by Richard Schulman
Ecuador and many countries in Africa are groaning under Chinese debt. They cannot pay this debt back because the world economy has collapsed into severe recession caused by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) lies and delays that turned the local Wuhan virus into a world pandemic. These countries and many others should immediately repudiate Chinese debt.
There is also a growing belief that Xi Jinping, who rules China dictatorially for the CCP, deliberately infected the rest of the world with the Wuhan virus so that China would not be the only country to suffer catastrophic death and economic damage from the epidemic. That would have set back the Beijing elite’s plan to turn the world into Chinese dependencies, like North Korea, Cambodia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Italy under its pro-communist leaders. Instead of apologizing and seeking to make amends for what it did, China’s leaders have doubled down on their lies, denials, and bullying of neighbors.
China’s deadly grip on Ecuador, African countries
“Ecuador is planning to auction off three million of the country’s 8.1 million hectares of pristine Amazonian rainforest to Chinese oil companies,” Business Insider reports, citing the Guardian. “Ecuador owed China more than $7 billion — more than a tenth of its GDP — as of last summer.” Why is Ecuador giving away its strategic assets when it could justifiably repudiate Chinese debt?
Meanwhile, China is Africa’s largest creditor, the Wall Street Journal reports. “An estimated $143 billion of African debt to Chinese lenders has been racked up over two decades of record lending…With Africa’s most poverty-stricken economies pushing for debt relief as they struggle with the fallout from the global coronavirus pandemic…Beijing is worried about setting a precedent for widespread forgiveness.” The only debt relief the Chinese seem willing to concede is that conditioned on a country’s agreeing to sign over its national — usually strategic — assets as collateral. Unless Africa wishes to make China its new colonial master, replacing the earlier Europeans, it should repudiate Chinese debt on a continent-wide basis.
Debt repudiation and lawsuits vs. China appropriate
The US and its allies should encourage immediate unconditional repudiation of African debt to China by way of partial compensation for the damage China caused by knowingly letting the Wuhan virus loose on the world.
Suits by individuals against China would usefully supplement nation-state actions seeking compensation. Realizing this, “Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) introduced a bill on Thursday that would allow Americans to sue China in federal court for ‘death, injury, and economic harm’ caused by the Wuhan Virus,” Breitbart reports.
The bully of Asia
China has earned itself a reputation as the world’s leading bully and bad actor, especially in southeast Asia. Greg Poling, director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, tells The Diplomat that
China hasn’t changed its behavior at all in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The aggressiveness it is currently displaying toward Vietnamese fishing, Malaysian oil and gas operations, and everything in between was also on display six months ago and will presumably be unchanged six months from now. If anything has changed, it is that continuing to put its boot on the necks of Southeast Asian states in the middle of a pandemic leaves observers more scandalized than they otherwise might be.
The latest incident was the sinking of a Vietnamese fishing boat by a China Coast Guard ship near the Paracel islands.
American medical products prevent from leaving
Meanwhile, personal protective equipment manufactured by American companies in China — including 3M and PerkinElmer — “are sitting in warehouses across China unable to receive necessary official clearances,” suppliers and brokers told the Wall Street Journal. Chinese officials say that the delays in granting export clearances are to insure that the exports pass official quality tests. This is nonsense, however. These reputable US manufacturers — unlike China’s many unregulated fly-by-night entities — don’t need CCP party hacks to certify the quality of the products the companies produce. Rather, the Chinese leaders wish to keep the American-made products for their own use or to just make the US suffer, perhaps hoping to discredit President Trump in so doing.
North Korea a Chinese tributary; attempts to make Hong Kong the same
China is also the godfather protecting the bandit nation, North Korea, which could not exist for a month without Chinese imports, exports, and military help, including nuclear weapons and missile assistance. “North Korea has developed increasingly sophisticated hacking capabilities that have enabled it to steal from financial institutions and cryptocurrency exchanges and evade international sanctions, according to a new United Nations report,” reports Michael R. Gordon — the renowned national security correspondent — and Dustin Volz in the April 19th Wall Street Journal.
Yesterday, obviously on orders from Beijing, Hong Kong police arrested 15 pro-democracy activists. The Chinese hope the world is too distracted by its Wuhan pandemic to notice. US and British officials strongly criticized the arrests.
Wuhan virus may have escaped Wuhan lab
Speculation is growing that the Wuhan virus didn’t originate in one of that city’s wet markets but in Wuhan’s supposedly high-level-safety bio-hazards research lab. Suspicion has been heightened by the Chinese government’s forbidding all scientific writing on the origin of the Wuhan virus unless first approved by the central government. Meanwhile, China has re-opened its wet markets, despite international calls for it not to do so.
Government censorship of Wuhan doctors — who tried to warn in December of a dangerous new, human-transmissible pneumonia virus — kept the world ignorant for a month. Despite this, the CCP has doubled down on its efforts to suppress all information not supportive of the pro-Xi-Jinping propaganda and party line. Many Chinese now despite their government for its continuing policy of information suppression, arrests of truth tellers, and blatant lying.
China’s US press and celebrity admirers
Fortunately for the Beijing dictators, they have servile press friends beyond China — for example, at NBC, the Associated Press, and NY Times, which have been uncritically reporting official Chinese “COVID-19” statistics and using the phony statistics to cast US and other countries’ more accurate death and infection statistics in a bad light. China’s fellow-traveling press have been predictably echoed by Hollywood’s Progressive male and bimbo lobby — including Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, Beyonce, Oprah Winfrey, Jennifer Lopez, Elton John, and Lady Gaga. Over the weekend they hosted a benefit for the China-kowtowing World Health Organization (WHO).
New critics
Of course, China is not without its critics. Steven Mosher’s op ed in the April 18th NY Post is headlined “With China’s economy on life support, it’s time to turn off the ventilator.” Mosher writes:
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is said to be furious with China as he recovers from the coronavirus, which nearly killed him earlier this month. Not only may he shut out China’s state-controlled electronic firm, Huawei, from the UK’s 5G networks for good, he has promised that there will be other consequences for China’s failure to share accurate and timely data on the deadly virus.
Mosher also reports that “Japan’s government has just announced that it will start paying its companies to relocate out of China” and opines that “For the sake of our economic well-being and national security, America has long needed a ‘hard decoupling’ from China.”
Xi Jinping wants a world of tributaries not sovereign nations
H.R. McMaster, the retired US Army lieutenant general and former National Security Adviser, writes in The Atlantic that
The [Chinese Communist] party’s leaders believe they have a narrow window of strategic opportunity to strengthen their rule and revise the international order in their favor—before China’s economy sours, before the population grows old, before other countries realize that the party is pursuing national rejuvenation at their expense, and before unanticipated events such as the coronavirus pandemic expose the vulnerabilities the party created in the race to surpass the United States and realize the China dream. The party has no intention of playing by the rules associated with international law, trade, or commerce. China’s overall strategy relies on co-option and coercion at home and abroad, as well as on concealing the nature of China’s true intentions. What makes this strategy potent and dangerous is the integrated nature of the party’s efforts across government, industry, academia, and the military.
If countries in Africa or elsewhere, such as Ecuador and Sri Lanka repudiate Chinese debt, it will benefit both their own people’s survival and the resistance against China’s lawlessness. The US should do all it can to encourage such repudiations if China doesn’t have the good grace to forgive these debts in toto on their own.
Hat tips to FQ, LF, Eaglebeak
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