China bonds beat US Treasuries. I have never seen the government bonds of an emerging market, supposedly in crisis, outperform US treasuries. Yet since the start of Covid, long-dated Chinese government bonds have outperformed long-dated US treasuries by 35%! In fact, they've been a beacon of stability. If you look at market behavior and conclude that, since Chinese banks have spent the last year outperforming US treasuries, the problem is not in the Chinese financial system, but in the US treasury market itself. If so, we are entering a new world in which US treasuries can no longer be thought of as the bedrock on which to build portfolios. Read article →

New regulations eliminate 30% of China's hedge funds, those that cannot maintain a net asset value of $1.2 million, limit the size of any investment to 25% of assets, and leverage to 200%. These smaller actors frequently cause extreme volatility in a sector that has grown sevenfold since 2013. Read article →

$944 billion investment in real estate YTD, 8.5% down from 2022. Read article →

$500 M Japanese seafood exports to China banned after Fukushima wastewater discharges. Hong Kong’s sushi restaurants are bracing for a cost jump. 

Korean and Taiwanese chipmakers will continue bringing advanced semiconductor technology and related equipment into China after the U.S. extended its one-year exemption. Read article →

Chip giant NVIDIA warns, "Restrictions prohibiting the sale of our GPUs to China will result in a permanent loss of an opportunity for the US industry to compete and lead in one of the world's largest markets". Read article →

The US wants to extend a science and technology agreement with China for six months so that it can negotiate, amend and strengthen the landmark deal, the State Department says. Read article →

Iran discovers world's #2 lithium deposit, disrupts the global lithium market and Australia’s position as its leading producer (and exporter of 95% of the mineral to China). Read article →

BRICS trade rises 19% YTD, to make up 10% of China’s total foreign trade.  Exports rose 23.9%; imports, 14.3%. Read article →

COVID-19 prevalence remains low. The proportion of EG.5-related cases in all COVID infections has risen from 0.6 percent in April to 71.6 percent at present, and it is the predominant variant in the vast majority of provinces in China.  Read article →

Total fertility rate was 1.09 in 2022, down from 1.30 in 2020, well below Japan's  1.26. Read article →

Beijing Municipality will restrict the use of AI in the healthcare sector. The draft rules “strictly prohibit” the use of AI to automatically generate online medical prescriptions without human supervision. Other provisions include:

• Doctors who offer online diagnosis must have practiced clinical medicine for at least three years. They must also register with their real names before seeing patients online.
• Patients are also required to identify themselves formally, and doctors must refer patients to physical clinics if there are any suspicions.
• Medical records of online consultations need to be kept for at least 15 years, and documentation of the process of diagnosis, including audio and video records, must be kept for at least three years.
• Internet medical services are required to clearly publicize their prices. Read article →

70,000 Tibetan antelopes, 1200 Snow Leopards counted in Sanjiangyuan National Park in NW China today, up from 20,000. Read article →

August 15 was China's first National Ecology Day, with activities to enhance awareness of the natural awareness. Read article →

Provinces get renewables targets for 2023. The highest (70%) went to provinces with the hydroelectric capacity, like Sichuan, Yunnan, and Qinghai. Each province also received a target for non-hydro renewable energy consumption, with Qinghai (27.2%), Ningxia (24.5%), and Jilin (23.5%) the highest. Read article →

World's largest hydrogen producer (33 MT pa.), China, published first hydrogen energy industry guidelines, aiming to establish a hydrogen industrial system that standardizes production, storage, transportation, and utilization; As the world's largest hydrogen producer (33 million tons per year), China sees the resource as an important means of transitioning to a low-carbon economy. Read article →

• T116 to Lanzhou: 24 hours, 1700km, sleeper = $ (408CNY)
• Z40 to Urumqi: 36 hours, 3200km, sleeper = $87 (635CNY)
• Z172 to Harbin: 24 hours, 1670km, sleeper = $64 (463CNY). 

The province of Tibet (Xizang), roughly 13% of China's territory, is composed at 86% of Tibetans, and I've never met a Tibetan in China who didn't speak Tibetan. There also are many Tibetan autonomous regions in Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu, Yunnan and other provinces. All in all, Tibetan autonomous areas make up more than 20% of China's territory despite Tibetans being less than 0.5% of China's population. In those regions, which I have visited many times, it's Tibetan culture everywhere: everything is written in Tibetan (road signs, shop names, etc.), you see Tibetan temples and monks everywhere, people dress up in Tibetan traditional clothing, etc. Meanwhile I've met plenty of immigrants to the US or native Americans who didn't speak a word of their original language, or knew close to nothing about their original culture. And so-called "Indian reservations" make up a meager 2.3% of US territory, FOR ALL THE TRIBES PUT TOGETHER (when we're speaking about Tibetans only for China: they have 55 other ethnic minorities, many of which also have their own autonomous regions).Read article →

“Complaints, whether of communities or individuals, it is possible to adjust; but war undertaken by a coalition for sectional interests, whose progress there is no means of foreseeing, may not be easily or creditably settled.”  - Archidamus, King of Sparta [Thucydides, 1.82.6] 

A BRI team of Chinese and Italian researchers has restored parts of the 300-year-old Church of Santa Maria di Nazareth, which overlooks the Grand Canal and is a prime example of Venetian Baroque architecture. using modern nanotechnology developed to consolidate, or treat, marble stones damaged by time and the elements. The research was funded by the Veneto regional government, the Natural Science Foundation of China, and the Ministry of Science and Technology’s BRI foreign expert exchange programme. Read more →

"Islam is safe and well respected in Xinjiang, China". Another delegation from the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) visited an exhibition in Urumqi to learn from "China's success" in "counter-terrorism and de-radicalization" in Xinjiang – the third tour of XJ for some members of the delegation. "The envoys were deeply shocked and outraged by previous incidents of terrorism and extremism in XJ and praised China's accomplishments in counter-terrorism and de-radicalization. "They were moved by the region's hard-won social stability, ethnic harmony, and religious conformity. The delegation's leader, Djibouti's Permanent Representative to the OIC Dya-Eddine Bamakhrama, said the past riots in Xinjiang were shocking.  "In addition, he said that the Chinese government's counter-terrorism and de-radicalization measures had vigorously safeguarded social tranquility and people's safety. Read more →

The Central American Parliament expelled Taiwan and replaced it with China, whose growing economic influence in Latin America has increasingly marginalized Taipei. Read more →

Mia Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados, spoke for many developing countries when she called for a transformation of the World Bank and IMF. “When these institutions were founded [in 1944] our countries did not exist”. Zoltan Pozsar, head of Ex Uno Plures, sees the system at a tipping point. “The global east and south are renegotiating the world order. The west dreamt of the Brics as a lapdog, that they would accumulate dollars and recycle them into Treasuries, but instead of that they are renegotiating how things are done.” Sir Danny Alexander, a former British government minister, said, “At a meeting of the China International Development Co-operation Agency there was a lot of discussion about the different kinds of collaboration going on. They talked about south south, north south and triangular co-operation. What is clear is there is a multiplicity of discussions on development and investment issues and these conversations no longer all flow through a western filter.” Read more →

Xi in Jo'burg: “China has funded Global Development and South-South Cooperation $4 billion, and Chinese financial institutions will soon set up a special fund of $10 billion dedicated to the implementation of the GDI. From Asia to Africa, from Pacific island countries to the Caribbean, over 200 cooperation projects have come to fruition, and cooperation mechanisms are growing in areas such as poverty reduction, education and health. Under the GDI, we have prioritized green development, new-type industrialization, the digital economy and some other key areas, and pursued a Partnership on New Industrial Revolution to boost high-quality development. We have launched a China-FAO South-South Cooperation Trust Fund, implemented the Food Production Enhancement Action, and provided food assistance to and shared agrotech with many countries. We have also initiated a Global Clean Energy Cooperation Partnership with a view to achieving energy security. Specific measures will be taken, such as providing satellite mapping data products, implementing a Smart Customs cooperation partnership, and launching with UNESCO a ‘GDI for Africa's Future’ action plan, to support sustainable development in Africa.” Read more →

Jim O’Neill, who coined the term 'BRIC' in 2001, said adding countries to the bloc will not really matter economically, unless the new member is Saudi Arabia — with its close ties to the U.S. and its oil resources — in that case, joining BRICS would be a “pretty big deal,” O’Neill said. Read more →

Taiwanese officials are monitoring Chinese Americans and passing intelligence to the FBI in attempts to have them prosecuted, while working with media and politicians to create a culture of fear towards China and Chinese people in the US. Taiwanese officials claim they are “directing” and “guiding” certain US politicians. Taiwan is monitoring and helping to intimidate U.S. politicians they deem to be too pro-China. The island is spending millions funding US think tanks that inject pro-Taiwan and anti-China talking points into American politics. Read more →

Russia's Volga-Dnepr Cargo Airlines initiated legal proceedings to recover the Antonov An-124 confiscated by the Canadian Government. The aircraft landed at Toronto Pearson International Airport on a humanitarian flight commissioned by the Government of Canada with 475 cubic meters/60,900 kg of COVID-19 test kits from China and was seized by Canadian officials. Read more →

PLAN's powerful rail gun – an electromagnetically powered weapon that launches projectiles with very high speed and accuracy. It accelerates a 124kg (273lb) projectile to 435 mph in 0.05 seconds, the heaviest known projectile to be used in a rail gun experiment. A shell moving at such speeds could hit a target several miles away. Read more →

A Chinese “supership” could do the job of almost an entire carrier fleet, wrote Rear Admiral Ma Weiming, who revealed a conceptual blueprint of a warship unlike any ship the world had seen. “It will overturn the combat formation of naval fleets that has been in place for over a hundred years”. Read more →

The Pentagon is building up missile defenses on Guam based on growing concerns of possible missile attacks from China. Said the Army general in charge of missile defense for the Indo-Pacific command, Maj. Gen. Brian Gibson, “The PRC is trying to impose their will throughout the U.S. military area of responsibility on things they they lay claim to. The activities and the growth of the PRC alone remain shocking. I don’t know why you create a military means at that magnitude and that level of capability unless you intend to use it,” he added, with charming naivety.  Read more →

Born from Crisis: China’s Sovereign Leveraged Funds

1. Talent at the Top: Only the brightest, most idealistic people are are admitted to politics–a policy unchanged in 2200 years.
2. Data in the Middle: policies are implemented, tracked, and optimized based on terabytes of data. The PRC is the world's largest consumer of public surveys.
3. Democracy at the Bottom: ordinary people, all unpaid amateurs, assemble twice a year to check the stats and sign off on new legislation. Policies need a minimum of 66% support to become law. That's why 95% of Chinese say the country is on the right track.

For decades, Western media have been narrating the same story about China being this brutal “dictatorship” whose people are killed at the hands of the criminal communist regime, giving the Tiananmen Square massacre as a prime example of the brutality of the Chinese government, wherein supposedly scores of students were killed at the hands of the People’s Liberation Army. However, a new book emerged proving that these claims are false and have no foundation to them except for Washington’s aspirations to tarnish the image of the Chinese Communist Party.

Atrocity Fabrication and Its Consequences: How Fake News Shapes World Order, a new book by A. B. Abrams, highlights that there never were any killings in the infamous Tiananmen Square back in 1989 as had been spread by Western propaganda for decades, and it was revealed that the entire affair was but a mere attempt at showing China as the villain in the geopolitical arena. The book underlines that no killings, let alone a massacre as is proclaimed, took place in Tiananmen Square.

How did the U.S. succeed in manipulating the mainstream narrative and have millions upon millions of people believe that China initiated a mass murder of its own people—young college students—crushing them with tanks and shooting them down with machine guns? The answer is simple: the manipulation of public perception through the press. This could be done using media out of context and providing an incomplete version of the truth.

For example, the most infamous piece of media “documenting” the crime to ever exist is a video showing a tank marching onto a person alleged to have been a student, and right as the tank gets close enough to the young man and stops, the video is cut, with there being some text accompanying the video hinting or proclaiming that the tank went on to run over the protester. However, that could not be further from the truth. In reality, other protesters rushed to the scene and accompanied him from there as the tank was standing in place waiting for him to comply and get out of its way.

The book argues that all the acts committed by the United States were in a bid to “justify wars of conquest and exploitation” and generate multi-billion-dollar profits for the notorious military-industrial complex, as reported by CovertAction Magazine.

Abrams highlighted that the Tiananmen Square protests initially took place not as a push for Westernization or the downfall of the Chinese government. Instead, their primary focus was on reinforcing the principles of China’s 1949 Communist Revolution and addressing the issue of corrupt officials who had deviated from Maoist principles.

This movement encompassed not only students but also a significant number of workers, who exhibited a stronger anti-CCP stance. Their collective objective aimed at the establishment of a socialist democracy within the framework of the movement.

The book cited a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing that WikiLeaks published in 2016. The leak included reports on the eyewitness account of a Chilean diplomat and his wife who were present when the PLA made it to Tiananmen Square to disperse the protesters. The pair made it in and out of the square numerous times without any harassment and observed no mass firing of weapons into the crowds. They never saw any use of lethal force, to begin with.

Moreover, the book cited former Washington Post Beijing Bureau chief Jay Mathews who, in 1998, admitted that “all verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully.”

It also cited Reuters  correspondent Graham Earnshaw, who spent the night of June 3-4 at the center of Tiananmen Square and reported that most of the students left the square peacefully with the remainder of them being persuaded to do the same.

As is customary, the main source the Western media used to claim that a massacre took place was an anonymous student from Qinghua University making claims to the Hong Kong press, who then made it to the British media.

Still, BBC‘s Beijing correspondent James Miles said there was no massacre.

Western reporting had conveyed the wrong impression and protesters who were still in the square when the army reached it were allowed to leave after negotiations.

The narrative was also completely spun out of proportion, with the perpetrators being painted as the victims of a crime that was never committed in the first place. The book underlined that those who did die in Beijing during the events lost their lives in street battles between the PLA and insurgents far from the square. Reports from the U.S. Department of State underlined that the unarmed PLA officers were attacked with petrol bombs, burning many alive.

Uyghurs, another ‘crime’ China committed

The hoax built around Tiananmen Square was a blueprint for U.S. media campaigns aimed at showing the Chinese government in a bad light, as Washington went on to accuse Beijing of perpetrating a genocide against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang province.

The book stressed that the claims about the so-called Uyghur genocide relied on nothing but hardline extremist U.S.-funded anti-China groups. Namely, they were funded by the CIA-affiliated National Endowment for Democracy, which was tasked with carrying out what the notorious spy agency had done alone under the covers for decades.

Amid the claims of Beijing genociding the Uyghurs, the Uyghur population in Xinjiang saw an increase of 25% between 2010 and 2018 instead of the population experiencing a contraction. Even facilities the West claimed to have been “concentration camps” in which Uyghurs were killed en masse and “brainwashed” or “indoctrinated” appeared to have been a logistics park, a regular detention center, and elementary and middle schools.

Xinjiang looks good, safe, and secure, and all the people I spoke with seemed happy about it, former London Metropolitan Police Officer Jerry Grey, who spent a lot of time traveling in Xinjiang, said.

“Uyghurs in China have been growing faster than the majority Han Chinese in part because they weren’t subject to the one-child policy, they have 20,000 mosques built […] Uyghur children can get into top universities easier than Han Chinese, and have halal foods prepared for them in canteens and they have a prayer area on campus,” Daniel Dumbrill, a Canadian businessman and Chinese political analyst said.

“Portraying an adversary as committing particularly egregious crimes, especially when one intends to initiate military action or other hostile measures against the adversary, has consistently provided an effective means of moving public and international opinion and justifying [US imperial] actions,” Abrams said in his book.

Yugoslavia

The book also shed light on the U.S. propaganda focused in the 1990s on Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic, a socialist who sought to keep Yugoslavia together, accusing him of genocide in Kosovo and elsewhere.

Milosevic, a socialist, aimed to maintain the unity of Yugoslavia and prevent its fragmentation. This effort was driven by his desire to counteract Western nations’ potential expansion of influence and the establishment of U.S. military bases in a strategically vital area.

Interestingly, the most severe instances of ethnic cleansing during the war were actually executed by the Croats through Operation Storm, a plan devised by the CIA.

The Clinton administration additionally provided support to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which sought to establish an ethnically homogeneous Albanian state. This endeavor involved targeting Serbs and other minority groups.

Financing from the drug trade played a significant role in sustaining the KLA, leading the State Department to label it a “terrorist organization”. The NATO North Atlantic Council identified the KLA as the primary instigator of violence in Kosovo.

The narrative of genocide and the Serbs running concentration camps once again heavily relied on the testimony of an individual who openly admitted to not witnessing any killings—propagandist reporter Roy Gutman. This account was eventually discredited when a British journalist visited an alleged death camp, discovering that the inmates had voluntarily sought refuge from the nearby conflict in surrounding villages.

Yugoslavia was a highly successful state that united numerous contemporary Baltic nations under the banner of communism, and it met its demise when the United States and NATO waged a war against it, killing hundreds of civilians in the notorious bombing campaign it launched on the country in order to “sow democracy” there.

Syria

The same man who was one of the main reasons behind the collapse of Yugoslavia was almost able to do the same with Syria. Gutman played a major role in another similar war launched over a decade later against Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad.

The propaganda effort pushed by Gutman was similar to the one he peddled earlier, with it including the mass murder of people at the hands of the government without any evidence backing up these claims.

Western media and regimes falsely accused Al-Assad of carrying out attacks with chemical weapons against his own people while the attacks were likely carried out by U.S.-backed terrorists.

Back in November, the Grayzone website published a series of leaks that expose how senior officials of the OPCW censored this explosive finding in the Syrian city of Douma.

In its investigation, the website stated that “in the early days of the OPCW’s investigation of an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria, expert toxicologists ruled out chlorine gas as the cause of death for more than 40 civilians reported at the scene.”

The Korean War: Another ‘atrocity’

The Korean War, a war peddled by the United States that wound up splitting one people into two, was presented to the public as a “humanitarian intervention” aimed at rescuing the local population from communist forces. To establish this narrative, the Pentagon sponsored a propaganda film, titled The Crime of Korea narrated by Humphrey Bogart. This film falsely attributed atrocities committed by the South Korean government, with U.S. support, to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

This narrative gained traction within the U.S. media and significantly bolstered the perception of the war as “morally justified”. An influential Timemagazine column titled “Barbarity” furthered this perspective by describing a communist massacre in Taejon, which subsequent investigations revealed was actually perpetrated by South Korean troops allied with the U.S.

Charles E. Potter, Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Korean Atrocities and appointed by Senator Joseph McCarthy, notorious for McCarthyism, which was responsible for the persecution of anyone even thought to be affiliated with any leftist organization or held any left-wing beliefs, emphasized the inhumane acts committed by U.S. adversaries. He recounted gruesome incidents, such as a “Red Chinese” nurse using garden shears to sever a GI’s toes without anesthesia and American POWs being subjected to torture with bamboo spears and confinement in small iron cages until death, with maggots infesting their eye sockets.

However, the accounts presented by Potter contradicted the testimonies of American and British POWs, who indicated that their treatment by captors was generally decent, although they had to attend lectures on communism.

Meanwhile, U.S.-run POW camps subjected DPRK and Chinese prisoners to severe brutality. These inmates were massacred for singing revolutionary songs and subjected to violent coercion to renounce repatriation to their homelands. This strategy aimed to score Cold War propaganda points by portraying defection to the West as a desire born out of the perceived superiority of its political-economic system.

The campaign of propaganda against the DPRK extended well into the 21st century, with increasingly extravagant made-up tales to portray the country in a negative light. Many of these stories were propagated by DPRK defectors, some of whom were influenced or incentivized by South Korea and possibly the CIA.

Shin Dong-hyuk, a defector, collaborated with Washington Postcorrespondent Blaine Harden to write a highly successful book Escape From Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West. However, this account was later revealed to be a fabrication.

Yeonmi Park, another defector, who charges a speaking fee of $12,500 on Western media outlets, even made the ludicrous claim that her friend’s mother was executed for watching a Hollywood movie.

Lee Soon-ok, yet another defector, testified before a House committee in 2004 that she had witnessed Christians being tortured and burned to death in DPRK political prisons. However, the head of the North Korean Defectors’ Association, Chang In-suk, contradicted this, asserting that Lee was never a political prisoner.

Abrams noted that fabricated reports about DPRK state executions of prominent figures often coincided with the surprising reappearance of these supposedly deceased individuals on camera.

In a CNN report from May 2015, it was alleged that DPRK leader Kim Jong Un had ordered the poisoning and killing of his aunt, Kim Kyong Hui. However, Mrs. Kim appeared in public in January 2020, highlighting the inaccuracy of the claim.

Abrams suggested that these false defector testimonies and biased media coverage were embraced in the West due to the “self-gratification” they provided, seemingly affirming the notion of Western superiority over the least Westernized state. Additionally, they often served as justifications for hostile policies, including economic sanctions, against the DPRK.

The book talks about the demonization of the Russian and Vietnamese governments, as well as that of Libya and Iraq in a bid to validate the Gulf War, while also revisiting numerous cases of U.S. propaganda aimed at subverting its foes while giving impetus to itself and its beliefs in a bid to uphold the unipolar system that it has been trying so hard to keep propped up—to no avail. The recounting of the countless crimes committed by the United States comes as no surprise to many as the latter has done so for decades, and continues to do so, exploiting its hold on the media to give itself the moral high ground over its geopolitical enemies. Monthly Review. Amazon.

The ISC (Needham) Report

The Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of Facts Concerning Bacteriological Warfare in Korea and China (the ISC report), published at the height of the Korean War, validated claims by North Korea and China that the US had launched bacteriological warfare (biological warfare, BW) attacks against both troops and civilian targets in those two countries over a period of several months in 1952.
   

The most vilified document of the 20th Century.

The report’s release in September, 1952, brought a withering international attack. It was roundly denounced by American and British politicians of the highest rank, ridiculed by four star generals, accused of fraud by celebrated pundits, misquoted by notable scientists, and scorned by a compliant Western press. Charges were made against the quality and truthfulness of its science. Its “unstated” political agenda was denounced. The ethics of interviewing captured US pilots was excoriated and its authors were publicly flayed as communist dupes. The report was red baited in the US halls of Congress and deemed unpatriotic to read, and therefore went unread and deliberately forgotten over the years, which has been the fate of Korean War history in general. In subsequent decades, volumes placed in American university library collections were quietly and permanently removed from circulation.
   
When the rare copy came up for auction, it was discretely purchased and disappeared from public view. This critical 67 year old truth commission document from the Korean War was slipping towards oblivion. For these very reasons, historians and truth seekers should exalt the wondrous rebirth of the ISC Report from near extinction with the publication of this new electronic edition. We welcome the sunshine that re-publication brings to a shadowy and suppressed chapter of American Cold War history. (from the introduction by Thomas Powell) 800 pages.  $9.99.