Tag Archives: foreign policy

They’re Only Uighurs

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People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping and his government henchmen are sending their representatives to “sleep with” the wives of Uighurs whose husbands have been interred in the PRC’s concentration camps reeducation locations for the crime of being Muslim.

The excuse for this?

Party officials who are called “relatives” (but not actually related) visit Uighur families every two months, stay for up to a week, and in some reported instances, share a bed with the women, [Radio Free Asia] reported.

Because, says a PRC Government Man,

They help [the families] with their ideology, bringing new ideas. They talk to them about life, during which time they develop feelings for one another.
…
Normally one or two people sleep in one bed, and if the weather is cold, three people sleep together.

Right.  Two on one; the wife is especially helpless.

After all, it’s not like those PRC government men see Uighurs—especially the women—as human beings: they’re just receptacles for those government men’s…fluids.  And with over a million Uighurs locked away, that’s a lot of women available for…comfort service.

Congresswoman Jackie Speier (D, CA) has the right of this one.

It’s difficult to imagine a more intimate form of political violence against an already terrorized minority.  The United States must speak out about the systemized enslavement and attempted cultural obliteration of the Uyghurs.

More than just talk though.  Maybe we, and the world at large, don’t need to be engaging in any sort of economic trade with such a willfully barbaric nation.

Policing the World

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D, HI) had an interesting campaign advertisement op-ed in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal.  One campaign promise she made in it jumped out at me.

A Gabbard presidency would mean the end of trying to police the world….

Who does Gabbard think would police the world if we don’t? Can she really believe that a police-less world would be benign, or that our enemies won’t divide up the policing among themselves explicitly for their benefit and just as explicitly for our detriment?  Or that their squabbling among themselves over the spoils won’t spill over into serious regional or even global conflict?

Doctorings

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And we have to learn about this from a German newspaper.  Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council functionary in the Trump administration, appeared in Congressman and Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff’s (D, CA) Star Chamber earlier.  Among other things, he claimed, on the matter of asking Ukraine to investigate corruption, including Burisma’s and the Bidens’ possible roles in the corruption,

was “inappropriate.” It “had nothing to do with national security,” he said he told [US Ambassador to the EU Gordon] Sondland.

Because, to this NSC staffer, everything looks like a national security thing.  There couldn’t possibly be any other purpose to a suggestion, like, say, a law enforcement thing, where ordinary corruption might involve American citizens.

But here’s the bit that we have to read about in other nations first because the American NLMSM didn’t want to mention it until Congressman and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D, CA) leaked it from Vindman’s official secret testimony:

He [Vindman] added that he had tried to fill in the word “Burisma” which was omitted from the White House’s rough transcript of the telephone call.

Vindman confessed to trying to doctor the transcript of the call. And we’re supposed to believe his testimony.

Aside: there’s nothing “rough” about the transcript; it is a plain transcript, made from notes taken during the telecon and from notes made immediately after it with the express purpose of producing a transcript. That Vindman had access to it for his attempted doctoring is a demonstration that the transcript was circulated among those present at the telecon to confirm its accuracy. Just like a trial court transcript is agreed by both defense and prosecution/plaintiff council.

PRC Personal Savings Rate

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James Areddy had an extensive article on this in a recent Wall Street Journal.  It seems that the personal savings rate of People’s Republic of China’s citizens peaked around 2010 and has been trailing off ever since.  Areddy posited a number of reasons for this, and why it’s likely to continue.  Chief among them is the usual suspect of an increasingly less poor, if not increasingly prosperous, population wishing to live better rather than save more.  Another major reason seems to be the PRC’s one-child policy, lately relaxed legally, but not socially.  With fewer kids in the family, there’s less reason for parents to save against those kids’ future.

I see another reason, though, for the continuation of the fall-off in savings rate, and that continuation running to disastrously low levels, from a national economic perspective.  This is the aging of the PRC’s population.

That aging is driven by a couple of things. One is that folks get old before they die (duh), and today’s PRC population being healthier than yesterday’s, these folks are living longer.  The bookend to this is the shrinking—across generations—of the population of working age citizens.  This stems from that one-child policy, emplaced explicitly to shrink a population that had severe trouble feeding and housing itself and from the continued social lack of desire for more than one child in a family, and from the desire to live better materially today, now that folks are better off (or at least not so bad off).

With fewer folks working relatively to aging and retiring, this means there’ll be less public money to pay for old folks’ retirement (and retired) needs, so the old folks will need to spend their savings even faster than might be the case otherwise.

Another feedback loop likely is inflation.  This will accelerate the fall-off in personal savings. This inflation will be driven by that same shrinking labor force, this time reducing production output—the availability of goods and services—even as spending increases across all age demographics: a classic case of (relatively) too many yuan chasing (relatively) too few goods.

Leverage

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Since so many American businesses—Apple, Alphabet, the NBA, to name a few—put their individual fiscal game ahead of American values, especially regarding Hong Kong and its citizens ongoing struggle for their own liberties (which just happen to lie at the core of our values), here are some thoughts on the fiscal value of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China.

Since 1997, mainland Chinese companies have raised $335 billion by floating in Hong Kong, tapping a broader range of shareholders than they could onshore.
…since the Hong Kong dollar is pegged to its US equivalent, and the city has no capital controls, a listing there can generate hard currency for foreign takeovers and investments. It would be harder to use a Shanghai stock sale for the same goal.

And [emphasis added]

For global investors, Shanghai and Shenzhen have become more accessible. But investors typically prefer Hong Kong’s legal protections, and they have other concerns about mainland markets, including the difficulties of moving money out.

And

Hong Kong is by far the largest offshore center for bond sales by Chinese firms. Companies can borrow for longer than they can onshore and, crucially, can raise funds in hard currency….

And

Hong Kong serves as the main offshore hub for yuan loans, bonds, and trading.

Interestingly [emphasis added],

When it comes to dollar bonds, big state-backed banks and industrial companies even prefer to sell these in Hong Kong…. US deals would be overseen by American regulators and would require greater disclosure.

And

Hong Kong is a preferred location for Chinese and international financiers or business people to conduct transactions because it has a Western-style legal and regulatory system that is seen as fair and nonpolitical.

In sum,

…Hong Kong stands out from its mainland rivals for its rule of law, competent regulators, low taxes, free movement of capital, and use of English.
Neither Shanghai nor [the People’s Republic of] China’s free-trade zones “can really compete with what Hong Kong is and does….”
…
Hong Kong is still [the People’s Republic of] China’s financial window on the world, and the rest of the world’s financial window on [the PRC].

RTWT; there’s more.

Sadly, too many of our major corporations don’t have the moral underpinnings to exercise that leverage.  Apple’s Tim Cook would rather the prestige of sitting as Chairman of a major university in Beijing.  Alphabet would rather work on censorable search engines for the PRC and help develop AI tools for the PRC’s government and People’s Liberation Army than it would work with our own defense establishment on such tools or refuse to support PRC censorship.  And we’ve seen, just in last couple of weeks, how the NBA as a whole, and its individual team staffs and players think their pocket books are more important than the rights of others.