China

China in late September celebrated the 2,572nd birthday of Confucius, a mark of pride for the Chinese Communist Party. A week later, it celebrated its 72nd “National Day,” commemorating the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Chinese President Xi Jinping regularly gushes over Confucius in speeches and even in his 2015 book. Since 2004, the Chinese government has sponsored more than 500 “Confucius Institutes” — public educational and cultural promotion programs — to the price tag of billions of dollars. But how Confucian is China? And is Confucian statecraft a good thing?

At the height of the 2008 financial crisis I was invited to an off-the-record media lunch with a famous investor. I was taken aback when one of the world’s most successful capitalists announced that the crisis showed the Chinese had a superior economic model. China has tried something different from traditional capitalism, with its reliance on the ‘hidden hand’ of the free market. Since the first economic reforms in 1978, the heavy hand of the state has grown and modernized the economy with staggering results. If you believe the data, eight hundred million Chinese people no longer live in poverty and China has averaged 10 percent growth a year since reforms began.

Some time between now and the next 10 years war between the United States and Communist China is certain. The only questions are when and how it will start — and how many millions of people will die. Why would I dare make such a bold prediction? Simple. History has conspired to create the perfect mix: trillions of dollars in trade up for grabs, a geopolitical rivalry, military tensions, bad blood, competing national egos and a quest for tech dominance. Washington and Beijing seem on the way to a world war the likes of which mankind has never before seen. And the most likely spark for this war is Taiwan.

Debt is as much a part of the real estate business as bricks and mortar. And as the great New York builder William Zeckendorf once famously remarked, 'it’s better to be alive at 20 percent than dead at the prime rate.' But the Evergrande Group, the second largest real estate company in China, has taken corporate debt to new heights, with liabilities of a staggering $310 billion, to finance its breakneck growth. In 2010, it had revenues of $7.3 billion and assets totaling $16.7 billion. In 2020, the figures were $81 billion and $368 billion. To be sure, it is a huge company, with 1,300 projects in more than 240 cities in China and 200,000 employees. This year alone, it began 77 new projects.

Cockburn is a traditional sort. He is favorably disposed toward anything that has existed for a long time, even things that don’t deserve it, like the United States Senate or the Washington Post. He therefore bears no ill will towards Britain’s vestigial royal family. There’s something admirable about any family that can do so little, possess so much and avoid a guillotine. But Cockburn does grow a tad cross when he is persistently made to weigh in on something those vestigial royals do or say. royal news is even worse than most celebrity news. If Kanye West says something insane, well, at least Kanye has made some albums people liked. But Prince Harry?

The Chinese Communist party’s origin story, like so many of its official lines, appears to be an apocryphal tale. But a month-long patriotic extravaganza leading up to its centennial celebration has featured military parades, skyscrapers emblazoned with hammer-and-sickle decor and propaganda blitzes on TV. None of the agitprop raised eyebrows as much as the main speech delivered by the Chinese president and general secretary of the party, Xi Jinping, in which he marked the milestone and praised China’s ‘tremendous transformation’ and the historical inevitability of its ‘national rejuvenation’.

On July 1, 1921, the founding congress of the Chinese Communist party was held in Shanghai, when 12 men gathered in a villa in the richest part of the city. Today, the party has over 90 million members. It has transformed not only China but the history of the entire world. The main stages in its development are well-known. In late 1920, Mao Zedong took over and reoriented the party from city workers to poor farmers. In the mid-1930s, the Long March, although a retreat, established a link between the party and the people across China. In 1949, revolution won. From 1958 till 1975, the Great Leap forward and the Cultural Revolution tried to enforce fast economic and social change.

How can America hold China to account? Its ruling party has committed human rights abuses and bears responsibility for the pandemic that has killed an estimated three million people and crashed economies worldwide. The Biden administration is making feckless requests of the CCP — and not demanded much more. As questions mount about the origins of the COVID-19 virus and the growing possibility that it escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and may even be an engineered virus created through gain-of-function research, (research in-part outsourced and paid for by American taxpayers), begging China to cooperate with the US, its allies and the World Health Organization isn’t going to cut it.

In an unforgivably cringeworthy mea culpa delivered in surprisingly fluent Mandarin, John Cena has apologized to his fans in China. He had said in a promotional interview with a Taiwanese media outlet that Taiwan would be 'the first country that can watch' his new Fast & Furious movie, F9. Uh oh. To the Chinese Communist party and a billion Chinese citizens, the slightest hint of Taiwan’s sovereignty is considered blasphemy in the highest order. 'I made a mistake,' the former WWE champion said in a groveling video posted to the Chinese social media platform, Weibo. 'Now I have to say one thing which is very, very, very important: I love and respect China and Chinese people.' He continued: 'I’m very sorry for my mistakes. Sorry. Sorry. I’m really sorry.

We still don’t know the origins of COVID-19, a full year and a half out from the start of the pandemic. The Chinese government initially claimed that the virus was spread through a wet market in the Wuhan province or that it perhaps came to China from parts of Europe in frozen food trucks. Almost immediately, any inquiries into how the outbreak started beyond the CCP’s original story were brushed aside and dubbed conspiracy theories by the US’s corporate media. Quite why is a question that should trouble any independent-minded person. When Sen.

Twenty years ago, the Catholics of a city in Alaska gathered enough money to build a church dedicated to the Sacred Heart. They presented the architectural drawings to the city council, whose non-Catholic members winced a bit. Were Gothic arches really meant to be painted the color of pale strawberries? Why were the bell towers capped with domes in cotton-candy stripes? But, what the hell, Catholics have their own funny ideas about what churches should look like. OK, they said, we’re fine with this so long as you don’t shove it in our faces. Here’s a bit of land on the outskirts of town where you can build the thing and we won’t have to look at it every time we walk down Main Street.

The World Health Organization now says the virus ‘most likely came from animals.' But everybody knows that the WHO is heavily influenced by China, and China is not a reliable source. Everybody, that is, except large and important sections of the US media. Before the WHO’s latest report, Feng Zijian, the deputy director of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, claimed the virus spread after a bat infected a human — or the virus initially went from bat to another animal or mammal species, which then jumped to humans or that shipments of frozen food from Europe or even the United States spread the virus throughout the province of Wuhan. It’s always the West’s fault, the way Beijing tells it.

There was a shooting spree at several massage parlors outside of Atlanta last week. The killer confessed in custody that his motivation was a combination of religious guilt and sex addiction. But the American media used the occasion to push a race-based explanation for the killings — an explanation that no investigators, including the FBI, have been able to prove thus far. By any and all factual indications, this was not a crime based on the victims’ race, but their occupation. American reporters ignore all that. Instead they sensationalize for a social-media audience of woke identitarians — and now the Chinese Communist party is getting in on the act. The CCP is employing the same talking points via their state media outlets as we see in our ‘free’ ones.

It goes without saying that when conducting high-level diplomacy, you don’t insult the other party at a joint press conference before the negotiations begin. And if you choose to do something so foolish, you must be ready when the other party retaliates in its response. It is incredible that secretary of state Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan did not understand this when they began talks with their Chinese counterparts in Alaska yesterday. At what was supposed to be perfunctory two-minute statements by the US and Chinese delegations to the press before the talks began, Blinken and Sullivan criticized Chinese activities against the Uighurs, in Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as for cyber attacks on the US and economic coercion of US allies.

In 2022, the Winter Games will descend on Beijing, China’s polluted capital, giving everyone that weren’t we just here? feeling. The world can once more expect to be equally horrified and dazzled by the sheer level of control China exerts over its population. Only one force on the planet stirred a sort of trembling adoration in China, but he’s sadly no longer president. Now, western liberalism is pathetically left trying to nag China into submission, with China mostly not even noticing. A soon-to-be failed, Republican-led attempt to boycott the Beijing Winter Games is under way that has the party split along seemingly surprising lines. It's the NeverTrump wing calling for a boycott, or, rather, those Republicans who the Trump base offers a chilly reception.

It has been more than two years since Ziba Murat has heard the voice of her ailing mother, Gulshan Abbas, a retired physician who was abruptly ‘disappeared’ in September 2018 in Xinjiang province, China. While exact facts and figures are hard to come by, it is widely reported that at least three million Uighurs in China have been forced into concentration camps, which Beijing calls ‘reeducation’ facilities for stamping out ‘Islamic extremism’. The scale of the ongoing atrocities is bone-chilling: from forced sterilizations and sexual violence to beatings and indoctrination. The Chinese government’s assault extends to Uighurs abroad.

Joe Biden is a Chinese asset. His family’s business dealings with Beijing have compromised his leadership of America and the free world. Look at his recent statement in which he suggested that ‘cultural differences’ might explain why the Chinese thought it was OK to brutally oppress Uighurs. An unnamed source within the intelligence community has revealed that Biden could not unequivocally condemn China’s human rights abuses because Xi Jinping has ‘has something’ on him. The 46th President therefore cannot be trusted to stand up to Xi on the world stage. ‘The Russians deploy kompromat as leverage over foreign assets,’ says my source. ‘Chinese agencies use something called “black materials” to extort western authority figures into doing what they want.

Washington DC, 2030 The reasons why the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) avoided total war, let alone a nuclear exchange, during their armed conflict in the autumn of 2025 remain a source of dispute. What is clearer is why the Sino-American Littoral War broke out, and what course it took. The United States lost part of its position in Asia, while China found its gains an unexpected burden. The resulting cold war between the United States and China became the defining feature of geopolitics in the Asia-Pacific in the middle of the 21st century.