As you might have noticed, I have not written newsletter for a while.
What is happening in Gaza devasted me. The West´s credibility as the upholder of human rights was shattered for me. And the USA, as the leading nation and representative of the West, along with Germany and the UK are the worst on earth, aiding the atrocities done to Palestinians and Lebanese in front of the eyes of the world. It is a pure horror show.
The climate wreckage that has destroyed millions of homes in the Global South has finally arrived in Europe, first with the flood in central Europe and then in Spain. Ocean temperature is not going down after “El niño, Nature acts like she is in rage. But it’s still business as usual, the West is paying lip services to cutting emission and the fossil fuel industry is enjoying record-high investment and profit.
Are Gaza horror and Climate crisis linked? Of course, they are.
It is called capitalism, where all resources and benefits are controlled by fewer and fewer billionaires and the 99% are soothed/brainwashed/guided to be consumers to feed the markets, so the economy keeps growing and politicians keep serving the rich and powerful. So the rich donors are making sure trigger-happy Joe Biden keeps sending arms to Israel. They want to show everyone that they dominate the world with military supremacy. Not surprizing then that the world is divided between colonizers and colonized on the issue of Palestinians.
Colonization is the backbone of capitalism. One case is Congo. I recently listened to a podcast on how the West kept robbing Congo of its minerals and enriched themselves but left the country in ruin. Our electronics should be way more expensive for Congolese to benefit from the industry. But no, the country is plumbed into war and famine, when we enjoy cheap smartphones. Perhaps no individual can change that because it is capitalism that is making all run smoothly. To hear the story, you can search “Upstream - The Fight for The Congo w/ Vijay Prashad” on your favorite podcast app (try here to listen in the browser), or you can read the (AI generated) transcript.
Before Gaza, I might not have totally believed this narrative. But Gaza opened my eyes. I took note of the part on China’s role in Africa is also of interest to you, (from the transcript).
Now for almost a decade, the Chinese government has held a China Africa roundtable, an annual meeting, where leaders from the continent meet with the Chinese leadership and they discuss, you know, plans, needs and so on. Over the last couple of years, African leaders have gone to that structure, to that meeting and have said, “look, you know, you’re just extracting our raw materials. This is not enough for us”. So, in the last couple of years, the Chinese government has responded, I think very productively, by saying, “we would like to help you industrialize”. So rather than just build infrastructure for you to remain at the other end of the commodity chain, we want to help you skill up. We want to build processing units, we want to build the actual intellectual capacity to run, you know, with engineers and so on. So that’s a big and interesting difference that’s taken place. Now, United States worries about this. Like the Chinese are having what they consider overdue influence. So they’ve been trying to sabotage some of these Chinese projects. In fact, as a consequence, they’re even sabotaging African-only projects.
I’ll give you an example. The government of Zambia and the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo, neither of them enormously progressive governments, nonetheless made an agreement to together build some sort of electric battery and then perhaps an electric car. Very good agreement. United States couldn’t have this happening without its presence. Blinken summoned the two heads of government, they redid the agreement to include all three countries and said this is how it’s going to be. Now these countries had started to, through the Belt and Road Initiative, export their goods and services out of the country. Zambia is a landlocked country, it was valuable to have infrastructure that could carry its copper out and so on. They built structures for that. Well, as China and the Belt and Road started to build structure, the US insinuated itself with no real money on the table and said they will build the Lobito Corridor from Zambia into the DRC into Angola and then a port. But who’s going to finance that? See, the US keeps talking about public-private funding because in fact, if you keep privatizing everything, the state doesn’t have any money. So, the US government doesn’t have money for the Lobito Corridor. They have gone with a begging bowl to get others to contribute. Meanwhile, the Chinese government, because they don’t privatize everything, has capital and is willing to invest it. So, this is a real contest set in play.
[…]
There’s nothing in parallel between Haiti and the DRC, except the time periods. Just as in the DRC, you have this long dictatorship of the father, Papa Doc Duvalier from 57 out to the 1980s. Eventually his son, baby Doc Duvalier, a long period of repression. And then the country struggles to find its feet. Similarly, the DRC struggles to find its feet. And now perhaps finding its feet a little more, trying to play the angles. The emergence of China has really opened space for countries like the DRC because now rather than being absolutely subservient to the International Monetary Fund, they can go and talk to the Chinese, they can talk to, you know, the Indians, they can talk to with more actually ferocity to the Economic Commission of Africa and so on. I think this is important. You know, we are in a different period now than we were before. Now, where it will go, it’s very hard to tell. I don’t want to exaggerate things. But certainly this is a better time than the 1990s when things seem completely bleak on the continent as in other places as well.
For me, it is not that China is inherently good and the West is inherently evil. But for China to compete with the West for access to Africa they have to offer a better deal to the Africans. Also, as a Chinese, I know there are lots of aspiring colonizers in China and perhaps some of them are in the government, but I also know that Chinese history of being colonized also help many Chinese understand African’s aspiration for its future.
With the moral bankruptcy of the West and of the USA in particular so completely revealed by the Gaza genocide, the world starts to look at BRICS as a good counterbalance of the West. With Trump being re-elected, many non-Americans start doubting the superiority of democracy itself. But for me, even before the election, the fact that people have to choose a regime that is actively aiding a genocide and a potentially fascist regime is already evidence that democracy in the USA is broken. And Europe is not far behind.
Yes, one can debate the philosophical pros and cons of democracy, but let me recommend another Upstream podcast episode, search for Upstream - A Marxist Perspective on Elections w/ August Nimtz, or read the (AI generated) transcript.
One funny reaction from x.com:
Chinese international student in my class was telling me about how his evangelical dad in Beijing believes that Trump was chosen by god to win the election, but that this victory is part of a larger divine plan to destroy the united states
Another one about a software company with the “right” name benefiting from Trump Cam-pain:
The funniest news involving China’s online reactions to the U.S. elections has to be the sudden surge in stock value for a company called Sichuan Wisdom Co. Ltd. (川大智胜). This spike occurred simply because the company’s name sounds like “Trump winning.”
Another one about disinformation from Iran and Russia:
Iranian disinformation tells me to vote Harris but Russian disinformation tells me to vote Trump, so I’m torn
In comparison to the Chinese one
Chinese disinformation tells you America is doomed either way and they are both controlled by Jews.
But overall, Chinese are cheering for Trump, observed by Chenchen Zhang, a scholar on politics and international relationship:
why are Weibo ultranationalists celebrating Trump’s win
- ideological alignment: seeing it as a win over feminists, LGBTQ activism, racial minorities, etc
- foreign policy: acknowledging that both parties are anti-China, and Trump’s approach to Ukraine & Taiwan is likely more China-friendly
- different assessments of the ‘Fall of empire’. some says “if the democrats won the US would fall more quickly wouldn’t that be nice?” but others are like “Trump can only save America a little bit and slow down the speed of destruction, but ultimately it’s irredeembale because feminism, lgbtq, immigration etc.”
And, of course, it is not just China, ultranationalists everywhere are cheering.
You might have heard lots of upbeat news on China. Especially their dominance on EV. But from what I see, the country is not doing very well (yet?). First, since the pandemic, very few foreigners are seen in China:
Only 22000 foreigners still living in Beijing
If you consider the number of embassies and diplomats it’s really a low number
It’s down 40-50% from a decade ago
Shanghai has maybe a bit more but it’s down a lot from peak time
In the future even less
Some Chinese people casually reported that the street looks very depressed:
On the street you see “shop for rent” everywhere and very few people wandering around.
I felt that at some point in the near future, a famine will break out.
I also have some personal friends saying the same thing. Business is actually hard for ordinary people in China.
Our friend, Lu Yuyu is actively reporting on mass incidents in China on x.com. For example, in the capital city of Henan province, local hospital workers have not been paid for eight months. Doctors and nurses blocked the gate to the hospital demanding the leaders of the hospital to pay them before leaving.
How Volkswagen got trapped in China, a x.com summary:
I would read anything @KeithBradsher (Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times) writes about the Chinese auto market. He reported on Detroit before he started to report from China.
“China’s state-owned banks and local governments have been pumping money into local automakers, allowing some manufacturers to sell cars far below the cost of making them. Volkswagen executives say that they refuse to join the price-cutting war and that they have relinquished market share as a result.”
Problems include subsidized local competition but extend to using China as a production base to supply the EU and thinking the German government would protect them from tariffs (and not cooperating with the EU investigation).
“VW began shipping Cupra Tavascan battery-electric cars in May to Europe from a new design and production complex in central China. But soon after, the European Commission decided to impose the tariffs. Companies like VW that did not cooperate were told they would face the highest tariff of all starting this week: 37 percent.
VW managed to wangle a reduction in its tariffs to 21 percent, and those tariffs took effect on Wednesday. But Tesla, which is one of VW’s biggest rivals and had cooperated earlier, persuaded the commission to cut its tariff to just 7.8 percent. BYD is paying 17 percent. VW faces the possibility of a lasting disadvantage in its home market on any electric cars imported from China, the world’s low-cost producer.”
And a host of problems linked to a Xinjiang production plant (that now needs to be closed but cannot be closed without offending the Chinese government
(the full article on NYT How Volkswagen Lost Its Way in China).
How is China’s EV sector? Lately with the tariff on EV imports from China imposed by the USA and EU, one can not help thinking that Chinese EV industry is directly competing with Western EV industry in their home market.
EV could help with climate crisis. But keeping West car manufacturers is still more important. It’s still business as usual,
For more reading on China, check out this Bloomberg article that argues that China’s “Made in China 2025” paid off (alt)
Also Bloomberg on The US Is Squandering Its Hidden Advantage Over Xi Jinping.
Many people are worried about Taiwan, but there is a chance that, with the ‘example’ of Ukraine, Trump can make a deal with China and Taiwan to have some ‘peaceful’ settlement, with the help from Elon Musk, and get TSMC as the US part of the deal.
My two cents worth of guess: Taiwan might be ruled like Hong Kong, maybe with less repression right away but eventually will become a Hong Kong.