Day: November 3, 2021

What Is Going on With China is Not a ‘Cold War’

Chin@Strategy

A new idea is gaining currency among some politicians and policymakers in Washington: The United States is in a Cold War with China. It’s a bad idea — bad on history, bad on politics, bad for our future. The Biden administration has wisely pushed back on the framing. But the president’s actions suggest that his strategy for dealing with China may indeed suffer from Cold War thinking, which locks our minds into the traditional two-dimensional chess model. Competition with China, though, is a three-dimensional game. And if we continue to…

Chinese People Think China Is Popular Overseas. Americans Disagree.

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Advertisement The Carter Center-RIWI published a joint survey of Chinese public opinion earlier this month. The results reveal two significant findings – the first, is that the attitudes of the Chinese public (at least, its netizens) toward the West, specifically the United States, have considerably soured over recent years; the second, is that a vast majority of the Chinese population remains convinced that China’s international reputation is broadly, if not very, favorable. These findings must be situated within the backdrop of two broader trends. The first concerns the worsening perceptions…

China Could Have 1,000 Nuclear Warheads by 2030, Pentagon Says

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WASHINGTON — China is continuing to strengthen its strategic nuclear arsenal and could have 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030, according to a new Defense Department report released Wednesday. The Pentagon’s annual report to Congress on China’s military might estimates that China could have 700 deliverable nuclear warheads by 2027 and 1,000 three years later. In addition, it warns that China has “possibly already established a nascent nuclear triad with the development of a nuclear capable air-launched ballistic missile and improvement of its ground and sea-based nuclear capabilities.” Even with the…

China increasing nuclear arsenal much faster than was thought, Pentagon says

Chin@Strategy

China is expanding its nuclear force much faster than US officials predicted just a year ago, highlighting a broad and accelerating buildup of military muscle designed to enable Beijing to match or surpass US global power by mid-century, according to a new Pentagon report. The number of Chinese nuclear warheads could increase to 700 within six years, the report said, and may top 1,000 by 2030. The report released on Wednesday did not say how many weapons China has today, but a year ago the Pentagon said the number was…

European Steel Plan Shows Biden’s Bid to Merge Climate and Trade Policy

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WASHINGTON — President Biden has promised to use trade policy as a tool to mitigate climate change. This weekend, the administration provided its first look at how it plans to mesh those policy goals, saying the United States and the European Union would try to curb carbon emissions as part of a trade deal covering steel and aluminum. The arrangement, which American and European leaders aim to introduce by 2024, would use tariffs or other tools to encourage the production and trade of metals made with fewer carbon emissions in…

Tennis star accuses Chinese ruling party official of #MeToo abuse

Chin@Strategy

The Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai has apparently accused a former vice-premier of sexual assault, engulfing the highest echelons of Beijing’s ruling Communist party in a #MeToo scandal for the first time. Authorities scrambled to stop the allegations from spreading, with online censors even appearing to block the word “tennis”. In a now-deleted post on one of her social media accounts, Peng, 35, said she and Zhang Gaoli, 75, had an on-off extramarital “relationship” over several years, which she said he tried to keep secret. Peng said Zhang had stopped…

Chinese Tennis Star Accuses Former Top Official of Sexual Assault

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Advertisement Late on Tuesday night, a bombshell dropped on Chinese social media. In a post on Weibo, Peng Shuai, a Chinese tennis star, accused former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli of sexually assaulting her – and then taking her as his mistress for years. It has not been definitively verified whether Peng herself made the post, and the accusations remain unverified as well. But the explosive account broke a major barrier in China’s #MeToo movement by naming a top leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as an offender. The post…

Governments Must Invest in Jobs in Green Economy, Ban Ki-moon Says.

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Global leaders must create jobs in the renewable energy sector so that the costs of transitioning from fossil fuels do not exacerbate economic inequalities, Ban Ki-moon, the former United Nations secretary general, said on Wednesday on the sidelines of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow. “What is absolutely necessary at this time — it is critical now — is for governments to increase their ambition level, not only in clean energy, but creating millions of new green jobs for the people,” Mr. Ban, the U.N. leader from 2007 to 2016,…

China seeks to join the nuclear big league

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Nov 3rd 2021 WASHINGTON, DC WHEN AMERICA and the Soviet Union raced each other to build ever-larger nuclear arsenals during the cold war, China ambled disdainfully. It did not detonate its first nuclear weapon until 1964, kept only a few hundred warheads compared with the tens of thousands piled up by the superpowers, and to this day maintains it will never be the first to use nukes in a war. Now China is sprinting to catch up. In its latest annual assessment, the Pentagon says China’s stockpile of nuclear warheads,…