka deal" Trump and America's SEATO allies are going to put a stop to this.

[Aktungbby]

The ' Yellow peril' is more perilous! Not content with their single birth doctrine, taking over the Spratley Islands of the South China Sea and general global domination....it seem that expectant Sino-mamas can visit Saipan in the Marianas Islands visa free for 45 days and are doing so to confer right of U.S. birth citizenship on their offspring. Talk about 'voting with your feet here'!

The United States is putting the word out to Chinese travel agencies: Stop allowing pregnant Chinese woman to visit the Northern Mariana Islands to give birth.
Why would the USA care? Because any child born in this string of 15 islands between the Philippines and Hawaii is eligible for U.S. citizenship, and in the past two years, the number of women delivering babies here has jumped dramatically.
Eloy Inos, the islands' governor, told the Saipan Tribune that immigration agents had sent home about 20 "birth tourists" in the past three to four months because of "documentation problems. Chinese tourist traffic to the islands in the first seven months of this year already matched arrivals for all of 2012, with the figure for July alone rising 49% to 11,177. Overall births in the Northern Marianas have been falling, but the Marianas Variety newspaper reports that births to ethnic Chinese rose 175% between 2010 and 2012 and last year outnumbered those of any other ethnicity. That means that 71 percent of babies born in Saipan are American-born Chinese, known in China as ABCs.
Many of the pregnant women arrive to avoid China's retribution, fines or worse that come with the Communist country's one-child policy. The Northern Marianas are a convenient refuge because Chinese can visit the islands for up to 45 days without a visa under an exemption to U.S. immigration rules intended to foster tourism.
And because it is one of a handful of official U.S. territories (Puerto Rico is another), children born in the Northern Marianas (a US territory since WWII) are eligible for U.S. citizenship.
Chinese tourist traffic of all kinds is now big business for the Northern Marianas. Northern Marianas officials are eager to head off the birth tourism problem to make sure it does not prompt the USA to revoke the visa waiver for Chinese tourists, something no competing U.S. destination can offer. Nearby Guam is seeking a similar waiver to compete.
Today, Saipan, the largest island, receives about eight charter flights a week from the Chinese cities of Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing with Wuhan and other cities set for connections too. And many businesses cater specifically to the maternity traffic.
The operator of one Saipan guesthouse told Radio Free Asia that she hosted 50 Chinese mothers last year, charging them $11,000 for accommodations, travel, translation help and some medical care, though most also incurred around $10,000 in other medical bills.
Birth tourism causes other problems too.
Inos said the Commonwealth Health Center, the only hospital on Saipan, may require tourists to provide a security deposit to combat the problem of bills left unpaid. Another proposal would raise the price of issuing birth certificates to certain types of visitors to as much as $50,000 from $20."

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/843799.shtml

[Aktungbby]

Originally Posted by me

even as they use the 'little fat man' and his nuclear threat in N. Korea to their political advantage to divert attention. I seriously doubt if the US under worthless "Let's maka deal" Trump and America's SEATO allies are going to put a stop to this.

U.S. officials identified and gathered information about the movement of the cargo ships, which are owned or managed by Chinese companies, using satellite imagery and other intelligence means. The evidence was presented to a United Nations sanctions committee, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

After the U.S. presented the information to the U.N., it asked the body to formally declare a total of 10 cargo ships as sanctions violators. China pushed back on the request, but it did permit the U.N. to blacklist four ships, excluding the six vessels tracked by the U.S., that don’t have connections to Chinese companies.
According to declassified intelligence reports, photos and maps given to the U.N. and reviewed by the Journal, the ships picked up illegal cargo, primarily coal, in North Korea and either transported it to Russia and Vietnam, or transferred it to other ships while at sea.
Some of the vessels disguised their locations by turning off their Automatic Identification Systems, which show a ship’s location...Corporate records and shipping databases were used to determine the six ships are owned by Chinese companies registered in Hong Kong. Chinese nationals invest in the companies, and they have used addresses in China. The Chinese government has investigated at least four of the six cargo ships and officials have questioned several of their owners and managers. At least one of the vessel’s managers has been arrested, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The 'great game' is well underway and China flouts the embargo sanctions in support of its criminal puppet regime. WSJ: The effort identified the ships by name and tracked their movements. The ships either entered ports in North Korea and transported what U.S. officials concluded was illicit cargo to Russia and Vietnam or made ship-to-ship transfers at sea.
According to the U.S., which presented the information to a U.N. sanctions committee, the ships also made extensive maneuvers designed to disguise their violations of the U.N. sanctions. In August, the Security Council banned North Korean exports of coal, iron ore, lead and seafood, which have generated an estimated $1 billion a year in hard currency for North Korea.
Just as switching off the AIS beacon can disguise a ship’s movements, a vessel can advertise its location by switching on the transmission device, much like turning on a flashlight in a darkened room. Both techniques were essential for the Glory Hope 1 as it carried out its mission, according to the analysis submitted by the U.S. to the U.N. sanctions committee.
The ship’s crew activated the AIS tracking device as the Glory Hope 1 approached the Chinese port of Lianyungang on Aug. 15. Instead of entering the port, the vessel “loitered” offshore, information provided to the U.N. shows.
The U.S. suggested the stop was meant to make it look as if the Glory Hope 1 had gone there to take on Chinese cargo. For more than a week, the ship hugged the Chinese coast until it approached Cam Pha, Vietnam, where its tracker was turned off again.
A U.S. satellite photo provided to the U.N. sanctions committee shows the ship anchored and being unloaded Aug. 26 near the Vietnamese port.
The U.S. said the Chinese-owned Glory Hope 1 was violating the U.N.’s complete ban on North Korean coal exports within days after it was passed in August. (Note: Coal from N. Korea is the backbone of the regimes hard- currency source when not conducting international banktheft, incl Bitcoin transfers by wire. 2 B used for nuclear weapon development.....)
The vessel crossed the Yellow Sea near North Korea under a Panamanian flag, entered North Korea’s Taedong River and then turned into the North Korean port of Songnim, according to the information presented to the U.N <satellite pics or it didn't happen?!!) China’s foreign ministry said Beijing abides fully with Security Council resolutions and deals with violations in accordance with the law. “Any measure taken by the Security Council should be based upon conclusive evidence and facts,” the ministry told the Journal in a written statement.
RIGHT

[ikalugin]

I just think that both Russia and PRC do not care enough to make extra (ie compared to non DPRK related smugling) effort to stop DPRK related smugling operation.

[Mr Quatro]

How much do we owe China anyway @ five (5) billion dollars each island the USA is helping China get ready for war.


The Paracel Islands are a chain of some 130 tiny features. China will likely building up dozens into islands with airports, missile facilities and ports.



https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/0...inot-line.html

China is spending about $5 billion to create and fortify each large man-made island in the South China Sea. This is for five-square-kilometer military bases. The bases often have 1-2 mile long airport runways and ports. These are larger than aircraft carrier runways. This means planes can launch with full loads of fuel and weapons. This allows planes to operate with longer ranges.

[Jimbuna]

China is deploying missiles in the disputed South China Sea to intimidate and coerce its neighbours, US Defence Secretary James Mattis has said.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-44340439

Nothing beats stating the obvious

[Mr Quatro]

China’s Sea Control Is a Done Deal, ‘Short of War With the U.S.’

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/w...-sea-navy.html



Look how close they are to the Philippines

[Jimbuna]

The reality is that governments with overlapping territorial claims — representing Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei — lack the firepower to challenge China. The United States has long fashioned itself as a keeper of peace in the Western Pacific. But it’s a risky proposition to provoke conflict over a scattering of rocks in the South China Sea, analysts say.

Just about sums it up for me.

[Aktungbby]

NEVERMIND THE TAKEOVER OF OF TIBET AND THE USURPATION OF THE SOUTH CHINA SEA....THERE MAY BE WORSE PROBLEMS:

China stands accused of a gruesome trade in human organs. It’s difficult to prove, because the victims’ bodies are disposed of and the only witnesses are the doctors, police and prison guards involved. Even so, the evidence supports a damning verdict.
The charge is that many prisoners of conscience—Falun Gong members, Uighur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists and “underground” Christians—have been subjected to medical testing and had their organs forcibly removed. Those organs have fed an enormous trade in organ transplants.

Patients in China—including foreigners—are promised matching organs within days. Former Canadian politician and prosecutor David Kilgour, lawyer David Matas, American journalist Ethan Gutmann and a team of researchers have confirmed this by posing to Chinese hospitals as patients. Dr. Huang Jiefu, China’s former vice minister for health and chairman of its organ-transplant committee, ordered two spare livers as backups for a 2005 medical operation. They were delivered the next morning. In most advanced Western countries, patients wait months or even years for transplants.
In 2016 Messrs. Kilgour, Matas and Gutmann published a report, “Bloody Harvest/the Slaughter: An Update,” building on research that dates back to 2006. In this latest version, the authors estimated that between 60,000 and 100,000 organs are transplanted each year in Chinese hospitals.
Where are the organs coming from? China claims it has the “largest voluntary organ donation system in Asia” and stopped using prisoners in 2015. But the country has no tradition of voluntary organ donation.
In 2010 China’s official number of voluntary donors was 34. In 2018 China still had only about 6,000 official organ donors, who are said to donate more than 18,000 organs. Yet the “Bloody Harvest” researchers find that figure is “easily surpassed by just a few hospitals.” Tianjin First Center alone performs more than 6,000 transplants a year, and the report’s authors “verified and confirmed 712 hospitals which carry out liver and kidney transplants.” Dr. Huang claims China will perform the most transplants in the world by 2020—more than America’s 40,000 a year.

China’s figures don’t add up. To provide healthy, matching organs within days to patients at hundreds of hospitals, using only several thousand voluntary donors a year means there must be an additional, involuntary source of organs.
Death-row inmates cannot account for all of these. China executes more people than the rest of the world combined, but still only about a few thousand a year. Besides, Chinese law requires prisoners sentenced to death to be executed within seven days—not enough time to match their organs to patients and have them ready on demand, as is China’s practice.
That led the investigators to conclude that prisoners of conscience are the source of most of the mystery organs. The evidence is varied: Former prisoners of conscience have testified repeatedly that they were subjected to blood tests and unusual medical examinations in prison. The report claims the test results were then added to a database of living sources of organs, enabling transplants on demand—when a patient needs an organ, a prisoner of conscience from the list is harvested.
Falun Gong, a spiritual movement the Chinese government considers subversive, has been persecuted since a crackdown in 1999. In 2006 Chinese-speaking researchers posed as organ buyers and directly asked if organs from Falun Gong practitioners could be arranged for transplant. Hospitals throughout China confirmed they had such organs available, no problem.
The stories are brutal. Dr. Enver Tohti, a former surgeon from Xinjiang, testified in the British, Irish and European parliaments to removing organs from a prisoner forcibly in 1995. “We had been told to wait behind a hill, and come into the field as soon as we’d hear the gunshot,” he recalled. “A moment later there were gunshots. Not one, but many. We rushed into the field. An armed police officer approached us and told me where to go. He led us closer, then pointed to a body, saying, ‘This is the one.’ By then our chief surgeon appeared from nowhere and told me to remove the liver and two kidneys.” According to Dr. Tohti, the man’s wound was not necessarily fatal. But Dr. Tohti went ahead and removed the liver and kidneys while the man’s heart was still beating.
Experts around the world have testified to China’s crimes. Israel, Taiwan and Spain have banned “organ tourism” to China. United Nations rapporteurs have called China to account for the sources of their organs but received no response.
The Independent Tribunal Into Forced Organ Harvesting From Prisoners of Conscience in China is looking into the matter. Sir Geoffrey Nice, who prosecuted Slobodan Milosevic, chairs the panel of jurists and experts. On Dec. 10, they issued a rare interim judgment: The panel is “certain—unanimously, and sure beyond reasonable doubt—that in China, forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practised for a substantial period of time, involving a very substantial number of victims” by the state.
The interim judgment was issued in the hope that it might “save innocents from harm.” If China has a response, I’d like to hear it.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-nightmare-of-human-organ-harvesting-in-china-11549411056 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Gong_practitioners_in_ China

Ethan Gutmann interviewed dozens of former Chinese prisoners, including sixteen Falun Gong practitioners who recalled undergoing unusual medical tests while in detention. Gutmann says some of these tests were likely routine examinations, and some may have been designed to screen for the SARS virus. However, in several cases, the medical tests described were exclusively aimed at assessing the health of internal organs.
One man, Wang Xiaohua, was imprisoned in a labor camp in Yunnan in 2001 when he and twenty other Falun Gong detainees were taken to a hospital. They had large quantities of blood drawn, in addition to urine samples, abdominal x-rays, and electrocardiogram. Hospital staff did not tend to physical injuries they had suffered in custody. This pattern was repeated in several other interviews. Qu Yangyao, a 30-something Chinese refugee, was taken from a labor camp to a hospital in 2000 along with two other Falun Gong practitioners. She says that hospital staff drew large volumes of blood, conducted chest x-rays and probed the prisoners’ organs. There was “no hammer on the knee, no feeling for lymph nodes, no examination of ears or mouth or genitals—the doctor checked her retail organs and nothing else,”

HEY NUTHIN' GETS WASTED IN CHINA! THE STATE OWNS YOU....PART FOR PART! AS A ''MAN OF MANY PARTS IN MY OWN RIGHT''....EVEN THE NAZIS NEVER DREAMED UP ANYTHING ON THIS SCALE!

[Aktungbby]

Well the corona virus is now pandemic and it might be a good thing for the world's peace since China, in order to save face is blamin the US for causing anyhow. Ever since advancing into Tibet unchallenged in 1959under the guise of Qing Dynasty ruleand the most recent expansion into suzerainty of the South China sea over the objections all the boardering nations:

China’s “New Silk Road” aims to improve trade between Asia and Europe, but the growing influence of Beijing and its tactics around debt have got hawks in Washington worried. They argue that China is using its wealth to buy influence across the world – and are preparing for a decades-long fight for economic supremacy and influence. Is the programme as much a threat as some US hawks believe?
The One Belt One Road initiative, or the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), is the name given to a Chinese government megaproject to improve trade and economic growth between the countries of Asia and Europe, primarily through infrastructure investments. It is the largest infrastructure project envisioned in modern times.
First proposed by Premier Xi Jinping in 2013, the initiative will involve countries hosting some 68% of the world’s population and 40% of global GDP. The final investment cost is expected to stand at between $4 trillion and $8 trillion.
The “belt” refers primarily to connecting countries on the traditional Silk Road route from Asia to Europe. An example of this would be the direct rail freight route between Chongqing, China and Dusseldorf, Germany which passes through Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus and Poland.
The “road” refers to countries connected by the “Maritime Silk Road”, an oceanic trade route that encompasses south Asia, Oceania, east Africa and southern Europe.Although this ambitious initiative by China has the potential to benefit the countries in which it invests, it has proved controversial in participating counties. The main criticism involves the amount of debt China has piled on poorer counties in an attempt to embed these developing nations in its sphere of influence. Critics argue that this borrowing trap will be used to exert significant leverage on participating counties and their leaders when they inevitably find themselves in financial distress.
It is no co-incidence that industries targeted in cyber-attacks are in sectors central to the Asian nation’s technology strategy as laid out in Premier Li Keqiang’s Made in China 2025 (MIC 2025) plan, unveiled in 2015. The policy targets many fields including robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), smart appliances and electric vehicles. The CrowdStrike report suggests that, while making positive diplomatic noises in trade discussions, cyber-espionage by China has now increased significantly.
This supports fears that Huawei, the world’s largest manufacturer of telecoms equipment, could spy on behalf of the Chinese government if its components were used in telecoms networks. The company is now banned from bidding for US government contracts; New Zealand and Australia have blocked local telecoms operators from using its equipment in their fifth-generation networks – and Germany is mulling a similar ban. In the UK, BT Group has removed Huawei components from a system it is developing for the emergency services and GCHQ is looking into the issue. Nevertheless, Huawei executives argue the company obeys regulations in all countries in which it operates.
Military build-up
There are some concerns that there is a military aspect too. In December, the New York Times reported that it had reviewed a confidential plan about China’s military projects in Pakistan under BRI. According to the proposal, a special economic zone will be created to produce fighter jets, while navigation systems and other military hardware will be jointly built at factories in Pakistan. China was “for the first time explicitly tying a Belt and Road proposal to its military ambitions,” the newspaper concluded.
As well as this military aspect, there are worries that participating countries will make themselves too reliant on China. While many of the countries benefiting from the BRI are in dire need of infrastructure and modernisation, China supplies almost all the workers to carry out the projects, which limits the scope for local involvement, creating tensions with “excluded” younger host-country populations. This has caused some to argue that the BRI could even end up creating infrastructure networks for extreme and radicalised organisations in unstable countries.
China and the US are in the midst of a struggle for dominance. China insists that BRI is benign, but it is likely to continue to build tensions with the US. Coming at a time when the “America First” policy is resulting in the US becoming increasingly isolationist, the BRI is a threat to the West as it increases the “soft power” of China in a number of strategically important countries. However, these countries are starting to conclude that that the BRI is not a magic pot of gold – and it is likely to come with a significant sting in the tail. This is a welcome development everywhere but Beijing. https://www.charles-stanley.co.uk/group/cs-live/china%E2%80%99s-belt-and-road-initiative-threat-west

In short we are in a cold war with China and as it has tipped it's POKER-hand holding the US responsible for Wuhan virus to save face on an international level. SUCH BOLD-FACE MISREPRESENTATION CAN ONLY BE ACCOUNTED FOR AGAINST THE PERCIEVED LOSS OF GLOBAL SILKROAD LOSS-OF-FACE AND INFLUENCE.

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/chinese-officials-blame-us-army-for-coronavirus-67267 The statements might simply be a distraction from criticisms about how China has handled the outbreak. Li Wenliang, a Chinese doctor who had tried to raise awareness about the virus in the early stages, was punished by the government and forced to say his concerns were an “illegal rumor.” Li contracted the virus himself while treating a patient in January and died on February 7. Critics claim that had these concerns been taken seriously at the time, it could have curbed the severity of the outbreak.
The unfounded claims could also be a response to US officials who have referred to SARS-CoV-2 as the “China virus” or “Wuhan virus,” according to the Times, terms that Lijian denounced as “highly irresponsible” at a March 4 press conference.
“The conspiracy theories are a new, low front in what they clearly perceive as a global competition over the narrative of this crisis,” Julian Gewirtz, an Academy Scholar at Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, tells the Times. http://search.earthlink.net/search?q=china+blames+the+US+for++virus&area=earth link-ws&abtli=0&abtcgid=87

Nuthin new: a regime controlling truth and altering facts to support it's illusion of infallibility.....

[Aktungbby]