“China – Communist Slave State”

China, through investments in and ownership of ports, is expanding its global maritime reach, and its appetite for ports shows no signs of diminishing. As of July 2020, Chinese firms reportedly “(partly) owned or operated some ninety-five ports across the globe.”

Out of the 95 ports, 22 are in Europe, 20 in the Middle East and North Africa, 18 in the Americas, 18 in South and Southeast Asia, and nine in sub-Saharan Africa. Just three Chinese companies, among them COSCO Shipping Ports and China Merchants Port, two central state-owned enterprises (SOE), account for the operations of 81% of those ports.

Researchers have identified debts of at least $385bn (£286bn) owed by 165 countries to China for ”belt and road initiative” (BRI) projects, with loans systematically underreported to international bodies such as the World Bank.

The four-year study by US-based research lab AidData said the debt burdens were kept off the public balance sheets through the use of special purpose and semi-private loans, and were “substantially larger than research institutions, credit rating agencies, or intergovernmental organisations with surveillance responsibilities previously understood”.

Xi Jinping will do anything to avoid population decline

Have you ever achieved a goal in life only to find it’s not what you wanted after all? Have you made great sacrifices — and trampled over other people — to get to somewhere that you don’t in fact want to be? If so, spare a thought for the Chinese Communist Party.

The International Olympic Committee said on Wednesday that the only people allowed to attend the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing, China, are those who live in China.

“Tickets will be sold exclusively to spectators residing in China’s mainland, who meet the requirements of the COVID-19 countermeasures,” the IOC said.

I’m sick of the Olympics anyway.

The developer’s collapse isn’t leading to global contagion, but China’s looming economic disaster might.

A major mistake of the Cold War was the tendency of Western observers to overestimate the Soviet Union. I have often wondered if the same mistake is being repeated with the People’s Republic of China. Then again, for every article over the last 10 years that predicted China’s economy would overtake that of the U.S., there were at least two prophesying a “China crisis.”

“The endgame of Chinese communist rule has now begun,” wrote David Shambaugh in 2015. Wisely, he added: “Its demise is likely to be protracted.” That same year, Jim Chanos of Kynikos Associates warned, “We’re getting inexorably to a tipping point in China.”