Xi doesn’t seem to care about friends. He lashes out at Australia, Japan, India, Canada, the UK, the US, Taiwan, and threatens most of the rest of the advanced and emerging world — then assumes that everyone will automatically fall into line.
China is fast losing friends just when it needs them most. In the last few months alone, China’s relations with India have suffered a devastating blow after a bloody border clash left at least 20 Indian soldiers (and an unspecified number of Chinese soldiers) dead. To punish Australia for daring to call for an international investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus, China imposed tariffs on Australian barley and threatened other punitive measures. On July 14, China’s foreign ministry denounced Japan’s recent Defense White Paper in unusually harsh language, raising doubts about the rapprochement Xi has been trying to engineer with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
… The United Kingdom’s decision to ban Huawei from its 5G networks has dealt a painful blow to China. Until recently, China was still counting on the UK to stick to its earlier decision to allow the Chinese telecom giant to supply non-core equipment for the country’s 5G networks. __ https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/china-uk-huawei-ban-another-diplomatic-setback-by-minxin-pei-2020-07
Why Does China Need Friends, Anyway?
China desperately needs access to the world’s export markets. Not just for Huawei and other pirated-tech firms but for well over 20% of China’s economy — in other words, to prevent massive internal unrest such as China has not seen in almost 75 years.
The most important thing to understand about China is that its domestic market cannot financially absorb the product of China’s industrial plant. Yes, China has grown, but its growth has made it a hostage to its foreign customers. Nearly 20 percent of China’s gross domestic product is generated from exports, 5 percent of which are bought by its largest customer, the United States. Anything that could reduce China’s economy for the long term by about 20 percent is a desperate vulnerability. COVID-19 has hurt and will continue to hurt many countries. But for China, if international trade collapsed, internal declines in consumption would come on top of the loss of foreign markets.
… China must have access to global markets, which depends overwhelmingly on the ports of its east coast. The South China Sea is therefore a frontier of particular interest for Beijing. The military problem is simple. To access the ocean, China must control the sea lanes through at least one (and preferably more) outlet. The United States does not need to control these lanes; it just needs to deny them to China. The difference is massive. The Chinese have to force the U.S. into deep retreat to secure access. The United States needs only to remain in position to fire cruise missiles or lay mines.
The geographic enclosure of China’s near seas would make it relatively easy for an adversary to disrupt or interdict Chinese trade. China faces many challenges in developing the ability to project sufficient naval power to safeguard seaborne trade as it passes through distant chokepoints. Instead, China must rely on the United States to provide security of the sea-lanes. Although maritime security is ostensibly a public good, China worries that, as a potential peer competitor to the United States, it will not always be able to rely on the United States to protect its shipping.
https://www.stratfor.com/image/chinas-maritime-limitationsThe U.S. Navy controls the Pacific from the Aleutians to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia and Australia, giving Washington an old and sophisticated alliance system that China cannot match. And though allies can drag a nation into conflicts it doesn’t want to be part of, having no allies deprives a nation of strategic options. If only one of China’s littoral nations allied with it, China’s strategic problem might be solved. The failure to recruit allies is an indicator of the regional appreciation of Chinese power and trustworthiness. Adding to China’s strategic problems is that it borders some countries such as Vietnam and India that are hostile to its interests. __ Geopolitical Futures
Xi seems to believe that “it is better to be feared than loved.” Perhaps he is right, if the fear is rational and based on genuine overwhelming strength. But when the fear is based upon Potemkin Village style propaganda, ubiquitous espionage, and threats of economic and physical sabotage which can be repulsed and defused using traditional methods — taking the Obama/Biden and EU suckup approach to China does not seem wise.
Fraud in China wherever you look
The story of Chinese fraud goes back a decade and a half, to the mid-2000s, when a wave of Chinese companies rolled onto U.S. exchanges via a backdoor maneuver known as “reverse mergers.” Chinese companies would merge with a U.S. shell company and take over its public listing, gaining access to American exchanges, trading, and investors — all without the regulatory scrutiny a traditional initial public offering would have brought.
But starting around 2011, revelations spilled out about the accounting and disclosure of company after Chinese company — that they’d inflated their revenues, pretended they had businesses they didn’t, or seen their coffers looted by executives.
President Trump has no intention of letting the genocidal CCP government off the hook. More Chinese genocide.
Over the last few months, [US President Trump] has taken nearly a dozen actions ranging from cutting off American investments in Chinese state companies to refusing to acknowledge Beijing has any territorial rights over the South China Sea.
And while primarily security policy issues, Trump and his team have used the diplomatic crusade against China to reeducate Americans about the evils of socialism, communism and human rights abuses that some on the far left have recently embraced. __ Trump and China
If countries fail to fight back against Chinese crimes, the bloodthirsty Beijing regime will not stop until its own dictates are the only law left.
Reneging on treaties, spurning just verdicts and, of course, seizing territory without suffering severe consequences tells China’s leaders that its opponents are weak and lack the will to resist. Undermining, co-opting and ultimately dominating global diplomatic and economic institutions; public and private organizations; and methods of interaction is another CCP goal. Revealing weakness forwards this line of operation. __ Strategy Page
Genocidal wars against its own people in Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, and mainland China proper, cast the vile regime in a very bad light. But few are those in the outside world willing to call Beijing out.
“[They want] To keep people silent if they want to reveal the truth, not only about COVID-19, but also for the other things happening in China.”
“I am waiting to tell all the things I know, provide all the evidence to the US Government.”
She added: “And I want them to understand, and I also want the US people to understand how terrible this is. It is not what you have seen. This is something very different.
Dr Yan wants to expose the Chinese government saying they knew about the novel coronavirus before publicly acknowledging the outbreak.
Speaking to journalist Bill Hemmer, Dr Yan said “we don’t have much time”.
… “If I tell it in Hong Kong, the moment I start to tell it I will be disappeared and killed.”
Dr Yan said she was among the first scientists asked to investigate a small number of cases of a new “SARS-like” virus in Wuhan on December 31 of last year.
She claimed the Chinese Communist Party and senior university staff censored evidence that Covid-19 could be transmitted between humans as early as last December.
“The China government refused to get overseas experts, even including ones in Hong Kong, to do research in China,” she said. __ Revealing CCP China’s deadly Wuhan coronavirus coverup
These are not the best of days for communist China, and future prospects are not particularly bright. According to new research published in Lancet, the population of China is expected to be cut in half by the year 2100.
Chinese leaders have only themselves to blame for their growing international isolation. With an inflated sense of their power, they have overplayed a weak hand and driven friendly or neutral countries such as the UK, Canada, India, and Australia into the arms of the US, now China’s principal geopolitical adversary. __ Minxin Pei
Can Russia Help?
In theory, Russia and mainland China are at least frenemies, if not exactly allies. But how far does China trust Russia to help in difficult times? Perhaps almost as far as Russia trusts China. Or more graphically, about as far as one back-stabber can trust another.
Hypothetically, China could forge an alliance with Russia, a nearby power with which it shares some common competitors. The problem is that Russia’s focus must be on its west and on the Caucasus. It has no ground force it could lend to China, nor does it have a naval force that would be decisive in its Pacific operations. A simultaneous strike westward by Russia and eastward by China is superficially interesting, but it would not divide U.S. and allied forces enough to take the pressure off of China.
It’s true that China is a rising power, but as I said, it’s rising from the Maoist era. It has a significant military, but that military’s hands are tied until China eliminates its existential vulnerability: dependence on exports. Under these circumstances, the idea of initiating a war is farfetched. More than perhaps any country in the world, China cannot risk a breakdown in the global trading system. Doing so might hurt the U.S. but not existentially.
… the U.S. is still the superior power. It has an economic superiority, a geographic superiority, a political superiority in alliances, and a superiority of experience not only at sea but in air and space. Technology can only offset those deficiencies so much. __ George Friedman
Several times Russia thought it had made deals with the Chinese, but each time it was discovered that Chinese industrial espionage was continuing. __ StrategyPage
If you want the world to look more like China, then support the politicians who are in Beijing’s pocket. You know who I mean. The suckups.
“On the basis of all direct and indirect evidence, the Tribunal concludes with certainty that forced organ harvesting has happened in multiple places in the PRC [People’s Republic of China] and on multiple occasions for a period of at least twenty years and continues to this day.” __ Source
More:
The swamp that wants to take over the world —
The global swamp includes a massive tangle of large international organizations that have proliferated since the Bretton Woods agreement, with the main purpose of leeching funds from large governments — particularly from the US government. Trump is fighting back against the “Global Swamp”
Remember that George Soros is a key member of both the US swamp and the global swamp.
al fin next level 
“Xi seems to believe that “it is better to be feared than loved.” Perhaps he is right, if the fear is rational and based on genuine overwhelming strength.”
The Red Terror and Propaganda was sufficient to cow the population for some decades. But Chernobyl was what ultimately doomed USSR.
China would be better off if it simply ceded all the territorial claims to its neighbors, including the Indian and Paki borders, the Spratlys and Paracels, and all the resource claims in the Nine Dash Zone. China can simply buy all those resources cheaply, and the borders contribute nothing to its security.
Moreover, China, Korea, Philippines, Vietnam, Laos, Burma, Indonesia, and Malaysia all suffered under American, European, and Japanese colonialism. A union of former colonies against the colonialists seems a natural thing to do. Especially since the US has adopted a ham-fisted approach towards Russia and China and the US’ allies in both Asia and Europe. But Xi and the CCP are too ham-fisted themselves to benefit from American missteps.
[Admin: Chairman Xi’s CCP is not too ham-fisted, it is too bloody-handed, and cannot stop itself. It will not end well.”
America’s greatest asset v.v. China and Russia is it very large system of alliances and bases all around the periphery of Eurasia. As long as that system is in place, China and Russia cannot displace America as the World Hegemon. Putin understands that, and he works ceaselessly to pry German, Turkey, Greece, and Egypt away from American influence. He has made some inroads, especially in Turkey and Germany. Xi just doesn’t get it.