By Godfree Roberts from his newsletter :

Today, moderate and nuanced views of China-US relations are less and less valued in the US. In a recent speech at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in California, the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo portrayed the Communist Party of China (CPC) as a tyranny and called on the so-called free world to defeat it. This could be perceived as the “new cold war” declaration.

A good read from Andrei Martyanov on One Trick Ponies. Or On Cold War With China. http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2020/07/one-trick-ponies-or-on-cold-war-with.html


On this note, let’s go see what they are doing in China from Godfree Roberts’ Latest Newsletter.

‘The China-Iran tie-up underscores all that is wrong with India’s diplomacy,’ says Indian Ambassador MK Bhadrakumar. “India looks increasingly like a beached whale, while an exciting, transformative geopolitical landscape is appearing in the Indian Ocean. China sees seamless possibilities in strategic partnership with Iran”.[MORE]

Steelmakers pour more steel in June than the US produces in a year. Three million tons a day, for a 2020 total of one billion tons, amid booming demand from construction and infrastructure.  Output for June was 91.58 million tons, up 4.5% year-on-year, putting six-month production at 499 million tons. [MORE]

China becoming Germany’s top export destination. China was Germany’s third biggest customer (after the US and France), with exported goods worth €96 billion ($109 billion), on trackto replace France as Germany’s second largest export market this year.. The export gap between China and Germany’s biggest export countries decreased “substantially” in the first five months of the year. [MORE]

International meeting: No to the New Cold War

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz_u-ejEcmQ&feature=youtu.be

SPEAKERS INCLUDE:

  • Medea Benjamin (Co-founder, CODEPINK)
  • Wang Wen (Executive Dean, Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China)
  • Martin Jacques (Author: ‘When China Rules the World’)
  • Vijay Prashad (Executive Director, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research)
  • Carlos Ron (Vice-Minister for North America, Venezuela’s Ministry for Foreign Relations)
  • Qiao Collective
  • Yury Tavrovksy (Author: ‘America Against China: Cold War in Times of Coronavirus’)
  • Yang Hanyi (Senior editor, Guancha.cn)
  • Ajamu Baraka (Black Agenda Report)
  • Margaret Kimberley (Black Agenda Report)
  • Max Blumental (Editor-in-chief, The Grayzone)
  • Anya Parampil (Journalist and presenter, The Grayzone)
  • Kate Hudson (General Secretary, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament)
  • Radhika Desai (Professor, Department of Political Studies, University of Manitoba)
  • John Ross (Senior Fellow, Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China)
  • Elias Jabbour (Associate Professor, Rio de Janeiro State University)
  • Jenny Clegg (Author: ‘China’s Global Strategy: Toward a Multipolar World’)

ROUGH JUSTICE: Huawei pushes court to reveal ‘sensitive’ evidence. Huawei wants to share the evidence with its Chief Financial Officer Meng Wangzhou but prosecutors have classified 21,000 pages of “sensitive discovery material” that can’t be shown to anyone beyond a group of US defense lawyers and must remain in the country to avoid the information falling “into the wrong hands” in China. Huawei says it is “both unseemly and improper” for the government to be dictating whom the defendants can speak with about central facts in order to defend a criminal case.[MORE]

Australia joins US in rejecting China’s claims in South China Sea. Canberra believes there is ‘no legal basis’ for Beijing’s claims to the disputed sea via its so-called nine-dash line. The move aligns Australia with the Trump administration, which earlier this month reversed a previous policy of not taking sides in such disputes. [MORE]

An Australian warship joined threee US Navy ships in Malaysian waters because an unarmed Chinese vessel was conducting routine seismic surveys there. The Australian warship did not come within 12 nautical miles of the contested islands, unlike American warships, which have recently conducted freedom of navigation exercises to challenge Beijing’s territorial claims.[MORE]

An Australian national security investigation targeting foreign interference is examining whether his parliamentary speeches and other representations were influenced by Chinese Communist Party agents. After raiding Parliamentarian Shaoquett Moselmane’s home, Australian Federal Police have spent two days in NSW parliament inspecting documents — speeches, petitions, questions on notice, committee papers and other material used in the drafting of these items — from Mr Moselmane’s office.[MORE]

A paper from the Australia-China Relations Institute found the proportion of Australian scientific publications involving Chinese researchers grew from 3.1 per cent in 2005 to 16.2 per cent last year, overtaking the US for the first time. The UK was third, followed by Germany and Canada. The strongest ties with China were in the fields of materials science, chemical engineering, and energy. In those three areas, a third of Australian-led publications involve Chinese scientists.[MORE]

Online mutual insurance for catastrophic medical problems has attracted more than 150 million participants in less than two years. Xiang Hu Bao, “mutual protection,” provides participants with a basic health plan covering 100 types of critical illnesses including cancer, critical brain injury and acute myocardial infarction, or heart attack. Participants pay 29 yuan and can receive a one-time payout of as much as 300,000 yuan.
 6.5% of COVID-19 patients can suddenly progress to serious illness and, among them, mortality can be 49%. This week, a team unveiled a deep learning-based model that predicts their risk of developing critical illness. The details, published in Nature Communications, tells how the lab devised the model based on a cohort of 1,590 patients from 575 medical centers in China, with further validation from 1,393 patients. The lab has made the predictor available online, allowing clinical staff around the world to calculate patients’ probability of developing critical illness within 5, 10 and 30 days using 10 clinical variables.[MORE]

Tianwen-1 blasted off for Mars on last Thursday and NASA’s Perseverance will follow next week. The Tianwen-1 team said the probe will orbit, land and release a rover on the first try, and coordinate observations with an orbiter. If successful, it would signify a major technical breakthrough, sine no planetary missions have ever been implemented this way. Tianwen-1 should reach Mars in February, spend several months positioning itself for landing then, when the time is right, the orbiter will release the lander and rover into the Martian atmosphere in April, which will touch down close to the Utopia Planitia – a vast plain and the largest recognized impact basin (with a diameter of 3300 km) in the Solar System. The orbiter will loop around Mars for an entire Martian year (1.88 Earth years), acting as a communication link for the rover, which has a designed lifetime of around 90 Martian days—93 Earth days. [MORE]

China decreases dependence on foreign semiconductors Part 1: Chinese firm establishes production line with annual capacity of 300,000 PCs, made with 100% with home-made parts and operating system. [MORE]

China decreases dependence on foreign semiconductors, Part 2.  Chinese-owned SMIC, the fifth-largest pure-play foundry in the world, will  produce 7nm chips next year, creating further negative financial impacts on US companies. Huawei is shifting its 14nm chipset orders from Taiwan’s TSMC to SMIC.

Qian Xuesen, one of the best and brightest rocket scientists in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, was forced to return to China during the Red Scare of the 1950s. Qian spent the rest of his career in the PRC and provided a critical boost to China’s efforts to modernize their military rocketry and space programs. Today, he is celebrated as a hero of the nation and his research led to the production of China’s first ballistic missiles, its first satellite launch, and the development of the Silkworm anti-ship missile.The son of a government official, Qian Xuesen was born in Hangzhou in 1911. He earned a mechanical engineering degree from Shanghai Jiaotong University in 1934 and at the age of 23 traveled to the United States on a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship, studying first at MIT and then at Caltech under Theodore von Kármán, who called Qian “an undisputed genius.” As a result of his research, in 1949 Qian as named the first director of the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Jet Propulsion Centre at Caltech.

In 1950, Qian applied for permission to visit his parents in China. An FBI investigation accused him of having Communist sympathies — as a grad student he had attended a social gathering the Bureau suspected of being a Communist Party meeting — and Qian was stripped of his security clearance. Qian denied the charges, but despite the best effort of his colleagues and supporters in the scientific community, he remained under house arrest until 1955 when he was finally permitted to leave for China. Former Navy Secretary Dan Kimball called the decision, “The stupidest thing this country ever did.”

Upon his return to China, Qian founded the Institute of Mechanics in Beijing and became a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 1964, China tested its own atomic bomb. Under Qian’s direction, Chinese researchers developed the first generation of “Long March” missiles and in 1970 supervised the launch of Chia’s first satellite.[MORE]

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