quote:
It quickly became obvious in Anchorage, Alaska, last month that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s diplomatic envoys hadn’t come carrying olive branches. Instead they brought a new world view.

As Biden administration officials expected in their first meeting with Chinese counterparts, Yang Jiechi, Mr. Xi’s top foreign-policy aide, and Foreign Minister Wang Yi asked them to roll back Trump-era policies targeting China. Beijing wanted to restore the kind of recurring “dialogue” Washington sees as a waste of time, say U.S. and Chinese officials briefed on the Alaska meeting.

Mr. Yang also delivered a surprise: a 16-minute lecture about America’s racial problems and democratic failings. The objective, say Chinese officials, was to make clear that Beijing sees itself as an equal of the U.S. He also warned Washington against challenging China over a mission Beijing views as sacred—the eventual reunification with Taiwan.

That is a big shift for Chinese leaders, who for decades took care not to challenge the U.S. as the world’s leader and followed the dictum Deng Xiaoping set decades ago: “Keep a low profile and bide your time.” Some senior Chinese officials privately—often sarcastically—called the U.S. Lao Da, or Big Boss.

Now Mr. Xi is reshaping the relationship. As far as he is concerned, China’s time has arrived.

“China can already look at the world on an equal level,” he told the annual legislative sessions in Beijing in early March, a remark widely interpreted in Chinese media as a declaration that China no longer looks up to the U.S.

quote:
The U.S. is committed to helping Taiwan preserve its autonomy under pledges including the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, and the Biden team trumpets its plans to strengthen economic and political links to Taipei. Mr. Xi has made reunification with Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a breakaway province, a big part of his “China Dream” of national revival.

China’s Foreign Ministry says of Mr. Yang’s Anchorage warning: “The Chinese side pointed out that the Taiwan issue is related to China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and China’s core interests.” It adds that “There is no room for compromise.”

quote:
With cameras rolling in Anchorage, Mr. Blinken briefly criticized China’s actions in Hong Kong and Xinjiang and threats against Taiwan. Mr. Yang, a member of the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo, gave his blistering 16-minute rejoinder, which the Chinese officials say was meant to show China’s new world view.

quote:
After rattling off his country’s achievements under Mr. Xi, he said China wouldn’t follow “what is advocated by a small number of countries as the so-called rule-based international order.” He criticized the U.S. as having “deep-seated” human-rights problems and declared that “the U.S. itself doesn’t represent international public opinion.”

quote:
Beamed back to China, Mr. Yang’s lecturing made him a national hero. It also represented a sharp departure from the policy of cooperation with the U.S. that Deng had adopted shortly after the two countries established diplomatic ties. “As we look back, we find that all of those countries that are with the U.S. have become rich,” Deng told aides in 1979, according to official accounts, “while all of those against the U.S. have remained poor. We should be with the U.S.”

quote:
America’s chaotic pandemic response, followed by a summer of racial upheaval and the Jan. 6 Capitol storming, solidified his faith in the Chinese system’s superiority, Chinese officials say. In internal meetings, they say, he compares American democracy to “a sheet of loose sand” and declares that the one-party system allows him to get things done.

With Mr. Biden in the White House, China has continued a hard-line approach, signaling that companies not following Beijing’s rules will lose access to the Chinese market. Swedish clothing brand Hennes & Mauritz AB recently met with a strong social-media rage and consumer boycott in China over its stance against sourcing cotton from Xinjiang. Chinese authorities have restricted military personnel and employees of certain state-owned companies from using electric vehicles made by America’s Tesla Inc., citing national-security risks including concerns about the cars’ cameras. H&M declined to comment. Tesla, which didn’t respond to requests for comment, said last week that its cameras aren’t activated outside North America.

“Nobody has forced them to stay in China,” Mr. Yang said in Anchorage, regarding U.S. companies doing business in China.

quote:
Mr. Wang, the foreign minister, met his Russian peer in late March, prompting the nationalist Chinese newspaper Global Times to headline, “China, Russia to break US hold on ‘world order.’ ” Then he traveled to the Middle East and signed a wide-ranging economic and security agreement with Iran.

First off Blinkin should be fired for taking that shite from the Chinese Ambassadors. It’d be like FDR’s SoS taking that shite from Himmler or Molotov. Trump would have not only fired Pompeo on the spot, but within the hour been on Air Force One to Anchorage to personally light into the Chinese Ambassadors himself.

And yeah, that last paragraph, that should scare you. People always say that there’s no way China and Russia will ally with one another because they hate each other on a personal level. Well guess what China hates all their neighbors, Russia hates all its neighbors, and all of their neighbors hate them both. The point is their interests are completely aligned, so why wouldn’t they form an alliance? It’s not as if the Germans were all that big of fans of Japan either after they wrecked their colonies and did shite so out in the open that it even sickened the Nazis (and think how bad you’ve got to be to do that).

If you’re not perturbed, then you’re simply not paying attention.

This post was edited on 4/12/21 at 2:41 pm