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China has no need to compromise with the US over its own territory.

China holds all the cards: economic, social, ethnic, military, technological and financial. TSMC has no IP to speak of.

Better to wait.

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Maybe not all the cards, but it has powerful ones, and the US's ability to coerce, intimidate or damage is increasingly diminishing. The criminal sanctions to destroy Russia have 'boomeranged' and dedollarization - begun a couple of decades ago by Russia and China - is now accelerating. With that the grotesquely 'exorbitant privilege' of unlimited dollar printing to finance endless wars, weapons and military bases - is also being eroded. This is a death struggle for the US to maintain hegemony. China is not seeking to become another US - just to keep naturally expanding its economy and influence through trade, technology and massive infrastructure projects like the BRI aka New Silk Road. The US is seeking to destroy and quarter Russia and resume its loot of Russian resources (done in the 1990s) and 'contain' China. In both cases the methods are criminal. And the Global South is aware, and knows which of the emerging new poles it must look to.

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Nov 28, 2022·edited Nov 28, 2022

Informative analysis, but one that is flawed in many respects. Firstly, Russia had no intention to annex Donbass - the Minsk agreements would have made them Russia-leaning independent territories. But the US obstruction of them gave Russia no choice. And having been forced to suffer heavy losses in Ukraine, due to the massive training and arming of the Azov Nazis by the US and NATO - Russia then assimilated those territories (legally in my view) as compensation. And to secure its land-bridge to Crimea. Russia hasn't or shouldn't have - any interest in the rest of Ukraine which is mostly agricultural and low in GNP - except perhaps to establish a further buffer zone beyond Donbass. The settlement Russia now hopes to impose during this winter, assuming it can 'end the war' and prevent the long-scale insurgency the West wants to inflict on it - will require Ukraine to accept never to join NATO etc.

China on the other hand, has its clear objective to assimilate Taiwan, which it considers a province and to which the US agreed ('One China') three times in the 1970s. So this is not using Taiwan to create a security risk for China, but rather preventing/delaying China's ambition, or even provoking it to attack Taiwan, which is not China's preference, although Xi Jinping refused to exclude the use of force at the recent Party Congress - as a signal to the US that its obstruction would be fought if needed.

Beyond that the risk of sanctions severely damaging China's economy is overstated by you, in my opinion. China has nearly 1.5 billion people which provides a massive domestic market. Despite border issues with India, China remains a major supplier to India as well. And the Global South, as in Africa, where countries like South Africa, Burkina Faso and DRC are openly critical of the West's predations in their continent, and seek better and more productive relationships with Russia and China. The massive Belt Road Initiative is a colossal project touching dozens of countries across Eurasia, and China is CENTRAL to it, as is Russia.

Besides which it will take the US some years to 're-industrialize', an objective it is clearly seeking with the 'planned demolition' of Germany with the 'suicidal' anti-Russia sanctions, which have largely failed, but which have inflicted costs on the Western populations, but more so on the Global South (excepting India for reasons you have written about - the massive ramping up of trade with Russia, especially oil and fertilizer; and presumably China and other nations who certainly would have paid attention to Putin's revolutionary speech on the day the Donbass was formally incorporated into Russia).

China has never been a warmongering country, and you continue to display anti-Chinese bias with your assumptions it seeks to replace/rival the US as joint hegemon. The US and West's hegemony has been based on warmongering, imperialism, military crimes, plus economic crimes like the utterly criminal sanctions, and the 'austerity measures' imposed on countries forced into debts with the IMF etc. by Western neoliberal crimes which have massively increased inequality in the West itself.

As the coming winter sets in, the pressure on the populations of Europe will escalate and protests against the US/WEF sanctions will also dramatically increase. How far will the WEF planted puppets like the German Foreign Minister (clearly a graduate of the 'Young Global Leaders' program) and others seen dancing in discos - be able to dismiss the protests of their freezing and starving populations? How far will Nazi thugs like the EU President Ursula van den Leyen keep barking 'we will support Ukraine no matter the cost on Europeans'?

India (I am Indian-born) certainly played the difficult cards it was dealt very well, which had the benefit to Russia of reducing its dependence on China, but I think you are wrong to think China is seeking anything other than the natural, lawful, peaceful resumption of its dominant economy role on the planet, which it occupied for 18 centuries without invasions or colonizations of others - until the British, European and American opium warcrimes devastated it and gave it '100 years of humiliation'. Putin himself declared a new world order based on multipolarity was dawning, which indicates he understands China will unquestionably be a major pole, along with Russia, India and Africa, rivalling the declining hegemon and its increasingly diminishing G-7 clout.

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You know after this Ukraine nonsense they're just going to keep shipping arms to Taiwan anyway. Every president for at least the last 40 years has sent tons of arms to Taiwan.

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