Category Archives: China 🇨🇳

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🪖 China and its military power 🇨🇳

05 Thursday Apr 2012

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 It’s all there for show…

Any conflict between America and China would of course be over Taiwan, but how realistic is such a confrontation.

If the Economist is to be believed America’s actions by moving troops into Australia, is an admission that Washington had been distracted by wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to such an extent that it had forgotten the rise of China.

If that is indeed the case, what hostile actions has China taken to alarm the world’s last superpower?

China is the second biggest military spender in the world today, which currently stands at 89.8 billion dollars, a fraction of what America spends – 739.3bn dollars.

Further, the combined budgets of Britain, France and Germany, who are all contributors to Nato, almost double China’s.

In addition to all this, the US and Nato have at least a decade of combat experience through wars in Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan and of course Libya.

The People’s Liberation army of China is indeed the largest army in the world, however, the last time it was involved in a theatre of war was in 1979 against Vietnam, where it was crushed.

And the Korean War was a complete disaster.

So, if anyone is going to be provoking a war, it certainly won’t be China.

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Twelve dead during riots in Kashgar

28 Tuesday Feb 2012

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Map of China

 

Twelve people have died in riots near the north-western city of Kashgar in Xinjiang province, the BBC reports.

It quotes Chinese state media which says that rioters killed 10 people, while two of the rioters were shot by police.

The Xinhua news agency  gives no detail as to what triggered the violence.

Security has been high in the north-western province since riots in 2009 in the capital Urumqi between the Muslim Uighurs, who are the largest ethnic group, and Han Chinese migrants.

Nearly 200 people were killed in that unrest, most of them Han, according to officials.

Today’s violence took place in a market in Yecheng county, according to Xinhua, which says police are still hunting some of the rioters.

Almost half of Xinjiang’s residents are Uighurs, Turkic-speaking Muslims with cultural and ethnic links to Central Asia.

Many complain that large-scale migration of Han Chinese workers from the east has cost them jobs and is eroding their culture.

China has invested heavily in Xinjiang and the region’s rich oil and gas deposits are vital to its booming economy.

Uighurs say they are suffering discrimination and marginalisation, and this has been behind anti-Han and separatist sentiment in Xinjiang since the 1990s.

Further violence broke out in July 2011 and left 32 people dead.

A hostage-taking incident in December led to the death of seven kidnappers – part of a “terror gang,” according to Chinese state media.

China claims it faces an organised terrorist threat from radical Muslims in Xinjiang, but Uighur activists say citizens are angry at Beijing’s heavy-handed rule in the region.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-17195886

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The Syria Question 🇸🇾

04 Saturday Feb 2012

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Kim Jong iL

19 Monday Dec 2011

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And so, much to the delight of his enemies, the Great Leader has died. Those enemies – namely the Western nations – are hailing this as a step forward, a new opportunity, and already Japan and South Korea have promised to work together in solving the problem of the north.

The modern history of this reclusive state is born of two events, namely the Korean war and the war on terror.

Both were a result of Great Power interference.

The first was sparked by a north attempting to reunite a nation that had been carved up by imperial Japan. In the process, she drew the fury of the new master of the Pacific, the United States of America.

When there was nothing else to bomb the Americans destroyed bridges in an effort to bring this stubborn little nation of Asians to their knees.

Eventually,  the frontier that we now recognise was marked out – at huge human cost.

And the second event was that speech by George Bush after those terrorist outrages, where he spoke of an axis of evil – Iraq, Iran and north Korea.

A year before, the north was in talks abouth reuniting with the south, and western diplomats found themselves very welcome, as this reclusive state – perhaps encouraged by China – had begun the process of opening up.

Unlike Libya and Iraq, North Korea never gave up her weapons programme, instead she testfired a nuclear bomb as a warning to anyone who may think of invading her yet again.

North Korea may be mad and many other things, but she can say that at the time of the death of the Great Leader, she and her people had maintained their independence.

Can the same thing be said of Japan and South Korea?

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The Euro

17 Thursday Nov 2011

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Elder statesmen in a barren landscape..

With Italy the latest nation to suffer under the burden of being linked to a single currency, very real questions are being asked about the future of the Euro.

TheEconomist says that Europe has not addressed the fundamental changes around her – namely the rise of a younger slimmer  Asia at the cost of this grand once great old man.

Today’s Financial Times outlines a three-trierEurope with France-Germany as the engine, the driver of a system that relegates eastern Europe to the periphery.

Of course, Gordon Brown did warn everyone that France – like Germany – was exposed because of her banks.

So what will become a unit that once touted as a serious economic challenger to the United States of America?

And will things ever be the same again?

The international system created by Europe was never perfect, and frankly the world outside this club of nations was roped into joining it.

Some powers suffered like China, some simply vanished – like the Ottoman Empire, whose loss the Islamic World has been suffering the consequences of to this day, especially in a world order based on power.

The history of the end of the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ can be traced back to the creation of the tiny kingdom of Greece, a cause championed by Shelley and Byron.

The behaviour of the main players at that time towards this once great and now grand old man was racist.

(Ever wonder where Adolf Hitler some of his ideas from?)

Now a century or so on, with the Eurozone crisis sparked by a bankrupt Greece, how will the main players on the international scene deal with their once great and now grand friend.

With America already signalling that she will be looking East, how will China view this potentially barren economic wasteland, which still fights wars against weaker nations, whilst lecturing others about human rights?

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Time for a Palestinian State 🇵🇸

15 Friday Jul 2011

Posted by in Analysis 🙌, Arab World 🌎, Breaking News 📺 🎙🗞, China 🇨🇳, Comment, France, International News, Politics 💼 🗳 🪖, Race Relations, Russia 🇷🇺, Terrorism, UK, USA 🇺🇸

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In this world of nations, there are some people who are clearly a nation, but for various reasons are unable to live in a land that belongs to them.  Sometimes – as in South Sudan – there clearly isn’t a nation, however because of Great Power intervention you find their appearance, which is a shame because there are people who have suffered for decades fighting for the right to be free. So, yesterday’s announcement by the Arab League – which has suddenly become a force in international politics – that it will back the Palestinians in their fight to be recognised at the UN as a state is welcome news to those who have long believed that they have been appalling treated by first the UN who did not recognise that they lived on the land now called Israel and by the state itself which has used the symbols, traditions and history of the Jewish faith as a justification to massacre a defenceless civilian population.  A single day does not go by in the so-called Occupied territories when there isn’t an incident involving the most powerful army in the Middle East and the people it has held captive in West bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem.  This has never been a fair fight, which the Palestinians – despite the defiance and rhetoric of Hamas – have ever been able to win, which makes the intransigence of the European Union all the more disgusting and the announcement by the Barack Hussain Obama that he would never allow a Palestinian state come into being that much more heart breaking. America has never been a fair broker in this conflict – it knows that – and Obama knows also that he has let down everyone who cried on the day he became the first Black President of the world’s most powerful nation.

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And Another Thing (..or how not to behave with China)

29 Wednesday Jun 2011

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China signed a trade deal with Germany that was almost nine times the size of the one secured at London. If you consider the fact that David Cameron had managed to get trade agreement worth  £1.4 bn to British companies, this will give you an idea of how much more that amounts to. So why did Wen Jiabao refuse to shake Angela Merkel’s hand after a press conference and why during their exchange to the media did the Chinese Premier take his earphones off in utter disgust?

Europeans had no right to lecture China about human rights, he is reported to have said.

Watching Wen Jiabao on the world stage, takes you back say a hundred years when two nations were then emerging as major players in their own right.

One of  them was Japan and the other was of course Germany.

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Throwing stones at China 🇨🇳

28 Tuesday Jun 2011

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ANALYSIS – The year is 1900, and a major rebellion is underway in the major provinces of China. The young men who are in revolt are objecting to the West ‘taking over’ their country. They attack all symbols as they see it of all this western intrusion, including railways. The Boxer rebellion is put down by an international force that includes Great Britain, France, Italy and the emerging nations of Japan, the United States of America and Germany. It would take China more than eighty years to emerge from the weight of unfair treaties and capitulations that the European nations had demanded from her, in what they called the open door. Today, China has become a superpower, a serious rival to America for global leadership, so serious that Obama has identified himself as his country’s first ‘Pacific’ President, who may also be the last to take Europe seriously. So, Wen Jiabao’s visit to London yesterday should have been a wonderful opportunity for David Cameron to foster a closer relationship with this economic powerhouse, given this country’s current predicament. Instead, we had the now customary spectacle of the Chinese Premier being lectured in front of the press on human rights by the man currently in the middle of a questionable war in Libya.

China’s human rights record in Tibet and Kashgar, as well as her attitude to freedom of expression are well documented and are rightly highlighted. However, those who lecture should also take a long hard at themselves – China emerged as a superpower after a horrendous period in her history which some of the nations who came to put down the Boxer rebellion had a hand in creating.

If China has moved on from that time, then perhaps so should Great Britain, who should also stop treating a former colony as a developing economy and take a leaf from the United States of America.If a report in The Financial Times is to be believed, Britain has lost its standing in China’s view, rating below Germany, France, Italy and Spain.  Hopefully, Wen Jiabao and the Chinese leadership will settle down to the line of thinking that a large number of us over here share, that Cameron does not know what he is doing, and that perhaps more disturbingly, he has appointed a Chancellor who is completely clueless.

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