"The “Two Sessions” are little more than a political ritual, since neither the NPC nor CPPCC have much real power." The NPC is far more powerful, both constitutionally and functionally, than the US Congress. The US Congress is a rubber stamp, as can be seen by their voting for the Patriot Act (which ended all civil liberties) without even reading–let alone debating–it.
"China is ranked 177 out of 180 countries and regions in the Reporters without Borders’ 2020 World Press Freedom Index." RWB is owned by Western private media owners. Independent polls by Edelman and Pew show that China's media are the most trusted on earth–even more than second-place Singapore's.
"US military expenditure grew by 5.3 per cent in 2019 to a total of $732 billion in 2019 while China’s grew by 5.1 per cent in 2019 to $261 billion". Adjusted for industry-specific PPP, China outspends the US on defense. The result is that the PLAN is bigger than the USN and is armed with much more powerful weapons (its more accurate missiles outrange and out-punch American missiles).
Thanks, Godfree, for these comments. Let's just agree to disagree on the first two items. On the third, yes PPP is important, but even then China would not be outspending the US, unless one adopts some non-conventional definition of spending in the context of military expenditure.
I don't think PLAN is as powerful as USN, at least not according to our recent study which looks at this across a spectrum of metrics. But the latter is stretched with global responsibilities whereas PLAN can focus in the region.
Our media insist that China’s economy is ‘the second-largest on earth’ when even the CIA admits that it’s thirty percent bigger[1]. This means, inter alia, that China’s defense budget is thirty percent bigger than we imagine and, since her economy grows three times faster than ours, her defense spending will, in any case, equal ours eight years hence.
But PPP figures are only an average of all prices and fail to reflect the fact that Chinese defense dollars buy almost fifty-percent more than American defense dollars. In other words, China’s defense spending has already surpassed ours by a considerable margin.
China also outspends us by 300% on R&D and much leading-edge research is military in nature but Beijing ensures that all of its discoveries are quickly exploited by the PLA.
Beijing owns the defense contractors so saves on lobbying, bribes, profit-taking, rent-seeking, waste, redundancy, overpaid boards and executives, politically-driven decisions, and more.
China is free to make consistently rational decisions about defense acquisitions. Demobilize a million troops? Done. Shift resources to the Rocket Force? Done. Recruit the entire Merchant Marine? Done.
Beijing’s Military-Civil Fusion is a force multiplier that saves a bundle. China has three sea forces, each a subcomponent of its Armed Forces: the PLA Navy (PLAN), China Coast Guard (CCG), and the People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia (PAFMM). Each has the world’s most ships in its category and all operate in concert under unified command and control. The first line of defense, the Maritime Militia,[3a] has 180,000 ocean-going fishing boats and four thousand merchant marine freighters–some towing passive sonar detectors. Crewed by a million experienced sailors, they transmit detailed information about every warship on the world’s oceans twenty-four hours a day. Shore bases fuse their reports with automated transmissions from Beidou positioning, navigation and timing satellites and provide real time data to reporting specialists, xinxiyuan, trained in target information collection and identification, who operate ‘vessel management platforms’ that collate, format and forward actionable information up the PLAN command chain. Shoreside, eight million coastal reservists train constantly in seamanship, emergency ship repairs, anti-air missile defense, light weapons and naval sabotage.
Technology contributes to cost-effectiveness and capability enhancement: China, the world leader in chemistry, math, computer science, and engineering, has applied its chemistry expertise to propellants and explosives. All its missiles, from air-to-air to ICBMs, outrange ours by fifty- to one-hundred percent and their warheads doubtless pack a superior punch.
Commonality Saves Billions. The fabled DF-21D ‘Carrier Killer’ is a repurposed IRBM the PLAN uses to loft many of the missiles footnoted below and, by mass producing them, reduces their cost to a fraction of ours while affording a mind-numbing[2] variety.
Mass Produced Warships. The PLAN launched seventeen warships in 2017 and nineteen last year, using a common approach to manufacturing while progressively cutting costs and improving each unit–sometimes based on radioed feedback from trialling ships. Their new submarine factory, the largest such facility on earth, produces six subs simultaneously, reducing construction costs to a fraction of ours. If the Chinese can build nuclear power plants for 35% of our cost, which they do, they can certainly produce cruisers like the Type 55, the most powerful surface combatant afloat, for half the cost of our Ticonderoga class.
The PLAN spends solely for defense. Defense. In 2001, anti-American terrorists with global reach were found in only one or two countries. Today we are fighting terrorists in eighty nations at a cost of two-thirds of the discretionary budget and leaving little for productive investment–or even innovative weapon systems. The GWOT has cost $6.4 trillion, including veterans’ care and we are still garrisoning Germany and Japan, Korea, Afghanistan, and Iraq. At our insistence, China built exactly one supply base, at Djibouti, which also anchors its massive (compared to our non-existent) development program for that country while we man and supply foreign bases in eight hundred locations.
If China knocked out all our foreign bases, were we to strike a mainland target China could (and, on past form, would) strike American mainland targets with equal ease. The PLARF can destroy every American city in 48 minutes and its missiles are much bigger, faster, and carry more explosive power.
The PLAN has more ships and the ships have more weapons and the weapons are more powerful (longer range, more accurate, higher explosive power) than the USN weapons = 'more powerful.'
There you are! Thought for a while that the propaganda department might have laid you off, what with the economic consequences of the outbreak and all.
Ads hominems like yours are more than just an insult. They're insults used as if they were arguments or evidence in support of a conclusion.
Verbally attacking people proves nothing about the truth or falsity of their claims. This can take the form of saying “Claim X is false because the person making it is an idiot.” But it can also take the form of “Claim X is false because the person making it is a propagandist,” or “Claim X is false because the person making it is a conspiracy theorist.
Why not refute my claims with contrary evidence? Or pour yourself a big, hot mug of STFU?
Fine. I apologize for being uncourteous and shall give you the benefit of an explanation:
I am willing to give anyone a portion of my time and effort according to what I believe they have earned for themselves, "Mr. Godfree". For instance, if ever given the chance, I would willingly forfeit the opportunity to engage in discussion with Donald Trump, as I hold his sincerity in doubt. Although your persistence and meticulousness is admirable, your consistently uncritical and defensive attitude with regards to China ultimately signals the same sort of insincerity to me. Let's say your comparisons between the NPC and the US Congress and between press freedom indices and media trust surveys, as well as your previous scathing rebuke of Ren Zhiqiang, are all suspiciously farfetched. In fact, you have thus far so convinced me that someone is paying for your comments that I am almost on the verge of offering to eat my briefs on live stream if you could produce counter-evidence.
P.S. Nice to see "the hot mug of STFU" again. I thought it had gone out of fashion ten years ago.
The only Westerners who get paid for writing about China are those who lie about it, as our journalists have done for generations. The Chinese government has better things to do with its money, alas. Carl Bernstein[1] revealed that more than four hundred American journalists and virtually every major US media outlet–including ABC, NBC, the AP, UPI, and Reuters–carried out assignments for the CIA. The CIA’s own Victor Marchetti[2] testified that the Agency spent a quarter billion dollars annually on NGOs like The Asia Foundation, for “Anti-communist academicians to disseminate a negative vision of mainland China[3].” Udo Ulfkotte[4], Editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, says no significant European journalist in, including himself, is free of CIA influence.
Publishers add their own disinformation[5], says Ann Lee[6], “A reporter and friend of Michael Massing[7] who worked at the Beijing office of The Wall Street Journal told him that the editors in Washington regularly changed material information and opinions in his articles. Given the twelve-hour time difference, by the time his stories went to press in the West, the editors had replaced all the Chinese interviews with statements from American talking heads who work at think tanks promoting anti-China perspectives.”
As to comparisons between the NPC and the US Congress, how much do you know about their very different roles?
As for press freedom indices and media trust surveys, did you bother googling them, or do you prefer the Fox News narrative?
The Edelman Corporation has been conducting global institutional trust surveys for decades. Here's their most recent media trust ranking: https://i.imgur.com/Xrws2Aq.jpg
___________________________________________
[1] “The CIA and the Media: How America’s Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up.” Carl Bernstein. Rolling Stone, 1977.
[2] The CIA and the cult of intelligence – 1976. by V. Marchetti. (It is the first book the US Government ever went to court to censor before its publication).
[3] Some of those writings resurfaced in 2017 when China’s censor asked Cambridge University Press to retract three hundred journal articles about a non-existent massacre in Tiananmen Square. Claiming academic freedom, Cambridge refused and the censor yielded.
[4] Gekaufte Journalisten (Bought Journalists), Udo Ulfkotte. Kopp Verlag. 2014. The English language edition, Journalists For Hire: How The CIA Buys The News, has been suppressed.
[5] CIA’s Mockingbirds and Ruling Class Journalists. New America.Tuesday, 25 April 2017
[6] What the U.S. Can Learn from China: An Open-Minded Guide to Treating Our Greatest Competitor as Our Greatest Teacher, by Ann Lee, 2012
[7] Michael Massing, former editor, The Columbia Journalism Review.
Good summary. A few notes:
"The “Two Sessions” are little more than a political ritual, since neither the NPC nor CPPCC have much real power." The NPC is far more powerful, both constitutionally and functionally, than the US Congress. The US Congress is a rubber stamp, as can be seen by their voting for the Patriot Act (which ended all civil liberties) without even reading–let alone debating–it.
"China is ranked 177 out of 180 countries and regions in the Reporters without Borders’ 2020 World Press Freedom Index." RWB is owned by Western private media owners. Independent polls by Edelman and Pew show that China's media are the most trusted on earth–even more than second-place Singapore's.
"US military expenditure grew by 5.3 per cent in 2019 to a total of $732 billion in 2019 while China’s grew by 5.1 per cent in 2019 to $261 billion". Adjusted for industry-specific PPP, China outspends the US on defense. The result is that the PLAN is bigger than the USN and is armed with much more powerful weapons (its more accurate missiles outrange and out-punch American missiles).
Thanks, Godfree, for these comments. Let's just agree to disagree on the first two items. On the third, yes PPP is important, but even then China would not be outspending the US, unless one adopts some non-conventional definition of spending in the context of military expenditure.
I don't think PLAN is as powerful as USN, at least not according to our recent study which looks at this across a spectrum of metrics. But the latter is stretched with global responsibilities whereas PLAN can focus in the region.
Our media insist that China’s economy is ‘the second-largest on earth’ when even the CIA admits that it’s thirty percent bigger[1]. This means, inter alia, that China’s defense budget is thirty percent bigger than we imagine and, since her economy grows three times faster than ours, her defense spending will, in any case, equal ours eight years hence.
https://i.imgur.com/0gxGhzx.jpg
But PPP figures are only an average of all prices and fail to reflect the fact that Chinese defense dollars buy almost fifty-percent more than American defense dollars. In other words, China’s defense spending has already surpassed ours by a considerable margin.
China also outspends us by 300% on R&D and much leading-edge research is military in nature but Beijing ensures that all of its discoveries are quickly exploited by the PLA.
https://i.imgur.com/FRb0Lgk.jpg
Beijing owns the defense contractors so saves on lobbying, bribes, profit-taking, rent-seeking, waste, redundancy, overpaid boards and executives, politically-driven decisions, and more.
China is free to make consistently rational decisions about defense acquisitions. Demobilize a million troops? Done. Shift resources to the Rocket Force? Done. Recruit the entire Merchant Marine? Done.
Beijing’s Military-Civil Fusion is a force multiplier that saves a bundle. China has three sea forces, each a subcomponent of its Armed Forces: the PLA Navy (PLAN), China Coast Guard (CCG), and the People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia (PAFMM). Each has the world’s most ships in its category and all operate in concert under unified command and control. The first line of defense, the Maritime Militia,[3a] has 180,000 ocean-going fishing boats and four thousand merchant marine freighters–some towing passive sonar detectors. Crewed by a million experienced sailors, they transmit detailed information about every warship on the world’s oceans twenty-four hours a day. Shore bases fuse their reports with automated transmissions from Beidou positioning, navigation and timing satellites and provide real time data to reporting specialists, xinxiyuan, trained in target information collection and identification, who operate ‘vessel management platforms’ that collate, format and forward actionable information up the PLAN command chain. Shoreside, eight million coastal reservists train constantly in seamanship, emergency ship repairs, anti-air missile defense, light weapons and naval sabotage.
Technology contributes to cost-effectiveness and capability enhancement: China, the world leader in chemistry, math, computer science, and engineering, has applied its chemistry expertise to propellants and explosives. All its missiles, from air-to-air to ICBMs, outrange ours by fifty- to one-hundred percent and their warheads doubtless pack a superior punch.
Commonality Saves Billions. The fabled DF-21D ‘Carrier Killer’ is a repurposed IRBM the PLAN uses to loft many of the missiles footnoted below and, by mass producing them, reduces their cost to a fraction of ours while affording a mind-numbing[2] variety.
Mass Produced Warships. The PLAN launched seventeen warships in 2017 and nineteen last year, using a common approach to manufacturing while progressively cutting costs and improving each unit–sometimes based on radioed feedback from trialling ships. Their new submarine factory, the largest such facility on earth, produces six subs simultaneously, reducing construction costs to a fraction of ours. If the Chinese can build nuclear power plants for 35% of our cost, which they do, they can certainly produce cruisers like the Type 55, the most powerful surface combatant afloat, for half the cost of our Ticonderoga class.
The PLAN spends solely for defense. Defense. In 2001, anti-American terrorists with global reach were found in only one or two countries. Today we are fighting terrorists in eighty nations at a cost of two-thirds of the discretionary budget and leaving little for productive investment–or even innovative weapon systems. The GWOT has cost $6.4 trillion, including veterans’ care and we are still garrisoning Germany and Japan, Korea, Afghanistan, and Iraq. At our insistence, China built exactly one supply base, at Djibouti, which also anchors its massive (compared to our non-existent) development program for that country while we man and supply foreign bases in eight hundred locations.
If China knocked out all our foreign bases, were we to strike a mainland target China could (and, on past form, would) strike American mainland targets with equal ease. The PLARF can destroy every American city in 48 minutes and its missiles are much bigger, faster, and carry more explosive power.
The PLAN has more ships and the ships have more weapons and the weapons are more powerful (longer range, more accurate, higher explosive power) than the USN weapons = 'more powerful.'
There you are! Thought for a while that the propaganda department might have laid you off, what with the economic consequences of the outbreak and all.
Ads hominems like yours are more than just an insult. They're insults used as if they were arguments or evidence in support of a conclusion.
Verbally attacking people proves nothing about the truth or falsity of their claims. This can take the form of saying “Claim X is false because the person making it is an idiot.” But it can also take the form of “Claim X is false because the person making it is a propagandist,” or “Claim X is false because the person making it is a conspiracy theorist.
Why not refute my claims with contrary evidence? Or pour yourself a big, hot mug of STFU?
Fine. I apologize for being uncourteous and shall give you the benefit of an explanation:
I am willing to give anyone a portion of my time and effort according to what I believe they have earned for themselves, "Mr. Godfree". For instance, if ever given the chance, I would willingly forfeit the opportunity to engage in discussion with Donald Trump, as I hold his sincerity in doubt. Although your persistence and meticulousness is admirable, your consistently uncritical and defensive attitude with regards to China ultimately signals the same sort of insincerity to me. Let's say your comparisons between the NPC and the US Congress and between press freedom indices and media trust surveys, as well as your previous scathing rebuke of Ren Zhiqiang, are all suspiciously farfetched. In fact, you have thus far so convinced me that someone is paying for your comments that I am almost on the verge of offering to eat my briefs on live stream if you could produce counter-evidence.
P.S. Nice to see "the hot mug of STFU" again. I thought it had gone out of fashion ten years ago.
The only Westerners who get paid for writing about China are those who lie about it, as our journalists have done for generations. The Chinese government has better things to do with its money, alas. Carl Bernstein[1] revealed that more than four hundred American journalists and virtually every major US media outlet–including ABC, NBC, the AP, UPI, and Reuters–carried out assignments for the CIA. The CIA’s own Victor Marchetti[2] testified that the Agency spent a quarter billion dollars annually on NGOs like The Asia Foundation, for “Anti-communist academicians to disseminate a negative vision of mainland China[3].” Udo Ulfkotte[4], Editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, says no significant European journalist in, including himself, is free of CIA influence.
Publishers add their own disinformation[5], says Ann Lee[6], “A reporter and friend of Michael Massing[7] who worked at the Beijing office of The Wall Street Journal told him that the editors in Washington regularly changed material information and opinions in his articles. Given the twelve-hour time difference, by the time his stories went to press in the West, the editors had replaced all the Chinese interviews with statements from American talking heads who work at think tanks promoting anti-China perspectives.”
As to comparisons between the NPC and the US Congress, how much do you know about their very different roles?
As for press freedom indices and media trust surveys, did you bother googling them, or do you prefer the Fox News narrative?
The Edelman Corporation has been conducting global institutional trust surveys for decades. Here's their most recent media trust ranking: https://i.imgur.com/Xrws2Aq.jpg
___________________________________________
[1] “The CIA and the Media: How America’s Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up.” Carl Bernstein. Rolling Stone, 1977.
[2] The CIA and the cult of intelligence – 1976. by V. Marchetti. (It is the first book the US Government ever went to court to censor before its publication).
[3] Some of those writings resurfaced in 2017 when China’s censor asked Cambridge University Press to retract three hundred journal articles about a non-existent massacre in Tiananmen Square. Claiming academic freedom, Cambridge refused and the censor yielded.
[4] Gekaufte Journalisten (Bought Journalists), Udo Ulfkotte. Kopp Verlag. 2014. The English language edition, Journalists For Hire: How The CIA Buys The News, has been suppressed.
[5] CIA’s Mockingbirds and Ruling Class Journalists. New America.Tuesday, 25 April 2017
[6] What the U.S. Can Learn from China: An Open-Minded Guide to Treating Our Greatest Competitor as Our Greatest Teacher, by Ann Lee, 2012
[7] Michael Massing, former editor, The Columbia Journalism Review.