By Michael Hudson and posted with special permission.
In a Financial Times op-ed, “Investors in Xi’s China face a rude awakening” (August 30, 2021), George Soros writes that Xi’s “crackdown on private enterprise shows he does not understand the market economy. … Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has collided with economic reality. His crackdown on private enterprise has been a significant drag on the economy.”
Translated out of Orwellian Doublethink, the “crackdown on private enterprise” means cutting back on what the classical economists called rent-seeking and unearned income. As for its supposed “drag on the economy,” Mr. Soros means the economy’s polarization concentrating wealth and income in the hands of the richest One Percent.
Soros lays out his plan for how U.S. retaliation may punish China by withholding U.S. funding of its companies (as if China cannot create its own credit) until China capitulates and imposes the kind of deregulation and de-taxation that Russia did after 1991. He warns that China will suffer depression by saving its economy along socialist lines and resisting U.S.-style privatization and its associated debt deflation.
Mr. Soros does recognize that China’s “most vulnerable sector is real estate, particularly housing. China has enjoyed an extended property boom over the past two decades, but that is now coming to an end. Evergrande, the largest real estate company, is over-indebted and in danger of default. This could cause a crash.” By that, he means a reduction of housing prices. That’s just what is needed in order to deter land becoming a speculative vehicle. I and others have urged a policy of land taxation in order to collect the land’s rising site value, so that it will not be pledged to banks for mortgage credit to further inflate china’s housing prices.
Warning about the economic consequences of China’s falling birth rate, Soros writes: “One of the reasons why middle-class families are unwilling to have more than one child is that they want to make sure that their children will have a bright future.” This is of course true of every advanced nation today. It is most extreme in the neoliberalized countries, e.g., the Baltics and Ukraine – Soros’s poster countries.
Soros gives his game away by stating that “Xi does not understand how markets operate.” What he means is that President Xi rejects rapacious rent-seeking, exploitative free-for-all, and shapes markets to serve overall prosperity for China’s 99 Percent. “As a consequence, the sell-off was allowed to go too far,” Soros continues. What he means is, too far to maintain the dominance of the One Percent. China is seeking to reverse economic polarization, not intensify it.
Soros claims that China’s socialist policies are hurting its objectives in the world. But what he really is complaining about is that it is hurting America’s neoliberal objectives for how it had hoped to make money for itself off China. This leads Soros to remind Western pension fund managers to “allocate their assets in ways that are closely aligned with the benchmarks against which their performance is measured.” But the tragedy of financializing pensions is that fund managers are rated on making money financially – in ways that hurt the industrial economy by promoting financial engineering instead of industrial engineering.
“Almost all of them claim that they factor environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) standards into their investment decisions,” Soros writes. At least, that’s what their public relations advisors advertise. Exxon claims to be cleaning up the environment by expanding offshore oil drilling in Guyana, etc. As for “social standards,” the neoliberal mantra is trickle-down economics: by making our stock prices rise, by stock buybacks and higher dividend payouts, we are helping wage-earners earn a pension, even though we are offshoring and de-industrializing the economy, de-unionizing it and “freeing” the economy from consumer and workplace protection laws.
Soros has a radical solution, which he suggests “should obviously apply to the performance benchmarks selected by pensions and other retirement portfolios: … The US Congress should pass a bipartisan bill explicitly requiring that asset managers invest only in companies where actual governance structures are both transparent and aligned with stakeholders.”
Wow. Such a bill would block Americans from investing in many American companies whose behavior is not at all aligned with stakeholders. What proportion: 50%? 75? More?
“If Congress were to enact these measures,” Soros concludes, “it would give the Securities and Exchange Commission the tools it needs to protect American investors, including those who are unaware of owning Chinese stocks and Chinese shell companies. That would also serve the interests of the US and the wider international community of democracies.” So Mr. Soros wants to block the United States from investing in China. He seems not to see that this is President Xi’s objective also: China doesn’t need U.S. dollars, and is in fact de-dollarizing.
George Soros is obviously upset that President Xi is not Boris Yeltsin, and that China is not following the kleptocracy dependency that warped Russia’s economy. Soros thought the ending of the Cold War would simply let him buy up the most lucrative rent-yielding assets, as he has aimed to do in the Baltics and Ukraine. China said “No,” so it is not deemed to be a “market economy,” Soros-style. It has not made its social organization marketable, and has avoided the financial dependency that makes “markets” a vehicle for U.S. control via sanctions and foreign buyouts.
Ha-ha-ha! This ghastly Hungarian Zhid, Nazi-collaborating piece of sh**e and one of the biggest parasites on the face of the planet, has decided that his, still evil, but already feeble mind, can produce something that can be published! God help us! What a f..k! The sooner World rids itself of this human garbage, the better it will be for all of us.
This man is so brilliant. Bam bam bam – in a few paragraphs he did not only decimate/decapitate Soros but a whole bunch of western-style economics journalism that followed this line since China started changing the rules for the massive tech behemoths and made it clear that they could not rule the roost. They are not running away with the economy but very carefully structuring and re-structuring. These people pay attention. I sometimes think they watch the West and deliberately do the opposite but it is of course not this simple.
The de-dollarizing is also subtle but if you look for it, it is clearly there.
This was a joy to read. A Brutal take-down, but a joy.
We are in total agreement with you. Dr. Hudson cuts through all the BS, and gets down to Soros’s true intentions. It’s called greed & profit.
“But what profits a man to own the whole world, yet loses his soul.”
Soros is a demon masquerading as a human being. I have no idea why he writes op-eds like these. Everyone knows he is evil. Why is he pretending not to be? Why does he have a psychological need to pretend like he is a do-gooder when he is clearly a wolf in sheep’s clothing? The man radiates darkness and evil. I just don’t get it.
Why pretend to be something different than what you really are. The world sees through you, Mr. Soros.
If you mean, Soros is one of the great Satan’s that feed on the blood of innocent people?
Then you are absolutely right. Soros and Dracula’s Bride Madeline Albright should all burn in hell for eternity!
I have never figured out exactly why Clinton’s deep state / MOSSAD wanted to destroy Yugoslavia and give Kosovo to the Muslims. Any clues?
A number of reasons come to mind:
– opening new markets (eliminating potential competition) for Western corporations (Yugoslavia actually had a car industry).
– geopolitical divide and conquer by the West. Yugoslavia had a population of 24 million, which made it a viable, sovereign state. After its break up, the elites of the newly created tiny states (Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Kosovo, etc.) had no choice, but to align themselves with the West/EU/NATO. (In 1990s, Russia was on its knees awaiting a similar fate and could not provide much support.)
My feeling at the time was that one reason was that they wanted to look good in Muslim circles. Also I think if you look in British Foreign Secretary and later Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s memoires you will find that when he visited the US during the war he had a meeting with Roosevelt. He was somewhat surprised to hear R. tell about breaking up Yugoslavia even then.
▪︎Splinter one of the most potent people when united (a global source of inspiration; were among founders of NAM)
▪︎Weaken Serbia, their permanent enemy and foundation of Yugoslavia
▪︎Generate hatred between Orthodoxy and Islam
▪︎Break up fraternal ties and trust between Serbs and Russians
▪︎Emotionally and militarily attach muslims and especially Turk/Arab muslims to the Anglo Zionist camp
▪︎develop Extremist Internationale proxies networks and interrelationships
▪︎Establish a black-hole stronghold/way point for trafficking humans, organs, refugees streams, narcotics and other contraband such as materiel for forever wars
▪︎ squat on a key node of Eurasia
At the time it made no sense to me, especially ejecting the moderate Kossovo leaders in favor of Tlaci and the KLA, who were known gangsters. After US invaded Afghanistan, it made sense. The CIA could fly their heroin straight from Afghanistan to Camp Bondsteel cutting out Turkish and Iranian middlemen.
I guess Yougoslavia was a neutral country and a Russian ally. It could be a bad example for the Eastern European conquered countries
This is your lucky day, go to the page below and look for all the articles there on Yugoslavia, you will find your answers there:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Gowan
‘The Euro-Atlantic Origins of NATO’s attack on Yugoslavia’
‘Making Sense of NATO’s War on Yugoslavia’
‘The NATO Powers and the Balkan Tragedy’
‘The Twilight of the European Project’
The Twisted Road to Kosovo
Another good source in English on the destruction of Yugoslavia prior to the Kosovo war is ‘Liar’s Poker. The Great Powers, Yugoslavia and the Wars of the Future’, 1998, 202pp, by M.Collon. Published in Bruxelles, Belgium by Editions EPO and Michel Collon.
Most people think that Soros is just a nazi bloodthirsty demon, but he is actually the public face or the World Jewish Congress leaders. China wasnt an easy prey as expected and now their main bloodsucking reservoir, America, is falling into pieces. I dont even think Soros wrote anything whatsoever. This was a product of the porteparole office of the World Jewish Congress, the secret tentacles which actually run the world, or at least the part of it controlled by the anglozionist empire
Brilliant Mr Hudson! The Soros take down is excellent, the man is clearly deluded, the time when the US dictates to Eurasia is over and as the US military has been exposed to all for the paper tiger it is, there is no possibility for the US to do anything about it (apart from threats and pointless sanctions) The Americans still haven’t realised thats its over and all downhill from here on in.
For any Western ‘expert’ to give economic advice to China is like a dunce offering his dunce cap. China is the world leader in economic growth rates. Its economic and social transformation that lifted a billion plus people out of poverty in mere four decades is a first ever in human history. Never before have so many stepped out from poverty into prosperity so rapidly. And what has George Soros to show for himself except his skills at financial manipulation? Has he built anything – ever?
It does seem absurd for Mr. Soros to lecture the Chinese on economics given the extraordinary success of the Chinese versus the dismal Western economies now poised for serious turbulence.
I wonder if Mr. Hudson has any comments on the current economic situation. It seems to me the Fed has only two stated options: either printing money (Quantitative easing) or raising interest rates which would restrict credit. As I see it, they are damned either way.
They can’t keep printing money and they can’t stop printing money because either way the bubble will break–i.e. from money printing inflation or money tightening deflation. Have you any views on this?
Michael has plenty to say: https://michael-hudson.com/
The only obvious “solution” is to kick the chess board over, as in WAR.
@NotEinstein
What’s the point of starting a war if you’re going to lose?
That is even more obvious.
Dear Blackring,
They are insane.
Has any war since Korea been waged with intent to win?
If the parasite has determined to switch to a new host in the Holy Land, wouldn’t it be convenient to have Anglo part of AZ and Rus/China/Iran camp achieve nirvana together?
It can’t be that insane, since the US has done it at least twice in living memory.
It is typical corruption, but kicked up a notch: finding ways to convert taxpayer money into politician’s money. That’s why they never tried to win in vietnam or afghanistan; winning ends the excuse for converting tax money into military contracts with whichever corp offers the most kickbacks to the politicians and generals.
@Blackring
Don’t underestimate the West. Nuclear armageddon will be their final farewell.
They’ll be in their burrows. It’s the rest of us who will suffer.
The ultimate goal of the kleptocrats is not money, it’s not power, it’s destruction. It’s the only option that makes sense.
But why would they want destruction? Perhaps it is a sacrifice to a god who has served them well, or so they think.
What “god” would that be?
Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man…
… Socialist policies… (Has Mr. Soros found out that China is governed by the communist party?)
What the PCCH has done was very intelligent and patriotic for the sake of the people. He beat the Anglo-USA empire on his own turf; understood that the economy or economic system is only a tool, and not an end in itself, to solve the problems of its people.
He is criticized for being totalitarian (compared to whom?) Of course, perhaps there is another way to confront the most genocidal and inhuman empire in history, the “perfidious Albion”, if not by protecting your sources, tactics and strategies. The so-called “democracy” is just a way of infiltrating the peoples and, among other things, brainwashing them with corrupt advertising and propaganda …
Soros means REAL socialism, where those in charge use the greater good as an excuse to pilfer wealth and amass power with which to get their jollies off on the poor stinking masses.
Taking down Big Tech in China was a way to return control to the CCP. Why should these people know more about our personal lives than our closest friends and family?
Removing actors and “celebrities” suffering from gender confusion is bound to strengthen society. Keep up the good work Mr XI.
You can measure the value of Mr Soros’ life by whether he makes spiritual and material poverty in the world bigger or smaller? The same question can be asked regarding the USA and Israel.
Generally speaking stock markets have during the history been much more danger than booster to real economy. Share holders with just few exceptions are nothing but lazy parasites. Perfect place for folks who can’t protect, provide, produce and solved problems. Every time when power of share holders has been eliminated people of nations have lived more stable and happy life.
Dear Esquire George S.
You’re wasting your precious time left before descending to a ’fairly hot place’ by writing this kind of hogwash about China. Intelligent, powerful, and tenacious governments are simply beyond you. Instead, please commit yourself 100% to what you have been absolutely great — indeed unsurpassed — at: taking down the US from within. I know you know that your US compatriots won’t get any ”funny ideas” about gunning you down, ever. Be sure your wrecking of the US is most appreciated around the globe!
Sincerely yours,
/Nussiminen
This is so preposterous. China’s economy is in slight decline (less cement, less cars purchased) due to the energy crunch affecting us all. The US, meanwhile, had to get out of Afghanistan because it could not service that war anymore. It is in steep socio-economic decline too, and its economy depends on oil far more than any other developed country. And guess which country, in case of war, will spend by far the most oil, in and from its forward bases? Even Soros, whom I thought of as part of a connected super-elite, is not understanding the main driver of this era, and has to attract attention to himself in a way that can not be good for him, come a few years.
With the possible exception of Germany the North Atlantic political/economic bloc has entered into a stage of long-term economic and political regression. The spread of financialization has been enabled by the same interests of parasitic, rent-extraction by landed property and banking and against productive/industrial capitalism. This wasn’t always the case, however, for:
”Under George the first English statesmen had long ago perceived the grounds on which the greatness of the nation depends. At the opening of Parliament in 1721, the King is made to say by the Ministry that ‘ … it is evident that nothing so much contributes to promote the public well-being as the exportation of manufactured goods and the importation of foreign raw materials …
This for centuries had been the maxim of English commercial policy, as formerly it had been of the commercial policy of the Venetian Republic … Nor does English history supress less conclusive evidence of the intimate connexion subsisting between a nation’s general political policy and political economy. Clearly the rise and growth of manufacturing in England, with the increase of population resulting from it became self-reinforcing.’’
This policy was carried over into the far corners of the Empire.
‘’In her North American colonies England had already acted on those policies in disallowing the manufacture of even a horseshoe nail. And that now horseshoe nails should be imported into England. How could it be expected of her that she should give up her own manufactures, for the basis of future greatness …England also prohibited the importation of goods from low cost areas of Empire such as cotton from India and Egypt.’’
Such were the views of Friedrich List and his National System of Political Economy. These policies were also operationalised by Alexander Hamilton in the United States. Congress created the Department of the Treasury, including the cabinet post of secretary of the Treasury, and required the secretary to report directly to Congress. President George Washington appointed Alexander Hamilton as the first secretary of the Treasury.
During 1790 and 1791, Hamilton embarked on an ambitious plan of economic nationalism. He intended the plan to solve the economic problems that had plagued the United States since the American Revolution and to provide the means to defend the new republic. Beginning in January 1790 with the “Report on the Public Credit,” he advanced his plan in a series of reports to Congress.
Along with Germany in the late 19th century the United States adopted an economic designed to break British hegemony, which by the turn of century it had succeeded.
But then came the great counter-revolution of the mid/late 20th century, and carried on into the 21st century led by the banking and propertied landowning classes whose interests were and now still are championed by the likes of George Soros. In global terms the north-Atlantic bloc finds itself in an economic and political cul-de-sac. Where we go from here is anybody’s guess.
Soros’ position reminds me of a TV debate in a Brazilian news channel over recent fuel price rises in Brazil, involving economists and investment fund administrators.
That was an unique debate: usually these debates are nothing more than a competiton of who’s the biggest neoliberal rentseeker in the room, but this time actual economists were invited and there was actual debate about the cascading effects of fuel prices in the economy as a whole.
Economists Exposed the effects and suggested a reduction of dividend payments to Petrobras’ staleholders (Petrobras is the former state-owned brazilian oil Company, currently the country is still the major shareholder, but it is Being through a “soft privatization”, with several BU’s being sold separately, until the company becomes unsustainable and get sold by an atrocious low price).
The fund administrators went nuts with the dissent, defending the position of Petrobras’ stockholders and their rising dividends as “vital to the continuity of the Company, while keeping Brazil attractive to foreign investors.”
In awe, one of the economists replied: “have you forgotten that Petrobras is still partially owned by the state, theoretically representing the Will of those who are not shareholders of the Company, but are affected by its policies?”
The answer, in my humble opinion, should go to the annals of neoliberal stupidity:
“But the shareholders are actual representatives of the Brazilian people at the Company’s board!”
Thanks for that great for reference again!
George Soros should be out selecting his coffin and not worrying about China, his days are numbered.
Good riddance when he leaves the earth.
in the forthcoming (i assume) Soros sitcom, his coffin, ironically, will be Made-In-China
I have to think that the fiends who control the world’s market economy aren’t even human anymore. More likely “they” are some kind of AI profit algorithm like what controls the hedge funds. It’s obvious they have no use for actual human beings and are culling the human race of useless eaters through famines, plagues, climate change, and best of all… nuclear warfare. That is after all what Zionists like Soros pray for, to start the war to end all wars that will bring an end to human history on the planet Earth, except maybe for a few of us who will be kept around as pets. Israel’s Samson Option isn’t a last resort, it’s the ultimate goal.
In the USA these are the Rapture-me-outta-here folks who looked to Trump as their ticket to the Rapture. One of them, Christian Zionist Pastor John Hagee, claims that the USA has nothing to fear from WWIII, that a nuclear holocaust will be a good thing. It will not lead to the end of the world, but rather to “God’s renewal of the Garden of Eden.” At the very least, nuclear winter will be the “fix” for global warming so I’m all for it.
Yes. Exceptionalism in all its forms does nasty things to one’s mind. Soros is also older than dirt and I think many of these types adopt a ‘nothing left to lose’ mentality as they approach their mortal end. Interesting times ahead until all this gets sorted out. I think it will have to be the kids to do it, as they’re the ones with the most to lose.
You also don’t have much to lose if your plan is to be Raptured up to Heaven while the rest of us are turned to cinder cakes. 50 million US Christian Zionists pray for WWIII to happen, and they all voted for Trump in the last election. Yes, we live in “interesting” times.
Thanks for this brief article on Soros, Michael. Yesterday I listened to all three of your recent lectures on globalization while doing chores. I’m approaching the end of the third volume of Uncle Karl’s Capital and am in the first volume of Theories of Surplus Value. Also reading your book on development and foreign debt. It was Pepe Escobar’s and your discussion on economics a year or so ago that renewed my interest in economics. I frequent your website.
Off topic: I love Thomas Carlyle and am reading his The History of the French Revolution for the third time. The parallels and cosmic rhyming—-absolutely amazing.
LTB, could you “share” a bit about how you listen to lectures, etc, while otherwise occupied? I’d like to be able to put similar time to that kind of use — as well as spare the eyes.
Thanks.
It is actually very satisfying reading Soros whining about China not doing the “right” things. I hope he keeps whining before going belly-up like a goldfish. The world needs more entertainment and negative education from his hypocrisy, greed and stupidity.
Rule of thumb: If people like Soros are whining, the Chinese are doing something right…
How van Inhave Mr Hudson’s email?
I’m interested in his next book.
Thanks.
There can be no better recommendation for the recent actions of President Xi than that it incurred the wrath of George Soros. Thanks for this succinct analysis Mr Hudson.
Many thanks to Michael Hudson for bringing clarity to issues that are routinely about as clear as mud in both academia and the corporate media. China presents the Western oligarchy with an intolerable spectre, the political rule of a country, not excluding economic aspects.
I find fault with the modern social sciences in general. If you want this ‘society’ to be scientifically knowable you must first turn human beings into predicable animals. And they have!!. One of the main techniques of this vast reductionist enterprise is the modern social sciences themselves. The legalistic queen of the sciences is psychology, the doctrine of hopes and fears which elicits the political science of government as a legislative manipulation of rewards and punishments (Bentham & Co.). The Chinese once called this ‘legalism’ and traditionalists hated it. The ‘system’ of individuated self interested ‘persons’, free and equal, operating in ‘conditions of perfect competition’ as the economics textbooks have it, is exactly ‘society’. Sociology is an assumed science of individuated agents who seem bereft of political capacities. There are reasons for this but I will content myself with the remark that the modern social sciences are of little use. We need to revive the traditional forms of political reflection. I call this political philosophy. This is not because I want to tell the world how wonderful the Greeks and Romans were. No. My view on the Greeks and Romans are very much in line with Michael’s. But although the republican Greeks first developed the sophistry of ‘freedom’ as an anti monarchic ideology of oligarchy, explicitly to maintain the underclass in a condition of slavery, by sanctifying the ‘rule of law’, yet they also created systematic order in the classification of the political regimes. I think in particular the accomplishment of Polybius is of great and universalistic value. Very quickly: they distinguished between ‘the one, the few, and the many’. Here is quantity. As regards these three each was distinguished qualitatively as good or evil, virtuous or corrupt. Here we have a true system that is fit for dispassionate analysis, hence political Philosophy.
The aim of the neoliberals is to put an end to political authority. It is an extreme version of the age old republican hostility towards monarchic authority, well able to discern class injustice and do something about it. So they took refuge in ‘the rule of law’ by which they really mean property rights that hold debtors in bondage. That was ever the idea. To confront and defeat this one must take a stand on the ground of POLITICAL authority. This is why Marxists are so often out to lunch. Their sociological orientation invalidates political authority. As Michael has acknowledged before they think ‘the state’ is something to abolish. But let us have done with ideas like ‘the state’. That is a sociological conception. The state is the organising principle of society. It does not predate Hobbes. Again we need to remind ourselves that there was once such a thing as a political association.
Kevin, very interesting post. Could you recommend some readings in general as well as about political philosophy.
Thanks.
I probably should not have posted the last bit as it hangs on a distinction between community and society that is likely to be lost on many. Maybe just confuses the issue.
FORTUNE 100 UPSIDE DOWN: A SOCIETY WITHOUT BILLIONAIRES
End of a Liberal Order and the Great Upheaval: China pushes back against the rich and slams the door on the Soros and the Jacks.
A Reply to Michael Hudson
INTRODUCTION
We Chinese would be remiss not to first thank Michael Hudson for his rebuttal to the FT op-ed by George Soros, whom China otherwise have no time for. Good thing that some 99.9 percent of the Chinese intelligentsia don’t read English. Their time would be better spent studying Hudson’s ideas on how financial capitalism had built on Milton Friedman’s monetarism, and now Soros is watching the edifice collapse. It was, for example, a revelation to learn that Babylonia had debt forgiveness under a new ruler each time. No such thing is evidenced in the Chinese past. This simply means our historians must revisit the archaeological and written records, wearing new lenses, like Hudson, to see why, without debt jubilee, ancient China produced had no class of debt peonage or slaves. In any case, this western notion of owning someone’s life in order to extract surplus value from labor is very un-Confucian, and so remains taboo to this day.
Until the arrival of western political economic thought, the all-encompassing Chinese production credo is to honor labor relations for the sole ethical and familial purpose of preserving and prospering the nation, starting with the individual, family, clan and village and onward in concentric circles to the State. There is nothing else. Strange, but perhaps this explains why liberalism never got much traction in China. Indeed, the East is East, the West is West….
That, too, is also why more than George Soros (because he is not Chinese), the Jack Ma and Joe Tsai versions of him in China are considered as aberrations, today becoming nationally hated figures. If the Communist Party (CPC) government hadn’t acted to get the Jacks and the Joes, all 1.4 bn Chinese would have demanded for their heads. (See this for example: 中共对内”统一思想”!为即将到来的一场不可避免的局部战争做准备! https://youtu.be/LH_nyg8rm0E.)
From reading Hudson, the first question that ought to be asked but never is, goes something like this: Why does the FT see fit to suddenly facilitate Soros his instigation? The crux of Soros’s argument is, ‘crackdown’ on private enterprise. But, is that opening claim even true? When is a business, private? How is a business, a business, or private, or both if the penultimate source of any private business, including its capital, profits and wealth had been derived from socializing resources or, more broadly, from the people and their land?
The Anglophile that he is, Soros understand nothing about Chinese ethical culture wherein an enterprise, private or whatever, is at its roots a trust (for the family, clan, etc) and not simply an individual, ‘private’ vehicle for gathering the surpluses of others. This explains why, despite the near total absence of institutionalized or bank debt, businesses and markets have flourished and China’s economy soared. It has always been a collective effort, among relatives, surname clans, and so on: say, eight persons pulling together, 10,000 yuan here, 50,000 there, to launch a 1 million yuan petroleum products distribution business which, after six years, is a chain of a dozen gas stations, all shoulders to the wheel, demolishing and refurbishing, placing orders, taking delivery, maintenance, receiving customers, and so on. We, the capitalist, extract our own surplus value.
For the Chinese, therefore, those questions posed above about the nature of private ownership are not a matter of semantics (in the English. The Chinese language doesn’t have such a problem). Rather their answers will lead to an epistemological discovery for the truth. In taking down Soros, Hudson not only exposed the like of him in their inane ideological trite — community of democracies, free market, etc — but this as well: He is a truly sick man, pathologically perverse, fascistic in his liberal ideology and tyrannical in his messianic delivery thereof; a totally Satanic self-serving capitalist. Evil has few equals as George Soros, and those words are made deliberate not polemical.
We won’t, therefore, dwell on Soros, though one thing must be said. Soros is the financial version of a Pat Robertson televangelist but peddling snake oil to unsuspecting bystanders in Westminster and Capitol Hill. How we sometimes wish Hudson will not alert him. We say, When your enemy is making mistakes, don’t interrupt. This (long) reply attempts, however, to provide some ground realities inside China, events that have taken place in recent months that brought Soros to our doors, threatening us with American punishments. What have we done to him to deserve his calumny? What have we, as a race and a nation with a habit of tending only to our own pot of bonsai, stolen from him? Or owed him?
NOVEAU RICHE
Back then to the initial question, Why now? This is asked because China’s campaign against the accumulation of obscene quantities of individual, private wealth has been going on intermittently for years, against especially wealth acquired in association with foreign (Anglo-American mostly) financiers, bankers and their ruling kleptocrats. Take billionaire Lai Changxing 赖昌星 who abuse his influence in the CPC, made his money from petroleum trade, stashed his proceeds in HSBC Hong Kong where, if you had the money and connection, no question is asked. From Hong Kong, out of reach of mainland authorities he expanded his Fujian petrol cartels that ran on a tax-evasion racket. We would have shot him dead in 2012 if not because we want his head so badly from Canada we made a deal with the latter.
The campaign against shady capital broke into the open upon reaching a peak last November. For example, 24 hours before Alibaba’s Ant Financial, all dressed and ready to go with its US$37 billion IPO in Hong Kong and Shanghai, the authorities halted it. Next came Didi Global, an Alibaba equivalent but in goods transport and taxis. Two days after completing its NYSE IPO, raising US$4 bn, Beijing authorities crippled its Chinese websites on which rest its entire bread and butter business. This scared the wits of at least four other similar Chinese companies seeking billions from listing in the US. Such tactics are actually very old: to scare off the monkeys, cut off the chicken’s head.
To the bosses in almost all the cases above, we invariably posed this question: more than 90 percent of your revenues are from China, credit in yuan is available at home, why then, as is claimed in prospectus after prospectus, would you need US dollars to expand a business? Forty years ago, the answer might be self-evident. But today? Ten times prior to Didi’s June 30 listing, officials from six departments, including the central People’s Bank, took turns to meet its top executives. We never got a convincing answer to the question. Instead they just regurgitate lines from their prospectus. They must think that either they are worldly-wise, English-speaking sophisticate Goldman Sachs globalists or we are stupid country bumpkins.
The western Press, with Bloomberg and FT in the lead, and even the amazingly naive and incredibly brainwashed Russian RT liberal underlings in America were spilling capitalist tears over this ‘crackdown’. In reports after reports two months ago, their arguments tried to explain the ‘crackdown’ on their terms of anti-monopoly practices.
Today, the FT blames Xi Jinping as if to insinuate and thereby flaunt its racist bigotry that only White people like Soros are able to “understand” markets when large parts of the Chinese economy as early as the Han dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE) ran on government-issued paper IOUs and minted coins typically as salary payments to soldiers, especially to the tens of thousands guarding the borders. That was how trade grew along the Silk Road free markets, starting in the Great Wall military garrisons. Currencies in its varied forms were exchanged for bales of silk, tea, grain and melons, horses and sheep wool in reverse, because soldiers have no use for a parcel of desert property the State would sometimes give away as payment. (We actually recovered, along with Buddhist scripts, accounting records of these transactions from the Dunhuang Caves, in its namesake county 敦煌, present day Gansu province. Dunhuang was one of the last few western most Han checkpoints before the Silk Road splits into two, proceeding west to Loulan and Khotan, Hami and Kashgar. Beyond these cities, into present day Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, military protection is unavailable, travel papers not required and sovereignty jurisdiction is absent or unknown.)
I digress… In case you hadn’t been told, persons of note who fell in the current campaign are Alibaba’s Jack Ma and Joseph Tsai (Taiwanese and Canada passports), and Didi’s Jean Liu (ex-Goldman Sachs) and Cheng Wei (who once worked for Jack Ma). There are many more and we’ll come to them later.
Note, too, that these noveau riche were nobodies, even in the early years when they started to make money: Jack Ma was a peasant teacher; Joe Tsai, with an American law degree in hannd, peddled employment and loan contracts and term sheets for the like of Goldman; Cheng Wei was a masseuse (I kid you not). It was not until western Press propaganda did their names begin to figure in global boardroom consciousness.
CULTURE SHOCK
But, with money came a sea change in culture, philosophy and ethical attitudes held by the billionaires – away from their indigenous Chinese, even socialist form. This change was facilitated by western clubs and local and foreign academia, most infamous among them is Asia Society (former Australian premier Kevin Rudd is current president), an NED political mouthpiece dressed in three-piece suits. From Hong Kong, their doors opened especially for Chinese in the like of Jean Liu and the Victor and Richard Li, Asia Society trolls out unabashed propaganda cloaked as Anglo-American free market values, etc. It is in places like this that the noveau riche among the underling Anglophiles began to think Soroian ‘liberalism’.
Hence, one sees Jack Ma appearing in Davos. Jean Liu is regularly on Fortune cover, Joey turns up in NBC offices (where, really, if you’d listen to him, he sounds like a lot of fart), and Cheng Wei at American campuses and often WSJ where he is touted in the headline as a ‘wisdom’ saint (here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-CJB-29489). Think of them as Liu Xiaobo 刘晓波 in coat tails.
Their conversion from Chinese to Anglophile thought and ethical culture was inevitable. Deng Xiaoping: “When we open our doors, the flies will come in.” In the early days, the Beijing central government think nothing of them. With 1.4 bn lives, among them, the peasants, their children and leaking shacks, to worry about, who has the time? (Disclosure: Even decades later, in one such home, lying in pitched summer darkness on a bamboo platform for a bed, I couldn’t help but think of Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “Now the umbrella was only good for counting the stars through the holes in the roof.”)
Several things in simultaneity woke up the Central government: Hong Kong insurrection, Xinjiang genocide lies, cotton boycott, Tsai Ing-wen, Huawei, Covid-19 origin blame, and especially two persons: Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo, with their endless berating and slanderous calumny. We could take all that in the knowledge that our people will continue to become better off as we push on.
Then, out of the blue, came Canada’s abduction of Meng Wanzhou on Dec 31, 2018. That kicked Beijing to realize that the Americans are playing for keeps. To destroy China (‘containment’ is too mild a word), they’d go as far as pick us off, the innocent and the unsuspecting, in an attempt to extract concessions at a personal price, our own flesh and blood. Equal to that horror was the certain knowledge we had been betrayed by the people whose presence we had tolerated. It wasn’t just HSBC, the drug money launderer since 1841, but also Cathay Pacific, the airline in which Meng flew on regularly. This is because only Cathay had her itinerary, only they had the manifest of passengers, date and time of arrival in Vancouver and so on.
The signal to act has come.
Putting up with this neo-colonial she-bang was one thing: Asia Society, HSBC, Cathay, the US Consulate, the Bankers’ Club, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, the Hutchinson and Jardines. But putting up with their Anglophile Chinese lackeys churns on the stomach because it meant watching them inverse the Chinese economic worldview that it was the Chinese society that made rich the like of the Jacks and Joes, not the other way around. The western notion of a rags-to-riches individual just doesn’t square with the reality in China. Making this, same point is Eric Li, one of China’s most eloquent international spokesman. His venture capital firm had in 15 years to 2020 helped guide a 300 million yuan electronics company into 100 billion yuan. Without State support since their start up in 1994, the company couldn’t have made it. Even its executive shareholders would concede that. But, more revealing were remarks Li one day made to them: “Don’t for a moment be so conceited as to think you are super clever (了不起) all because you made so much money. They are people in government far more talented though they earn a fraction of your income.” (See 李世默:中国最聪明的人在政府: https://youtu.be/cYUW5tpgqbE)
Yet, that was not how the billionnaire class, Jack Ma in particular, had carried themselves, not even in front of a Chinese public. When Meng Wanzhou was taken in they had not a word of sympathy but continued as if nothing happened even though the fates of Huawei’s 5G telecom infrastructure and Alibaba’s business are inextricably linked: What’s good for Huawei would have been good for Ali and Didi, with or without their monopoly.
In Beijing, officials watched, listened, took notes, and spoke to people like Hudson: What does this all mean?
When the Hong Kong riots broke in early 2019, almost immediately after Meng’s abduction, a peculiar theme kept recurring that again lifted eyebrows in Beijing: none of the plotters asked to change a neo-colonial capitalist exploitative system which one has come to expect of a revolution. Instead the rioters, all bigoted and fascistic and led by an Anglophile chattering class, burned down half the city, pillaging the free market, going after Chinese only private enterprises. They were working solely to bring down the Central government which, to all intents and purposes, was outside the system and for more than 20 years had not bothered them because more important affairs waited to be attended in Beijing. The mayhem that followed was incredulous in scope, made all the more unbelievable because the target of the riots, Beijing, stood in sharp contrast to the Carrie Lam government where from top-down its corrupting influences on society is ironically transparent and constitutionally legitimate. Thus, Hong Kong has come to be the US in miniature form, controlled by the landlord and financial class, the bulk of Covid-19 financial relief devoted to the rich, crumbs for the rest, all which eventually added up to produce problems identical to New York and California: homelessness (about 200,000 of a 7 million population), child hunger and poverty (25 percent), prohibitively high rent prices, higher than downtown New York, producing a people who spent 60 to 70 percent of incomes on rents, a city of waitresses, bell boys and bartenders, street sweepers on the one end and hedge fund honchos on the other, emptied of factories, and run on Milton Friedman monetarism that’s been written into the Basic Law that held on to a system that can’t be changed as long as the oligarchs held sway — no matter who’s voted in.
The trouble with those economic and social outcomes painted above is this: nothing in them is unlawful. The system is such.
EXIT STRATEGY
When late last year, Didi formally notified Beijing authorities that it had been scheduled in mid-2021 to list on the New York Stock Exchange, its submission papers passed through the bureaucracy as they always do. Then in America things happened succession. In Trump’s final two months to the March formal swearing-in of Joe Biden, student and scholar visas were revoked, six were rounded up as spies, Tiktok was banned, and stock market authorities began throwing up regulatory hurdles and imposing new conditions that, in effect, were telling Chinese companies America want them packed and out of the country if they can help it but, if not, cut down to size and other companies kept from stepping into the capital market.
You begin now to see where Soros is headed with his FT op-ed.
Those 2021 events read together with the raft of other attacks on China, notably (a) Meng’s abduction, (b) the threats issued to global markets to cease buying Huawei, and especially (c) the threat to renege on Treasury securities if China doesn’t pay US$3 trillion as compensation claims over deaths and infections from Covid-19 in America, there was only one conclusion. The decoupling in the two economies were becoming real and coagulating fast.
Ominously, every Chinese life in America and every piece of Chinese asset could, by tomorrow, be turned into a hostage, as America have done to Meng. The varied dimensions in this hostage taking is shocking: the more T-bills China bought, the more Chinese companies attached themselves to US capital markets, the more they are turned into poker chips, and the more vulnerable China is made to feel.
There was no doubt in our minds that those were acts of international piracy, 21st Century style. Yet Didi appeared nonchalant when, after several requests, Beijing authorities met its executives, trying to dissuade them from the IPO. Even foreign ministry officials showed up at one meeting, telling them clearly them that the hostage taking by US authorities ought not be taken lightly. Nor was it a trivial matter. US power was clearly acting in concert: the Justice Department, the Immigration and FBI, even universities were told to present some Chinese scalps.
In the end, Beijing authorities retreated two steps and simply urged to defer. Again, they said nothing in reply. Jean Liu et al smiled, shrugged their shoulders, she tilted her head gently the way you see her in Forbes magazine then waved us off. At the lift door, some of their faces tell, as if saying: “This is private business, it is our money, what’s it to you? Now run along boys, you have wasted enough time.”
You see, the Chinese approach to international relations is like the way we approach Didi: total naivety.
Recall that, unlike Europeans and Anglo-America that left home to conquer and seize property abroad, the Chinese are wont to stay home. Hence they have develop no capacity to plot and scheme, engage in subterfuge: anyone come to our doorstep with arms, we simply send a 100,000 men sometimes 500,000 to greet them. For 2,500 years or more, Chinese never left home except to trade. Kings and their emissaries come to us, usually via the Silk Road (even most of the traders were not Chinese but from the kingdom of Sogdian, today gone to the Kazakh desert), others from as far away as Malacca where circa 1500, a sultan sent word that the Siam kingdom was amassing troops to enter the Malacca sultanate. We wrote to the Siam king to please, act the brother that he says Siam is in our family neighborhood. In that way, Malacca was saved from an invasion, a war averted. Subsequent to that the next sultan, a relative of sort, traveled on one of those Chinese trading ships to the Forbidden City. Records of the letter to Siam and the Parameswara’s exchange with the Ming emperor are in the Beijing National archives. (The Chinese are prodigious in recording official events: how many attended, who arrived first, what greetings were used, what they brought with them, the list on what we gave in return, quantity received times five, we being the eldest, as is customary in Chinese ritual, all weighted and measured.)
The Chinese are slow to anger and reticent in their manners. But we have no patience for perfidy and treachery, especially from kin who are expected to hold the highest ethical and familial standards. The punishment meted out is heavy.
Even after cutting off the legs at Alibaba and Didi, plus a dozen other Didi-like companies, we still hadn’t yet prosecuted Jack Ma or Jean Liu. (Joe Tsai hides in Hong Kong and Taiwan where we can’t get to him.) They remain in the Asia Society invitation list. One could produce a charge sheet, like US Congress are fond of doing with passing laws against the world, and the Justice Department with their indictments against local political enemies. How then should the Beijing destroy the Jacks and the Jeans. That would be as easy as swatting a fly, but towards what end if their miserable existence offers a better, live lesson to charlatans who ever think of plotting against the Chinese nation, which the CPC has sworn to serve and protect under the Mandate of Heaven 天命. Hence, the Chinese approach to the Alis and the Babas is more conciliatory than is vindictive in Anglo law: How did you come to so much money? What do you want it for? American capitalists would stash away their proceeds in artworks and Caribbean tax-haven islands. Where do you want to put them? Why? Buy an island? In a nation as China, and for self-evident reasons, capital accumulation is not permissible for its own sake. It must serve a social purpose. Consequently, the State has the right to the answers should it asked because, in economic terms, asset price inflation is a primary source of unearned income but something which Soros is so adept at.
Recall that the IPO is primary seen (after decades of indoctrination) as the trophy of capitalism being reaffirmed by the market even though, in reality, in its term sheets and contracts, the IPO is purely an ‘exit strategy’. That is, Alibaba never really needed the capital, not especially in US dollars, nor does Didi. Rather exit strategy says, you put in US$10 five years ago how can you get out and get back the US$10 plus US$90 profit for a total US$100. This ‘exit strategy’ is the stuff of financialization, in IPO parlance increased valuation; in economics, pumping up asset values. Soros, Tim Cook, Japan’s Softbank, Goldman, Chase Manhattan, all had stakes in this financialization.
Once China closed this financial tap, imagine how they would be tossing and turning in bed, anger brewing even in their dreams. Cheng Wei gave himself US$4.4 bn worth of shares at IPO. A week later into the Soroian ‘crackdown’, his worth had fallen to US$3.2 bn. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/isabellebousquette/2021/07/22/fortune-of-didi-globals-billionaire-ceo-tumbles-hundreds-of-millions-dollars-in-one-day/?sh=6bcf27676f37). Jean Liu went from US$1.1 bn to $782 mn. Even those lower values exist merely on paper, and mean nothing if they can’t find some American pension suckers to buy them. Such is the stuff of financialization, that is, fundamentally a pyramid scheme.
SOROS CONUNDRUM
The actual ramifications into the events taking place in China are actually greater than is apparent at first sight, more tomorrow than today, more on persons like Soros and his Japanese collaborator Masayoshi Son than on their Anglophile lackeys, the Joeys, Jeans and Jacks.
Soros et al had presumed from the outset that China would become a Friedman kind of monetarist haven, like Hong Kong. Consequently, when the Central government wasn’t looking, their financial interests spread like tentacles all over the land, through hedge funds, private equity, private banking, insurance, venture capitals, and others in collaboration with Rothschild, Chase Manhattan and so on.
The power of, for example, Jack Ma’s Alibaba is not to be underestimated (by us, at least). In 2020, mobile payments leaped 24.5 percent from a year earlier to aggregate at 432 trillion yuan. This equals to 1.2 trillion a day, or 2 percent of the 62 trillion yuan (US$100 billion) in China’s M1 money stock in bank notes. Alibaba’s novelty in mobile payments beats for example Amazon because of a simple feature, an escrow account to which all monies end up and won’t be released to product seller or transferee until the transaction is verified, both ways. That makes Alipay a pseudo bank, and a pseudo debit and credit account, a three-in-one, without the requisite licensing requirements.
With Alipay and associated Alibaba escrow accounts having a 60 percent share of mobile payments, the Alibaba group alone controls 1 percent of M1. There’s no knowing yet what this control might lead to in affecting monetary policy, to prices and interest rates. It is uncharted territory, M1 is a fixed stock of physical currency issued by China’s central bank on a periodic basis whereas Alibaba accounts are daily moving sums of money, so nobody really knows the effect of one on the other. But, on an annual basis, Alibaba’s control of 17 trillion yuan in transactions gives its actual legal jurisdiction in 27% of money under circulation.
Just thinking this through leaves a chill in our bones. All the more then, capital must be controlled and we return momentarily to Soros.
He and his ilk hadn’t realized that once capital enters Chinese sovereign space, Beijing is in control, not them. Here are a few reasons why Soros and others hadn’t foreseen this problem coming to them: (a) in China, capital is subservient to the State, not the other way around as in America or Hong Kong, (b) the fierce protection of fiat currency independence enabled, in turn, limitations on foreign exchange transactions, further reducing as a result the power of capital flows, and (c) China has more liquid dollars than a hundred Soros stacked up, giving the State more leverage than money market players and financialization, and this is in a nation equal in size to America but with a fraction of the latter’s debts. Hence Soros can’t short the yuan, and he can’t corner the trades in US-local currency exchange. He can somehow try to prise open the financial markets (Press and academic propaganda call it ‘liberalization’) but that requires beforehand some leverage control of the money supply, or M1.
DEATH ON MOUNT TAI
We are coming soon to the denouement, please bear with me. And we will return, moments later, to the above as well. But before all that, a word about the Taishan Club 泰山会, members of who, just 20, come from the roster of this self-explained titled, China Entrepreneurs Club 中国企业家俱乐部. (For who’s who in the club, go here: https://postimg.cc/gallery/4t7J6wR)
Now, Taishan or Mount Tai in the English is famous not just by its existence, almost 2,000 meters up surrounded by the farms and the sea in Shandong province, overlooking the Great Wall. Its reputation in China comes especially from a line 2,100 years ago by the court historian Sima Qian in a letter, circa 100 BCE, to a personal friend and General Ren’an, awaiting the death sentence, later commuted, for defiance of the emperor’s orders:
“Surely, a man has but one death. That death may be as heavy as Mount Tai or as light as a goose feather. It is how one uses that death that makes all the difference!”
Taishan Club members are often deified in the Anglophone Press, a bunch of ignorant and bigoted Anglo-American journalists, fed information by equally stupid Chinese sycophants, knowing next to nothing about how the political economy and the Communist Party works. Hence, they run stories like this: “These Are the Super-Rich People Shaping China”. (See, https://fortune.com/2016/03/03/china-national-peoples-congress-alibaba/)
That article is still up on the Net although the Taishan Club had been completely dismembered by July 2021. Disbanding was not a coincidence in the Soroian crackdown nor was the association between clubs members and the like of, for example, George Soros in 2009, Justin Trudeau in 2017 and when Joe Biden was vice president under Obama. (For a gallery into Soros with Jack Ma: https://postimg.cc/gallery/VzYrY9p)
July 2021, recall, entered the final phase in the breakup of the Taishan cartel, with Jack Ma and Jean Liu’s father Liu Chuanzhi of Lenovo (formerly IBM), both club members. In part because of her pedigree and her Goldman Sachs background, American media stooges in Japan and South Korea would hailed Jean Liu as an ‘unstoppable force’ (sic) and a ‘superpower’ in China’s modernization drive. (See, for eg., https://kr-asia.com/jean-liu-is-the-unstoppable-force-behind-chinas-standard-setting-ride-service). Not anymore.
One person we are waiting to finish off though is Li Ka-shing whose campuses in China, Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business and China Europe International Business, sell corporate management techniques as tools of liberalism, and worse, using Alipay as case study in how to corner the digital payment market. But, he is an old man and so death might take care of him quicker than we will.
The ability of the rich to wield power, influence and even attempt to direct policy was perhaps inevitable. Since the CPC had permitted capitalists into membership, 114 of China’s richest occupy the 3,000 seats in the highest legislative body, the National People’s Congress. Jack Ma, Liu Chuanzhi, and Li Ka-shing are among them. Ma’s condescending disdain, at both ideological and personal levels, for the Central government and its peasant, worker rank-and-file roots is encapsulated in this remark delivered at Davos 2015: “We want to enchant the government, but we don’t want to marry it.” (See, https://fortune.com/2016/03/03/china-national-peoples-congress-alibaba/)
Everybody in the room clapped. They aren’t anymore: The wealthy, the Anglophile and the liberals from within China’s political structure were finished by July.
TO KILL WEEDS, START AT THE ROOTS
Once Taishan was breached, we, that is the People included, went after Taishan’s power brokers. This means CPC officials who, as far as we can uncover, are all at the provincial level and in cities. After which we went for two other related classes that provide the mass base in influence and control, both having to do with youths: the academia/intelligentsia that instructs millions of students and the entertainment industry which, in the words of Jack Ma, was designed to ‘enchant’ the government.
This is a thing about China: Patient yes, but once we decide to act, events would unfolded quickly, no buts and no ifs. Notable cases:
Aug 17, Zhou Jiangyong, 周江勇, party chief of Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, and home to Alibaba was picked up. On Aug 19, the anti-corruption agency National Supervisory Commission of China, formally announced his arrest and investigation along with his wife, also deputy secretary and heads the Ningbo Rural Commercial Bank. Younger brother Zhou Jianyong 周健勇 was exposed. He teaches at the Shanghai University of Technology and controls four companies involved in big data and payments systems (in Alibaba, Ant Financial, Union Pay). Zhou’s government and party aide Ma Xiaohui turned himself in to the anti-corruption agency. Others, all businessmen like Zhou Wenyong 周文勇, were also implicated. (On anti-corruption investigations of officers of the party and government, go to Chinese sites, eg., https://www.zaobao.com/realtime/china/story20210826-1186513)
Their relationship with people like Jack Ma is self-evident, via banking, big data, mobile payments.
Between Aug 20 and 30, the sweep struck at the core of the music, film, TV, think tanks and and universities (recall HK Li Ka-shing’s Cheung Kong Business School and another created by Jack Ma, with campuses in Hangchow and Kunming). Here is an incomplete list so far:
Tang Guoqiang 唐国强 (Actor who portrayed Mao Zedong in the film, Founding of a Republic)
Zhao Liying 赵丽颖 (Singer)
Zheng Shuang 郑爽 (Singer)
Gao Xiaosong 高晓松 (Composer, heads Alibaba Entertainment)
Zhao Zhehan 张哲瀚 (Notorious for visiting Japan’s Yasukuni Shrine that houses all the top military and government officials who were never prosecuted by the US for war crimes.)
Vicki Zhao Wei 赵薇 (Infamous in the list, often frequently seen with Jack Ma. Here is a list of her seven crimes: https://www.upmedia.mg/news_info.php?SerialNo=122754)
Their punishments were and would be severe. Other than fines for tax evasions, the most serious cases would mean jail terms. But, why them? The answer lies at several levels, and it isn’t simply about breaking up the billionaire class although that’s the ostensible social and economic argument about equality. Inequality is not the root of any social dysfunctioning as seen in America; it is a symptom that harks back to matters of ethical culture and the Chinese soul talked about in the opening paragraphs.
Put another way, Anglophile culture, broadly defined, and Anglo-American values aren’t things we did hanker after, die for much less.
Zhao Zhehan and Vicki Zhao (they are not related) are currently being investigated under internal security laws. In both cases, they recall Hong Kong where campuses, high schools, theaters and art establishments, lawyers, unions and media, even government departments have been thoroughly infiltrated by the CIA-NED, complete with infusions of money, techniques and agents in regime change, mass revolt, street protests.
As with mainland events, a parallel phenomenon has been taking place simultaneously in Hong Kong, Affected are key players and organizers in the 2019 rioting: teachers union, journalist associations, lawyers, political parties, civic societies, and especially Apple Daily, the newspaper of Jimmy Lai. All these have been disbanded as of August. Many of these fronts, like the Hong Kong Art Center, were actually government funded. The Art Center for instance paid more than US$1 million for works from UK and US art galleries that were blatantly anti-China, like showing the middle finger at the Tiananmen Square or a girl in Marilyn Monroe style lifting her skirt to show her butts at the Mao portrait. These works were never exhibited though.
The parallel in Vicki Zhao and Zhao Zhehan to Hong Kong is best illustrated by this sina.com posting (since removed). A Zhao Zhehan fan said (translated): “The PLA has 2.5 million soldiers, the police 2 million. But we are 50 million fans. Lets go to rescue Zhao Zhehan.”
In this year’s house cleaning, the financial class of Jack Ma and Jean Liu are mere faces — the grease — of a deeper problem that penetrates popular and art culture and academia. The op-ed by Soros not only reveals his own helplessness but also misses a larger picture. We won’t tell him what that is: Why instruct your enemy? In China, we call the upheaval in recent months the Great Earthquake.
But, even the events unfolding are simply preparatory steps. George Soros is least of our problem in threatening China and its people. The root of it lies elsewhere, across an ocean. Ultimately that’s where we must go. In Chinese, we say, when you kill the weeds, dig them out from the roots….
These days there have been a Call to Arms (re: Lu Xun): 为即将到来的一场不可避免的局部战争做准备! Wait for the Big One. Recall Sima Qian: “Surely, a man has but one death. That death may be as heavy as Mount Tai or as light as a goose feather. It is how one uses that death that makes all the difference!” Let us play for keeps or we’d betray our forefathers who have lost so much and sacrificed so much to bequeath us this nation since 221 BCE. It’s all we have.
End
Yun Lin; thank you for this outstanding and most informative essay. I’m sorry to see it posted late in the day. It deserves a much wider reading. I, for one, hope that you will continue to contribute to the Saker. Again, many thanks.
Very informative, many thanks.
I wanted to post this over here /down-in-the-pit-fighting-the-pigs-of-apocalypse/#comment-971190 but given this excellent man’s work I do want Dr. Hudson to see and read it. One may wish to see further at this link https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2021/09/03/merrick-garland-and-the-war-on-federalism/
In addition about the redistribution of the worlds wealth, well that Robinhood moment, would be Communism 3.0 on steroids wouldn’t it? Can you imagine the jealously of Lenin and Stalin seeing what is occurring today with techno tyranny?
What a savior a Robinhood was and is except for one little problem he and his merry band were little more than thieves themselves.
If this actually goes down as I suspect the world won’t care and anyway the world is full more of poor people than wealthy people and for a coming goat to play god he will be seen as a great savior and will gather to himself the billions poor. For this great gift to them he however, will demand to be worshiped as god otherwise he will take away your credit card. So what Dostoevesky said we are working not with thee but with him for who can plan the universal happiness of man if not he who holds within his hand your conscience and bread?”
So there you have it really and for those who may think of this Robinhood moment as nonsense they did do something very similar many years ago: watch for the name Schweitzer…
Too Much or Not Enough
In spite of the fact that the U.S. government had in_ creased its money supply 47% in a five_year period, and other nations were doing the same thing, still there were those who cried it was not enough. Between 1954 and 1965, world trade had doubled. I sat with a thousand delegates in the International Board of Trade in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel of New York listening to the speakers struggle with their unsolved problems. world trade had reached the staggering figure of $159.2 billion. The currencies and credits with which they had to carry on this volume of trade was little more than $67.3 billion. By 1973, the volume of trade in the free world was $367 billion. I talked with Mitchell Sharpe, then Minister of Finance for Canada, and some of the American leaders. These men realized that the currencies being used were outmoded and insufficient for the modern day. They pointed out that the system was medieval, serving acceptably in the olden days when communities were small and self-contained, but thoroughly in-adequate for the present. The leaders of the nations invoived in trade spoke of the nightmarish task of trying daily to adjust the varying exchange rates between the currencies from country to country on a day-to-day basis. They clamored for a single system of standardized value large enough in volume to allow world trade to move forward in an orderly fashion.
ln 1967, two years following that International Board of Trade meeting in New York, the world leaders met in Rio. In discussing the inadequacy of the present world money systems to carry on world trade, Guido Carli from Rome suggested ersatz money which would resemble paper gold which was to be presented to the world the following year. I was back in America when the announcement came.
It was March 31, 1968. Most of the world reacted with amazement at the announcement that came from Europe stating that the nations of the world were ready to transact business with a new medium of exchange known as “paper gold.”
But to all who follow the trend of monetary matters, the announcement was no surprise. For days there was a feeling in the air that something momentous was coming.
An editor wrote in the Financial Times,
Something sinister is going on.
With great interest, I followed the comments and reactions of world leaders.
Carl Schiller, Germany’s financier, stated,
There’s a worm in the apple somewhere.
Pierre Paul Schweitzer seemed pleased. Schweitzer, the nephew of Albert Schweitzer, was an elite Protestant, born in Alsace-Lorraine, who had served as number-three man in the Bank of France, and had been elected managing director of the International Monetary Fund. Some declared that when paper gold was presented to the world on that March morning, Schweitzer declared,
Gentlemen, we are right on schedule.
72% of the nations in the IMF were considered under_ developed. Schweitzer seemed especially dedicated to the task or policy of taking from the rich to give to the poor.
This naturally made him popular with the majority in the IMF, who were elated at the prospect of acquiring some of America’s wealth regardless of the measures.
Why the Announcement from Europe?
Many Americans, startled by the announcement of paper gold, were asking, “Why has this declaration come to us from the bankers of Europe? Why did we have to hear it first from the lips of the spokesmen representing the gold pool so integrated with the World Bank and the Inter_national Monetary Fund?”
The attitude of the average man on the street was one of absolute helplessness. In olden days, banking had been a rather personal matter between himself and a trusted friend. It had changed with the passing of time until it was with an institution equally trusted and respected. The local banker was indeed his friend and would discuss with sincerity the personal financial needs of any of his clients. But banking had become much more than a localized or even nationalized institution. In a single lifetime it had seemingly taken on an ominous new form of world control.
A question began to arise in the hearts of millions of Americans. “Why can’t we retain our financial destiny in our own hands? Why can’t banking be a personal matter between man and his banker as in the past? Why must it be in the international courts and the arenas of the world?”
In searching for the answers to those questions, I seemed to find a twofold answer. Logic and wisdom could explain with clarity the reasons for a world bank. But there was a dark side, which, when properly considered, revealed an invisible government with an amazing power that planned world control in a sinister fashion.” Cantelon
We went from barter to gold to paper gold, to credit cards and now a computer chip and with it Dostoevsky’s universal happiness by way of legislated morality.
“That’s just what is needed in order to deter land becoming a speculative vehicle. I and others have urged a policy of land taxation in order to collect the land’s rising site value, so that it will not be pledged to banks for mortgage credit to further inflate china’s housing prices.”
afaik the citizenry/government in china owns all land and only the buildings are individually owned
The land ownership laws in China have changed. And now, they have to change again. They come from a peasant type society and growing into a behemoth of technology and more citified people. So, laws must change to reflect this. Also, it is complex at the moment and as always what is first taken into account is what is good for the collective.
But currently there are constitutional rights since 2007 or thereabouts .. “The lawful private property of citizens shall be inviolable. The country shall protect in accordance with law citizens’ private property rights and inheritance rights. The country may, as necessitated by public interest, expropriate or requisition citizens’ private property and pay compensation therefor.”
So, there has been development in their land policies. Their civil law is in a state of evolution still because of the steep growth trajectory.
What Michael is talking about here, is that the new policies are allowing land to become speculative, with prices rising just too fast in certain sectors and therefore a rent-seeking commodity and not productive.
Anyway China’s land laws are a complex business.