Huawei takes iPhone's #1 spot in smartphone sales in China with a 23% market share, ahead of Apple's 22%. Read article →

GDP grows 5.2% YTD. Value-added industrial output up 4% YoY; Retail sales rose 6.8%; Fixed-asset investment up 3.1%; Per capita disposable income up 6.3%. Read article →

Electricity consumption up 5.6% YTD, to 7 trillion kWh. The National Energy Administration said  that in September alone, power use expanded 10% to 780 billion kWh. Read article →

China produces 90% of the synthetic graphite in EV battery anodes and 67% of natural graphite. Japan, the U.S., India, and South Korea are its top buyers. China Customs now requires export licenses to sell natural flake graphite, spheroidized graphite and expanded graphite, and artificial graphite with high purity, high strength and high density. Read article → 

Following in BYD’s footsteps are Geely-Volvo, GAC-Aion, Li Auto, and SAIC, threatening to overtake Tesla in the Chinese EV market in 2024, which will ne almost 100% EV in 2025. An avalanche of Chinese car exports will follow, and we could see Chinese car manufacturing plants proliferating in both Europe and North America. Read article → 

US-China corn imports fell 83% in August YoY, while corn imports from Brazil went from zero last August to 580,000 metric tons in August 2023. Imports of Brazilian corn are expected to reach 1.22 MMT in September and US imports  drop to 70,000 metric tons. Read article →

"Highlighting Beijing’s infiltration of Russia’s automobile industry since the Ukraine war, Russia’s government on Friday published a list of domestically-produced cars that state officials should buy, all either Russian or Chinese brands.” REUTERS Read article →

Taiwan’s chip orders have fallen every month, since the loss of the Mainland market. Huawei's home-made chips, along with a slew of new fabs, will accelerate the decline. Read article →

“TSMC is an incredible company, but if things in Taiwan deteriorate from a sovereign perspective, who knows what’s the right valuation for the company," as David Allen, head of long-short strategies at Plato Investment, told nervous investors
avoid TSMC on geopolitical risk. Read article →

Russia-China goods trade rose 32% YTD, to $155 billion. Chinese imports of goods from Russia increased by 14% to over $83 billion and exports doubled compared to last year, reaching $72 billion.  Read article → 

1. China
2. Hebei Province
3. Tangshan (a city in Hebei)
4. Tangshan's illegal production
5. United States. Read article →

Amazon, the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy globally, with 26 GW of projects in its portfolio. TGood, China's biggest public EV charging operator, consumed 6,000 GWh last year, followed by Star Charge and Xiaoju.
And Nio’s battery-swap stations delivered 630 GWh. Its 1,500 stations are used 55,000 times a day, suggesting that 15% of the Nio vehicle fleet is swapping batteries daily.  Read article →

After working at Google X (the moonshot lab), Tiancheng Lou joined Baidu, in 2016: “When Google was researching autonomous driving, he discovered that there was a large gap in Google’s cultural understanding of China’s transportation, and it did not understand Chinese driving habits at all. Americans and Chinese have different ideas and ways of driving. Americans’ minds are full of rules, but the most important thing when driving in China is communication. Cars need to understand people’s intentions, analyze and communicate, and form compromises and guidelines when conflicts arise.” Pony Ma secured approval from the Beijing government to run its Robotaxi program in Yizhuang, a district in the southeast suburbs of Beijing, home of many high-tech research centers. Tiancheng Lou, Ideals will never die.

Above: Young Xi Jinping in Guangdong, studying his father at work. So fearlessly did Xi Sr. attack bogus communism that he was twice sentenced to death. On the second occasion Mao arrived and released him, then forbade PRC political killing forever. The old man was a combat general at 17, a governor at 23 and, Mao said, the best negotiator in China. Released from 7 years in prison for opposing the Cultural Revolution he went to poverty-stricken Guandong and created China's first FTZ. He is fondly remembered because he doubled everyone's income except his own. He told Jinping to go into politics and coached him until his death. His son has done his father proud: urban families' net worth is now four times American families'. Ed.

I was representing the USA in an international table tennis tournament in Osaka, Japan. The night before, I wandered over to the tournament site to check it out and noticed a guy in a Chinese team jacket. They were and still are the best in the world but, being cocky, I went over and asked him if he would like to hit up. He did and we eventually played a best-of-three match. I was playing well and managed to eke out a win. Back with my teammates I modestly mentioned that I had beaten a Chinese player. Fed up with their scoffing, I suggested to the most skeptical teammate stroll with me to where the Chinese team was camped out. I didn’t see the player from last night, so I started talking to one of the other Chinese players. Finally I casually mentioned that I had won a match with one of his teammates. “Which one?” he asked. “Well I… Oh there he is, walking over now.” “Ah yes”, he said, “That’s Mr. Chen. He’s team chef.”  Read article →

Defense minister Li Shangfu is under investigation for corruption connected to the procurement of military equipment, and the leadership plans to replace him with Liu Zhenli, current Chief of Staff of the Joint Staff Department of the Central Military Commission (CMC), ahead of an international security forum on October 29–31. Read more →

Thai PM Thavisin, in Beijing for the BRI reunion, pitched a 100-mile, $27 Bn Kra Isthmus land bridge, connecting the Andaman Sea to the Gulf of Thailand and bypassing Singapore and the Malacca Strait. Bidding and construction would begin in 2025 and create 280,000 jobs and raising economic growth to 5.5% annually. Thailand's economy is forecast to grow 2.8% this year and 4.4% next year. It will be an important connector for logistics for transporting goods between India, the Middle East and Africa. Read more →

Answering a question on China’s reaction to Israel's attack on Hamas’s, David Satterfield, US Special Envoy for Middle East Humanitarian Issues and former ambassador to Turkey and Lebanon, replied: “The Chinese don’t really want to take a stand on any of this stuff. They don’t really have much influence, one way or the other. They aren’t taken seriously by any of the parties. Nobody wants to offend them, but they’re not actors. And that is not new — that is the past 20-25 years.” Read more →

UNSC Gaza failure shocks China. The Security Council's failure to adopt a resolution calling for humanitarian pauses in Gaza, left China in shock, said UN Ambassador Zhang Jun. Read more →

Xi Jinping’s BRI speech: China will build a new logistics corridor across Eurasia and remove all restrictions on foreign investment in manufacturing. Two banks will set up a $1400 billion financing window for “small smart” projects, and an additional $1.2 billion for the Silk Road Fund. China will carry out 1,000 small-scale livelihood assistance projects and provide 100,000 green development training opportunities for partner countries by 2030. China will hold the first BRI Conference on Science and Technology Exchange and increase the number of joint laboratories to 100 in the next five years, advance the Global Initiative for Artificial Intelligence (AI) Governance and establish a Belt and Road Forum Secretariat. Read more →

The US Commerce Department is considering a blockade on general-purpose AI programs, not just physical parts. Although much remains to be seen about how the controls would roll out—and, indeed, whether they will ultimately roll out at all—experts described alarming stakes. If enacted, the limits could generate more friction with China while weakening the foundations of AI innovation in the US.  Read more →

The geopolitical impact of Chinese dominance in the critical vehicle manufacturing industry, and the decline in Western manufacturers (possibly even Tesla), will cause huge strains between China and the Western nations and within Japan, Germany, France and the US. The psychological impact on the Western supremacist worldview will also be significant. We can expect “voluntary” import restraints and a push for localized manufacturing plants. In the US such dominance may be deemed a national security issue, with Chinese brand share being explicitly limited. It may be that the equivalent of the German “Trabi” will be found in a protectionist and paranoid United States by the 2030s! What would happen if Tesla were to be eaten alive by the Chinese and other non-US manufacturers in the next five years, ending up like DeLorean? The impact to the US supremacist image of itself may be shattered, with a new “Yellow Peril” racist response, as when Japan threatened US car and technology manufacturers in the 1980s and 1990s. Read more →

First large unmanned airfreighter starts mass production in Shandong. The TP500 has a 1200 mile range with a load of 1200 pounds, or one-half ton. Read more →

The CJ-10 is the only cruise missile in the PLARF arsenal. Unlike ballistic missiles, cruise missiles have a lower trajectory and remain in the atmosphere for the duration of their flight, making them difficult to detect and intercept. The CJ-10 has a range of 1,500+ km, a CEP of five meters, and could potentially carry a nuclear warhead. Read more →

"The PLAAF ground-based missile forces complement the air and sea-based precision strike capabilities of the PLAAF and PLAN. The PLARF continues to grow its inventory of DF-26 IRBMs, which are designed to rapidly swap conventional and nuclear warheads. They are also capable of precision land-attack and anti-ship strikes in the Western Pacific, the Indian Ocean, and the South China Sea – from mainland China. Read more →

"Longer-range hypersonic missile can beat US defenses". Now, the public can see what the American intelligence community already knew: China is quickly improving its capacity to strike thousands of miles from its shores and prevent the United States from intervening,"  Washington Post. Read more →

Ignoring US threats, Iran can use Beidou's satellite navigation system to guide missiles to Israeli targets. Read more →

Pentagon says China can hit the continental U.S. with the world’s first conventionally armed intercontinental missile and submarine-launched weapons fired from the safety of its littoral waters.  Read more →

China won't invade Taiwan and the U.S. Navy won't engage Chinese forces in the foreseeable future. It's a scam to cover the incompetence and corruption which led the Pentagon to spend trillions on obsolete weapons. We lost the South China Sea years ago. We're in roughly the same position as Britain was in Singapore in late 1941, except that unlike the feckless British, we know it. We just can't admit it. The U.S. DoD has known since at least 2012—when I consulted for the Office of Net Assessment—that Chinese missiles can destroy U.S. aircraft carriers, or any other military asset that isn't submerged. Not until recently did the U.S. military concede this in official assessments. Read more →

China can deal with Taiwan whenever it wants. "The PLARF is world's biggest ground-based missile force, with over 2,200 conventionally armed ballistic and cruise missiles and with enough antiship missiles to attack every U.S. surface combatant vessel in the South China Sea with enough firepower to overcome each ship's missile defense," as Maj. Christopher J. Mihal wrote in 2021 in a U.S. Army journal. Read more →

Reuters: "Chinese civil servants and employees of state-linked enterprises are facing tighter constraints on private travel abroad and scrutiny of their foreign connections, according to official notices and more than a dozen people familiar with the matter, as Beijing wages a campaign against foreign influence.” [China is preparing for war – Ed]. Read more →

Emotional control

Feeling things out

Beating the “demons”

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.