"China has labelled [this] a selfish and highly irresponsible action,"
Yeah, and China knows all about those actions. //

and other fascinating comments...

Asks Beijing to stop the phone calls harassing civilians, as tests show impact of nuke plant water

The US Department of Energy has reversed former President Trump’s ban on the import of certain electrical equipment from China.

China’s worsening economy and Biden’s ineptitude increase the likelihood of Xi playing the jingoistic card of war and invasion. //

But there’s a way out, one common to dictators: start a war to stoke nationalist fervor.

This option is often overlooked by Western observers, who feel comfortable in their mirror-imaging fallacies. Under this bias, they assume that foreign regimes act with the same rationale as the nations where they have lived, studied, vacationed, or worked.

The mysterious ’disappearance’ of China’s top diplomat is the latest proof that Xi is a ruthless dictator.  //

A dictator who is cruel to his own people doesn’t care about our people’s well-being. He will not hesitate to harm America and our allies’ interests. The sooner the Biden administration recognizes the true nature of Xi and his regime and develops appropriate policy responses, the better we can protect ourselves and our allies.  

We followed Code Pink’s ugly antics for years, but lost track of them, so we didn’t notice as the group became an outlet for Chinese government propaganda. A NY Times report reveals that after a well-connected Chinese businessman married a Code Pink co-founder, money poured in and propaganda poured out, including defense of Chinas actions against the Uyghurs. //

The Times article is about widespread Chinese government funding of leftist western activists. When the history of the climate and other ‘social justice’ activism meant to tear down and weaken western societies is truthfully written, I have little doubt the that Chinese government (and the Soviets, now Russians) are behind much of it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/world/europe/neville-roy-singham-china-propaganda.html //

It’s good that Code Pink has been revealed for the “peace” fraud it always has been. They are not for peace, and they never have been. Perhaps most important, it’s becoming even more clear how much of the western leftist activism is funded by and influenced by China to undermine our society.

The U.S.’ ongoing naval challenges give Red China an opportunity to accumulate more power throughout the Indo-Pacific.

on Saturday, Yellen committed a grievous diplomatic error—she bowed repeatedly, at least three times, to Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng when she met him.

That’s a grave show of American weakness to the Chinese, particularly the repeated and deep nature of the bowing. If the Chinese didn’t already think they could step all over us, that’s the type of signal to them that they can, when Biden officials act that desperate to bend over for them. Lifeng even backed up a little to give her more room to kowtow to him, like she was a servant.

“Never, ever, ever,” Bradley Blakeman, a senior staffer in George W. Bush’s White House, told The Post. “An American official does not bow. It looks like she’s been summoned to the principal’s office, and that’s exactly the optics the Chinese love.”

“Bowing is not part of the accepted protocol,” agreed Jerome A. Cohen, an emeritus professor at NYU and expert in Chinese law and government. [….]

“The way to treat an adversary is, you don’t go hat in hand,” Blakeman said. “But with this administration, time and time again, we embarrass ourselves and show weakness. And it just shows the lack of effective leverage we have.”

On Twitter, Bonnie Glaser, Asia Director of the George Marshall Fund of the United States, wrote: “This message will not land well with Japan and South Korea. Does Wang Yi really think that national interests are less important than appearance?”

“The irony of … Wang Yi telling Japanese and Koreans ‘you can never become an American,’ is that Japanese and Koreans become Americans every day,” wrote Jeff M. Smith, director of the Asian Studies Center at U.S. think tank The Heritage Foundation.

“They’re part of the fabric of America. What they can’t become is Chinese. Tone deaf. Again,” Smith wrote.

Avik Roy
@Avik
·
Follow
“A man wrote me and said: ‘You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.’”—Ronald Reagan, 1989 https://reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/remarks-presentation-ceremony-presidential-medal-freedom-5
4:40 PM · Jul 4, 2023

Whether appealing to racial stereotypes or economic or security interests, it’s likely we’ve not seen the last of China’s efforts to drive a wedge between the U.S. and its Indo-Pacific allies.

What did that shameless, dishonest groveling at the feet of the Chinese dictatorship accomplish? The answer is apparently nothing. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in the adversarial nation on Sunday to hold more fruitless talks, the CCP immediately set out to embarrass the Biden administration.

Is this how this entire trip is going to go?

DaiWW @BeijingDai
·
Blinken lands in China. No red carpet, no greeting party and no high level CPC officals.
9:19 PM · Jun 17, 2023 //

When high-ranking diplomats (and there is no higher ranking than Blinken) visit other countries, it is an act of tradition and respect to roll out the red carpet. It’s also customary for that person’s foreign counterpart, usually the one he’ll be negotiating with, to be in attendance to greet said diplomat and escort them to the meeting place or where they are staying. In this case, Blinken was met with a low-ranking official while given essentially zero pomp and circumstance, and the reason China snubbed him isn’t exactly a mystery.

As it stands, the CCP sees Biden as weak and ineffective. Not surprisingly, that’s because the president is weak and ineffective. His prostration before Xi Jinping on Saturday, defending China’s aggression with talking points that came straight out of Beijing (and that his own administration officials have contradicted), has only made the situation worse.

Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence team’s statement points to Beijing’s motives and its belief that there will be no repercussions from the current U.S. administration: “Microsoft assesses with moderate confidence that this Volt Typhoon campaign is pursuing development of capabilities that could disrupt critical communications infrastructure between the United States and Asia region during future crises.”

There are two key take-aways from Wednesday’s news from Microsoft: 1) Chinese President Xi Jinping has consistently brushed aside diplomacy while actively preparing for potential conflict with the U.S. and 2) detection of such attacks remains a key gap for critical infrastructure cybersecurity. //

More policies and more people are themselves not a solution. The Department of Homeland Security and other federal stakeholders have been given authorities to be proactive in their approach to cybersecurity. However, the model the government has embraced is a flat-footed and clumsy approach that keeps them in a constant state of response and recovery—awaiting alerts from the private sector and then managing damage-control messaging afterward.

Instead of waiting for the private sector to decide to share information, DHS must become forward-leaning and take meaningful steps toward addressing the risk and mitigating cyber threats to our critical infrastructure. ///

Not sure we should have the government leading the way in this, we would end up just like China, with bureaucrats inside private sector security...

A new report finds that last year China permitted the equivalent of two coal plants per week.

In appearances on two Sunday talk shows, House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Rep. Mike McCaul (R-TX) said that China sending a high-altitude spy balloon across the continental United States “was an act of espionage in plain sight” and revealed that the balloon had a greater capability than satellites to gather and collect imagery, and left open the possibility that these signals and images were still transmitted to Beijing even though US intelligence officials claim that they “mitigated” the damage.

Chinese balloon shot down of Myrtle Beach

Just days before Secretary of State Antony Blinken is scheduled to travel to China for “high-level talks,” the Pentagon announced that the US government has detected a Chinese spy balloon drifting over the continental United States for the past two days.

Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said:

“The United States government has detected and is tracking a high-altitude surveillance balloon that is over the continental United States right now. The U.S. government, to include Norad, continues to track and monitor it closely. The balloon is currently traveling at an altitude well above commercial air traffic and does not present a military or physical threat to people on the ground. Instances of this kind of balloon activity have been observed previously over the past several years. Once the balloon was detected, the US government acted immediately to protect against the collection of sensitive information.”

A senior official told Fox News that the government is “confident” the balloon belongs to the People’s Republic of China.

Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL) is sounding the alarm about an unsettling trend of companies with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party buying up U.S. military academies, including the one attended by Donald Trump when he was a teenager

Greg Price @greg_price11
·
LMAO Adam Schiff posted his first TikTok after being removed from the Intelligence committee by Kevin McCarthy.

7:33 PM · Jan 25, 2023 //

Schiff was booted off of the Intel Committee because McCarthy believes he was a security risk and someone not to be trusted with sensitive information. And what does Schiff do? He films a video on a program that has been proven to be Chinese-controlled spyware. It’s as if the California congressman wanted to prove the Speaker’s point.

Also, didn’t the government recently ban the use of TikTok by congressional members (and other government employees)? I guess the out here would be if Schiff was using a personal device, but what kind of judgment does it show to use a Chinese spy app to film a video complaining about being removed from a committee that deals in top-secret information? The answer is that it shows very, very bad judgment.

The Navy Isn’t Prepared To Face The Growing Diesel Submarine Threat

A veteran submarine hunter explains how the proliferation of ever more capable diesel-electric submarines is a major problem for the U.S. Navy.

Louisa Lim’s book, ‘Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong,’ tells the heartbreaking tale of the Chinese takeover of what was one of the world’s freest cities. //

Lim’s book is timely because Beijing has been busy rewriting the history of Hong Kong, emphasizing China’s sovereignty claim of the city since time immemorial. Chinese authorities reportedly will introduce a new history book to Hong Kong schools that denies Hong Kong was ever a British colony. //

Lim’s book helps answer some questions many people, including myself, have, including: Why and how did the British government give up Hong Kong so easily?

Great Britain deserved credit for bringing the rule of law, independent judiciary, and laissez-faire capitalism to Hong Kong. These political and economic systems, combined with the Chinese people’s resilience and industriousness, transformed the once-sleepy fishing village into an international financial center and one of the busiest trading ports within a few decades. However, the British made three big mistakes that sealed Hong Kong’s fate today.

First, the British government failed to institute a democratic political system in Hong Kong. //

The second big mistake was that the British government was naive about the nature of the CCP, which was shocking to me because Hong Kong’s fate was sealed when Margret Thatcher was the prime minister of the U.K., and she was known for standing up to communism. Yet Thatcher let her colleagues and herself be played by cunning CCP officials during their negotiations. //

The third big mistake the British government made was to exclude Hong Kongers from its negotiation with Beijing. Thatcher told the British Parliament that the final agreement was “acceptable to the Hong Kong people.” But the Hong Kong people did not get a say in the matter.

Ethnic Chinese who served as advisers to the Hong Kong governor’s office were shut out of the negotiation despite repeated requests. They warned the British government that without an ethnic Chinese on the British negotiating team, the team “might be missing the nuances of spoken Mandarin.” They also feared that the British negotiating team “simply failed to understand the down-and-dirty nature of haggling with the Chinese.” All of their concerns turned out to be spot on. //

The British government didn’t even organize a public referendum or democratic process to let Hong Kongers vote on the agreement. Lim wrote that in retrospect, she could see how accurate the advice Hong Kong advisers gave was and how they “had pinpointed the problems at every step of the way.” Had the British government involved Hong Kongers from the very beginning, Hong Kong’s demise could have been prevented.

As Taiwan becomes the flash point between the United States and China, it’s foreseeable that the two nations may engage in a negotiation about Taiwan’s future someday. Lim’s book offers some timely and valuable lessons for future U.S. negotiators. Let’s hope they don’t repeat the British government’s mistakes regarding Hong Kong.

As China conducted live-fire drills near Taiwan, the Biden administration announced it would delay a routine U.S. missile test to avoid escalating tensions with China after Pelosi’s visit.

Why was the Biden administration concerned about placating Beijing when Beijing was the one who antagonized the escalation? Why didn’t the Biden administration respond to China’s sanctions on Pelosi and her family by imposing sanctions on PLA generals and their families?

Furthermore, the Biden administration’s inaction has failed to de-escalate the tension in Taiwan Strait. And because of this, last week, Beijing was emboldened to declare that it would extend military drills “indefinitely” before it decided to wind them down shortly after that.

Inaction is the last thing that will deter the PLA from invading Taiwan. If China perceives a consistent gap between the U.S. government’s actions and rhetoric on Taiwan, its military may grow more aggressive. Regardless of the outcome, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan will incur an enormous cost for all parties involved.