Mitt Romney may actually get it

Mitt Romney gave his first major foreign policy speech at the Citadel today, and for anti-CCP folks, it was a pleasant surprise. Of course, presidential candidates fortunate enough to be elected have a habit of sounding anti-Communist before Election Day, only to fall into the “engagement” morass soon after the victory party. Still, Romney broke new ground for a top-tier candidate, new and welcome ground.

In previous post-Tiananmen election cycles, incumbents hew the engagement line while challengers rail about economic threats from the CCP. Romney is the first major candidate I remember to go straight to the geopolitical threat. Here’s his first mention of the problem (transcript courtesy of Katrina Trinko - NRO, emphasis added):

China has made it clear that it intends to be a military and economic superpower. Will her rulers lead their people to a new era of freedom and prosperity or will they go down a darker path, intimidating their neighbors, brushing aside an inferior American Navy in the Pacific, and building a global alliance of authoritarian states?

Let me restate for emphasis: no other top-tier candidate for president has ever even noticed, let alone warn of the CCP building an anti-democratic alliance – not one. This is a major step forward for anti-Communists; even most of our prominent allies in Congress are missing this.

Later, Romney reiterated his concerns about the world with a list of “ a handful of major forces that vie with America and free nations, to shape the world in an image of their choosing . . . determined, powerful forces that may threaten freedom, prosperity, and America’s national interests” – and the Chinese regime made the list.

This is not to say it was a perfect speech. When Romney talked about what he would do as president, East Asia was not specifically mentioned. India was never mentioned at all, a glaring faux pas on several levels.

Still, Romney has given hope to anti-Communists everywhere that he at least understands better than anyone else how dangerous the Chinese Communist Party is to the democratic world. If that is maintained by Romney as GOP nominee (if he is to be that), it could be one of the surprise issues of the 2012 campaign; if President Romney (if he is to be that) turns it into policy, it could dramatically halt the CCP’s global march, and perhaps even hasten its demise.

I once thought I could never be able to support Romney’s bid for nomination. I can’t say that anymore after today.

Cross-posted to the right-wing liberal and Bearing Drift

Communist China’s high-speed railway . . . made in Japan?

One of the dirty little secrets about technological advances in Communist China is that there almost never started within Communist China. As much as the CCP would like to have us think they’re the next technological superpower, their myriad engineers, scientists, and other overcredentialed cadres keep building things with imported parts and/or stolen technology . . . and it still has problems.

The latest exhibit: the highly praised (from the outside) bullet train network in the eastern mainland, which suffered a bad crash earlier this year. As the Wall Street Journal noted, this should not have been a surprise:

. . . China’s high-speed rail network was in fact built with imported components—including signaling-system parts designed to prevent train collisions—that local engineers couldn’t fully understand, according to a review of corporate documents and interviews with more than a dozen rail executives inside and outside China.

During a late July lightning storm, two of China’s bullet trains collided in the eastern city of Wenzhou, killing 40 people and injuring nearly 200 in one of the world’s worst high-speed passenger-rail accidents.

The cadres quickly pinned it all on Anonymous (or, to be terminologically precise, “human error”), but – surprise! – the regime “recently postponed public release of its crash findings.” Of course they did.

The WSJ goes on to note that one of the more important pieces of the rail network was imported from Japan – with a built in “black box” to keep the ChiComs from stealing the technnology within. The contracting firm (an ex-state-run-enterprise that likely was “sold” to a cadre group in the 1990s) had trouble with the parts, but rather than simply agree not to steal the intellectual property, the cadres were OK with installing parts about which they didn’t know enough to keep them operating,

Then again, they decided lightning rods were unnecessary, too. Is it any surprise that that collision came during a lightning storm?

This is a tragic yet telling example of how “modern” Communist China works. Rather than a well-structured society based on freedom, property rights, and the rule of law, we have a slipshod edifice held together by fear, treachery, and corruption. The results is a rail system that gleams wonderfully for ignorant foreigners while killing innocent Chinese.

Does anyone really expect this bunch to inherit global leadership if we give it up? History tells us leadership seeks nations out more than nations seek it. If Washington ever sends it into exile, it’s headed straight to New Delhi, a stumbling Beijing’s effort to chase it down notwithstanding.

Sic Semper Tyrannis?

There is no other way to describe it: Virginia First Lady Maureen McDonnell embarrased herself, her husband, and her state with this litte get together. Ugh!

From the Governor’s Office press release:

On Friday, Sept. 9, First Lady of Virginia Maureen McDonnell hosted a delegation from China Central Television (CCTV) at the Governor’s Mansion in Richmond. The group came to Virginia as a result of Governor Bob McDonnell’s trade mission to Asia in May of 2011. During that trip, the First Lady and representatives of the Virginia Tourism Corporation met with China Public Television officials regarding opportunities to work together on media related initiatives.  

 “It is exciting to work with an institution like China Central Television on initiatives that can produce such great mutual benefits” said Mrs. McDonnell. “I am grateful that our trade mission is producing results such as these and that Virginia now has the opportunity to host this distinguished delegation.” 

As the great John McEnroe would say: You cannot be serious!

CCTV is not PBS, or even NPR, or anything else that passes as “public television” in the United States. It is Communist propaganda, pure and simple. Among the many “educational” programs this bunch of cadres airs for the Chinese people was this drivel seen and noted by Troy Parfitt (Why China Will Never Rule the World):

That night on CCTV, a panel of Chinese scientists was explaining how the Americans had never landed on the moon. Not only were the lunar missions faked, they said, but the Apollo program itself was largely a matter of science fiction. The shadows were all wrong. Where were the craters? And just look at that ridiculous flag – not moving even with solar winds. Their tone was both mocking and disdainful, as if even having to explain why this was the biggest fraud of all time insulted their very intelligence. It was announced that part two of the program would air the following evening and I made a mental note to remember to watch it. I reckoned I might be able to learn where Elvis had been hiding and why Princess Diana was murdered by Britain’s secret service.

So now the Commonwealth of Virginia is on record endorsing the source of nonsense like this, and this meeting is sure to be beamed from the Pacific to the occupied nations (Tibet and East Turkestan) as evidence of Virginia’s thumbs-up to the regime and its propaganda arm.

Virginia’s motto is Sic Semper Tyrannis – with the controversial image of a half-naked woman stepping on a dictator. Something tells me the semi-clothed femme fatale would have been the one embarrassed this time.

Cross-posted to Bearing Drift

Finding the “new” China

Troy Parfitt provides an invaluable contribution to the debate over the future of China with Why China Will Never Rule the World: Travel in the Two Chinas. His tale of travels and travails in both Taiwan and the mainland provide stories humorous and tragic, painful and uplifting. It is also a devastating critique to those who see the Communist-controlled nation as the wave of the future.

Whether or not it will reassure anti-Communists is another story.

The one myth the book pulverizes better than any other is the notion of China at the cusp of modernity. In over 300 brutalizing pages, mixing his own story with the history of the place, he paints a picture of . . .

. . . just another backward, bitter, idiosyncratic, xenophobic, despotic, intellectually improverished nation-state; one effectively devoid of tact, charm, grace, creativity,or emotional intelligence, and to that end . . . definitely not unique

Ouch!

Parfitt is certainly not without evidence. Tale after tale of uncooperative hotel staff, taxi drivers who have no idea where they are going, museums with half-baked propaganda course through the pages of his work. That such depravity, lack of civility, and backwardness is as much on display in Beijing and Shanghai as it would be in the isolated and impoverished interior will be an eye-opener even to experienced hands.

Finally, Parfitt is one of the very few China watchers who actually compares the mainland to Taiwan, and finds both depressing similarities and (to him) stunning differences. One of his best examples, of all places, comes in a nuclear waste facility in Taiwan where he’s certain the staff is giving him the runaround about a leak that would poison a local aboriginal community:

The Taiwan Power Compant had wagered on the Tao’s lack of resolve. They had also wagered on the fickle Taiwanese and their racism and their penchant for forgetting. They had wagered correctly. But at least I was allowd into the place. I was even given tea. That really impressed me. In China, I would have likely been arrested and put on an airplane. A local likely would have been arrested and put in a death van.

So, it is clear that Taiwan is superior to the mainland in many ways, but can we say for certain that this will preclude the Chinese Communist Party from worldwide domination? After all, the Soviet Union’s greatest period of geopolitical strength (the late 1970s) was the exact moment of its greatest nadir economically, ecologically, and culturally.

At first, I assumed Parfitt had succumbed to a typical Canadian fallacy – the overestimation of “soft power.” Many Canadians seem to overemphasize cultural value and diplomatic graces as a rationalization for an inferiority complex driven by Canada’s proximity to the United States. Moreover, for decades, the U.S. itself has been accused of myopia, ignorance, and cultural courseness – the very things Parfitt lays at the feet of the Chinese. Indeed, even the 18th century British were considered uncultured hicks by the continental powers that tried, and failed, to contain their rise to global prominence.

However, in the end, British and American history don’t contradict Parfitt; they validate him. In both cases, the Anglophonic nations became more powerful as their respective electorates  expanded. Contrary to many Americans’ thinking, the British Empire reached its peak in the early 20th century, not the mid-19th. Britain grew in strength for decades after America began establishing a global presence in the 1880s, despite becoming an island where the pre-1868 elite were overwhelmed at the ballot box by the masses. Similarly, America’s height came after women were granted the vote, and victory in the First Cold War came after the franchise was finally expanded to African-Americans. It’s as if the ballot paper came with it an implied responsibility – one keenly felt by the newly empowered, and guarded with surprising zeal.

This is where we come full circle, and back to Parfitt’s journey – in a land where the people have no power and thus feel no responsibility. When it comes to projecting China’s power around the world, the CCP is on its own – and tyrants have never been able to impose their will on the world for precisely that reason: the people feel no obligation to help.

In the end, Parfitt’s observations validate his thesis, almost. Perhaps someday, China will rule the world, if the people are given a role in running China, and thus feel some responsibility for it. Parfitt never sees that day coming, and thus, never sees when China will rule the world.

So long as the CCP insists on ruling China, he’ll be right.

“One Child” careens into the presidential campaign (UPPERDATED)

It is a fact that the Obama Administration’s policy in East Asia has shown the strongest geopolitical resistance to the Chinese Communist Party since the Nixon U-turn of 1971.

None of that mattered when Vice President Joseph Biden opened his mouth in defense of the CCP’s hideous “one child” policy. Suddenly, the geopolitical strength became the exception rather than the rule, and the title of Most Anti-Communist Party in America shifted to the Republicans by default . . . and if two GOP bigwigs have their way, that won’t change anytime soon.

Here’s Biden’s nonsensical comments (Washington Post): “Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I’m not second-guessing — of one child per family.” Never mind the forced abortions, forced sterilizations, and infanticides. What’s that between friends?

House Speaker John Boehner – the highest-ranking Republican in the country – quickly hit Biden for this (same link – “No government on Earth has the authority to place quotas on the value of innocent human life, or to treat life as an economic commodity that can be regulated and taken away on a whim by the state.”

If anything, Mitt Romney – who was the front-runner for the GOP nomination until Rick Perry showed up – was even angrier (once again, same link):

China’s one-child policy is gruesome and barbaric. Vice President Biden’s acquiescence to such a policy should shock the conscience of every American. Instead of condoning the policy, Vice President Biden should have condemned it in the strongest possible terms. There can be no defense of a government that engages in compulsory sterilization and forced abortions in the name of population control.

Now, Romney has had . . . issues with his stance on pre-born life in the past, but normally “one child” is hideous enough that both sides of the debate are comfortable ripping it. To date, Romney is the only candidate to take notice of Biden’s comments (and take aim at them). Earlier this year, Romney also called for a re-think on free trade with the ChiComs (although that’s de rigeur for presidential candidates - Frum Forum).

Zhongnanhai wasn’t supposed to make an appearance the American campaign of 2012. Bad for them, good for us.

UPDATE: The Weekly Standard heard from “A foreign policy hand familiar with Perry’s thinking.” Some of the more choice comments (emphasis added):

Obama has downgraded our relations with [our] key allies such as Japan and our most important future partner India. Obama gives and gives on issues like Taiwan. He has the worst record on Taiwan since Jimmy Carter. China is not impressed by concessions, the key to a good relationship with China is recognizing your leverage.

“Leverage means a strong relationship with Japan. [Obama] gathers every Cabinet member he can muster to join in high-level dialogues with China. These ‘dialogues’ usually beg the Chinese to do what they need to do anyway. What about Japan?

. . .

Obama also halted the great momentum we started with India by taking China’s position on South Asia and seeing Delhi as a ‘South Asia’ problem rather than an emerging great power. Also he leaves the impression that he wants to leave Afghanistan as soon as he can politically, which only spooks Delhi.

“There would be nothing worse for the U.S.-India relationship than leaving Afghanistan to terrorists and the Taliban which would also risk the complete radicalization of Pakistan. Obama does not seem to understand how this fight is related to our larger geopolitical interests.

. . .

 A stable relationship with China means recognizing that it is an economic partner but a security competitor. That is how they see us. And this President is the worst on trade in a long time. We still have not ratified the South Korea Free Trade agreement, our biggest since Nafta. It would create jobs for us and link us more strongly to an important ally.

. . .

Biden’s comment was abhorrent.  The one child policy is morally wrong, it has led to forced abortions and sterilizations and the death and abandonment of countless baby girls.

Now, before we get too excited, this is a source close to Perry, not the man himself. Still, if this is even close to how Governor Perry views Asia . . .

UPPERDATE: From Perry himself (Wingright):

China’s one child policy has led to the great human tragedy of forced abortions throughout China, and Vice President Biden’s refusal to ‘second-guess’ this horrendous policy demonstrates great moral indifference on the part of the Obama Administration.  Americans value life, and we deserve leaders who will stand up against such inhumanity, not cast a blind eye.

Cross-posted to the right-wing liberal

So . . . what’s Mandarin for TARP?

Over the weekend, while we celebrated the 236th Independence Day, leading Chinese economist and dissident He Qinglian gave a detailed description of the Chinese Communist Party’s local government debt problem to the Epoch Times. He listed the local loan default potential to be anywhere from $300 to over $450 billion.

Two days later, Moody’s discovered over half a trillion in loans to local cadres that were bascially off the books – and thus, far less likely to be recovered (BBC).

This really shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, membership in the Chinese Communist Party is basically a license to steal, especially for local government cadres. For much of the 1990s and aughts, this kleptocratic system was funded with sales of land seized from the Chinese people; or loans leveraged with the same. The latter helped fuel a massive real estate bubble. On top of the massive university debt (Epoch Times), the Communist banking sector is in serious trouble.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Can you say TARP in Mandarin?

Of course, the cadres have some advantages that Washington doesn’t, such as a near-complete monopoly of rare-earth metals – at least until the massive find Japanese geologists revealed to the world can be made viable (BBC).

At some point, Zhongnanhai may have to choose between propping up its various allies, cracking down on dissidents (Epoch Times), and keeping its local cadres with sticky fingers afloat. Sadly, the rest of the world seems determined to postpone that day as much as possible. In Washington, the Obama Administration – which has been surprisingly unwilling to crouch into a fetal position in east Asia – has done little to even annoy, let alone frustrate, the Communists’ mullahcratic allies in Tehran (National Review Online). Meanwhile, the European Union has fallen for the “monitoring” nonsense once in again, and pledged a slew of aid for the cadres’ Korean colony (Epoch Times).

This is a familiar picture to anyone who remembers the 1970s, when the Soviets seemed on the march globally, on the offensive diplomatically, and even on solid ground economically. The disasters that were the Soviet economy and ecology were largely hidden from view. The CCP does not have that ability in the early 21st century, so they have resorted to fudging numbers (see above) and various forms of geopolitical subterfuge.

One day, the Chinese people will rise up and take their country back from the CCP. The only question is how long the democratic world will tolerate it and its terrorist allies, and how much damage in blood and treasure we will have to endure in the meantime.

Lest that sound flippant, remember that Germany made its transition from revanchist power in 1890 to stable democracy in 1990 – but that’s a century no one wants repeated.

CCP’s Iranian allies caught backing our enemies, again

Thomas Jocelyn of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies has the latest in how the mullahcracy in Tehran is training anti-American terrorists in Iraq and arming the Taliban in Afghanistan (Wall Street Journal via Weekly Standard):

The U.S. has attributed all the attacks to Shiite militias it says are [sic] are trained by the [Iranian] Revolutionary Guards, rather than al Qaeda or other Sunni groups that were the most lethal forces inside Iraq a few years ago

. . .

Kata’ib Hezbollah, or Brigades of the Party of God, is viewed as the one most directly taking orders from Revolutionary Guard commanders in Iran. Two others, the Promise Day Brigade and Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, are offshoots of the Mahdi Army headed by the anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who currently lives in Iran.

As for Afghanistan, as Jocelyn himself notes . . .

Iran’s support for the Taliban’s war against coalition forces dates to late 2001, when Iranian officials promised to supply Taliban leaders with weapons and safe transit for Arabs (al Qaeda operatives) traveling to Afghanistan to wage jihad.

If you haven’t been following this closely, this all may come as a shock. Those of us who do follow it closely are just shocked it still surprises people.

Those of us who follow this very closely might also note that the mullahs’ chief ally and military supplier - the Chinese Communist Party – has done nothing to stop them, or even distance itself from them.

There was a time when that would lead Washington to take action (and I don’t mean just military; there are several options here) against the Tehran-Zhongnanhai axis. Are any of the presidential candidates (incumbent included) interested in doing so now?

Cross-posted to Virginia Virtucon and the right-wing liberal

Here comes the ChiCom bubble

One of the amber-hardened pieces of conventional wisdom is that the CCP has us over a barrel, because they own so many U.S. Treasury notes.

Hardly anyone bothers to look at the equation from Zhongnanhai’s point of view.

The CCP didn’t come into all of this American debt by accident. They bought our bonds in a deliberate attempt to overprice the dollar and underprice their own currency so they could export more to us. While much of the focus here has been the effect of the CCP’s currency manipulation on American jobs, our allies in Asia have been far more hard hit as the ChiComs moves in on their export markets.

The results are only half clear: while Chinese exporters have done very well, the regime has to keep buying our bonds or the whole thing collapses. In other words, the CCP can’t get rid of our bonds without triggering a deep recession at home. Given that the number of antiregime protests are already double what they were a decade ago (and the fact that labor costs are finally catching up to the rest of the world), that’s a huge problem.

It may not be one they can avoid, though. According to an Epoch Times reoprt, the bond-buying spree increased the domestic money supply at a rate of seven times economic growth. This has, of course, led to serious inflation problems, to which the cadres have responded by fudging the numbers (same link). Imagine that.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong, which was supposed to be the jewel the cadres could exploit for decades, has become a political embarrassment (Epoch Times) on top of the usual human rights problems (Epoch Times).

Making matters worse, their Korean de facto colony is in such bad shape that even military units are starving (One Free Korea). In other words, no one  is going to just sit and wait for the painful adjustments the CCP has to make in order to get the economy off its export fix – least of all the Chinese people.

Oh, sure. NOW the CCP likes “dialogue” on the South China Sea

I’ll give the Chinese Communist Party this: they’re getting better at spin.

After more than three decades of telling the world that the South China Sea is their personal lake – and two years of being stunned to hear Washington say, “Um, no it’s not” – Zhongnanhai now wants us to believe that they think it’s just wonderful to have a “new channel” for “friendly, candid, and constructive” talks with the United States on the subject (Voice of America).

Sure, and I’m in the bridge-selling business.

Communist China has claimed the South China Sea as their jacuzzi since the late 1970s – when Vietnam dared to attempt enforcing it’s claim to the water. For the most part, the United States usually ignored the CCP’s claims (which had been continually without any means to back it up). Recently, though, Vietnam (and the Phillipines, Indonesia, Brunei, Taiwan) have gotten very antsy about the CCP navy adding bite to the Central Military Commission’s bark. Suddenly, American silence sounded a lot like American appeasement.

That’s about when the Obama Administration started playing against type and warning the CCP off. Now the Phillipines are getting treatment reserved in the past for Britain; Vietnam’s regime is acting like it fought on our side during the 1960s and 1970s; and the CCP is finding that Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea are not their only local problems anymore.

It must be a painful joke for the CCP. While Barack Obama has led America in retreat just about everywhere else on the planet, in Eastern Asia he has deepended and expanded alliances against the CCP. If it weren’t for the fact that the Communists have strong ties to America’s other adversaries around the globe, they would consider President Obama to be a total loss.

As it is, only their proxies get to benefit from Obama. The CCP itself has to resort to talks with their neighbors (New York Times).

This could get especially interesting next year. Taiwan as a new election coming up, and the CCP-friendly Kuomintang is facing a surprisingly resurgent Democratic Progressive Party. Meanwhile, we’ll have our own election, and it will be curious to see if East Asia becomes an issue.

Now over here

For the last couple years, things on the China e-Lobby have been slow, in no small part because I was blogging in several other places on WordPress, making it difficult to shift back and forth.

So I’ve solved that problem my moving the C e-L from there to here.

I’ll be posting at the C e-L’s wordpress site from now on.