Xitler Chinazism

Steve Bannon compares China to 1930s Germany and says US must confront Beijing now
By Benjamin Haas in Hong Kong

Steve Bannon has compared China to 1930s Germany, warning the country could go down the same dark path if the US fails to challenge its rise.
“A hundred years from now, this is what they’ll remember — what we did to confront China on its rise to world domination,” Bannon told the New York Times.
“China right now is Germany in 1933,” he said. 

“It’s on the cusp. It could go one way or the other. The younger generation is ultranationalistic.”
Donald Trump’s former senior White House aide is preparing to kick off a global anti-China crusade and the former White House chief strategist has called himself a “street fighter”, setting his sights on his next opponent: China. 

Bannon is convinced the US and China are destined for open conflict and has lambasted the country on everything from trade to intellectual property to North Korea ahead of speech in Hong Kong on Tuesday.
“China’s model for the past 25 years, it’s based on investment and exports,” he said. 

“Who financed that? The American working class and middle class. You can’t understand Brexit or the 2016 events unless you understand that China exported their deflation, they exported their excess capacity.”
“It’s not sustainable,” Bannon added. 

“The reordering of the economic relationship is the central issue that has to be addressed, and only the US can address it.”
Bannon left his position at the White House last month and said he would be “going to war for Trump against his opponents”. 

During his short tenure at Trump’s side, Bannon wielded significant influence on immigration and tax reform efforts by pulling the president to the right, and he will now seek to shape policy on China.

He has returned to leading Breitbart news, a far right website popular among many Trump supporters.
Bannon will be speaking at a conference hosted by CLSA, a unit of Citic Securities, China’s largest state-owned brokerage, and his speech will focus on “American economic nationalism and the populist revolt and Asia,” according to a CLSA spokeswoman. 

“He’s the man of the moment.”
“Donald Trump, for 30 years, has singled out China as the biggest single problem we have on the world stage,” Bannon said in an interview on CBS just days before his Hong Kong speech.
“I want China to stop appropriating our technology. China, through forced technology transfer and through stealing our technology, is cutting out the beating heart of American innovation.
“We’re not at economic war with China, China is at economic war with us.”
He admonished officials in George W Bush’s administration for their trade policies, accusing them of being weak.
Bannon will now take his fight to Chinese soil, speaking to a room filled with investors who owe much of their fortunes to China’s economic rise. 

Past speakers at the conference include Bill Clinton, Al Gore and George Clooney.
Bannon also echoed Trump on US strategy in reining in North Korea’s nuclear program, saying China was the key in dealing with the isolated state.
“If you’re a great power, how come you can’t control the Frankenstein monster you created in North Korea?” he asked in the interview with the New York Times.
“The solution to Korea runs through Beijing and we have to engage Beijing,” Bannon said in the CBS interview. 

“[North Korea] is a client state of China.”
Bannon said the US should consider “doubling down” on efforts to pressure China to act through a host of measures including sanctions, restricting access to US capital markets and penalising Chinese financial institutions.
“We have tremendous leverage to force China,” he said.

Bannon previously lived in Shanghai where he ran an online gaming company, but returned to the US in 2008. 

He has long been convinced the US is headed for a major confrontation with China.
“We’re going to war in the South China Sea in five to 10 years,” he said in March 2016 on a Breitbart podcast. 

“There’s no doubt about that.
Bannon was encouraged when Trump, before he was sworn into office, spoke directly with Taiwan’s president on the phone, infuriating China. 

China considers the self-ruled island a breakaway province, and Trump later bowed to pressure from son-in-law Jared Kushner, telling Xi Jinping the US would honourthe “One China” principle.

Die Endlösung der Hanfrage

The dark side of China’s national renewal
The race-based ideas of the country’s leaders have unwelcome historical echoes
By Jamil Anderlini

Examples of the west ceding global leadership seem to have become a weekly occurrence. 

In the vacuum left behind it is natural to look for a replacement and for many, including the mandarins in Beijing, China appears to be the most credible.
But how much do we know about the kind of global leader China wants to be? 

The best place to start is with the stated intentions of the country’s leaders. 

On assuming the mantle of the ruling Communist party’s paramount leader in 2012, Xi Jinping declared it his mission to realise the “China Dream”, which he defined as the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, according to official translations.
This phrase has been repeated ad nauseam since then and has come to underpin and justify everything China does. 

Building a new silk road to Europe, rapid expansion of the People’s Liberation Army and militarising artificial islands in disputed waters in the South China Sea — all are part of the glorious task of rejuvenation.
To an English-speaking ear, rejuvenation has positive connotations and all nations have the right to rejuvenate themselves through peaceful efforts.
But the official translation of this crucial slogan is deeply misleading. 

In Chinese it is “Zhonghua minzu weida fuxing” and the important part of the phrase is “Zhonghua minzu” — the “Chinese nation” according to party propaganda. 

A more accurate, although not perfect, translation would be the “Chinese race”.
That is certainly how it is interpreted in China. 

The concept technically includes all 56 official ethnicities, including Tibetans, Muslim Uighurs and ethnic Koreans, but is almost universally understood to mean the majority Han ethnic group, who make up more than 90 per cent of the population.
The most interesting thing about Zhonghua minzu is that it very deliberately and specifically incorporates anyone with Chinese blood anywhere in the world, no matter how long ago their ancestors left the Chinese mainland.
“The Chinese race is a big family and feelings of love for the motherland, passion for the homeland, are infused in the blood of every single person with Chinese ancestry,” asserted Li Keqiang in a recent speech.
This concept is reflected in Hong Kong where any recent arrival who can convince the authorities they are at least part “Chinese” can get citizenship. 

Meanwhile, people of Indian or white British descent whose families have lived in the territory for over a century will never be granted full citizenship rights.
Some theoreticians in Beijing even argue the modern idea of the sovereign nation state is an illegitimate western invention that contradicts the traditional Chinese notion of “all under heaven”, with the Chinese emperor at the centre and power radiating out from the Forbidden City to every corner of the earth.
Race-based ideas of national rejuvenation and manifest destiny have deep and uncomfortable echoes in 20th-century history and earlier European colonial expansion. 

That is why Communist party translators have opted for the misleading official translation of “nation” rather than “race”.
For many in the Chinese diaspora this linguistic trick does nothing to ease their discomfort as they are increasingly called on to contribute to the “great rejuvenation” regardless of their nationality or attitudes towards the ruling Communist party. 

Li said it was the duty of all people of Chinese descent to help achieve the investment, technological development and trade goals of the People’s Republic of China.
He said they are also required to promote traditional Chinese culture (as defined by the Communist party) all over the world and to unwaveringly oppose Taiwan’s independence.
In exchange for compliance, the party offers the prospect of belonging to the “great family” of the Chinese race as well as a chance to participate in the country’s continued economic boom. 

But those who reject their filial duty to the Communist party risk being labelled “race traitors”, vilified within expatriate communities and banned from visiting mainland China.
For countries in China’s own neighbourhood the rhetoric of rejuvenation has starker implications. Under past dynasties and emperors large swaths of their current territory were conquered and controlled by China.
The logic of China’s great rejuvenation is essentially revanchist and assumes the country is still a long way from regaining its rightful level of power, influence and even territory.
The dangerous question for the rest of the world is at what point China will feel it has reached peak rejuvenation and what that will look like for everyone who is not included in the great family of the Chinese race.

Freedom Fighter

He Called Xi Jinping ‘Xitler’ on Twitter. Now He Faces Prison.

By CHRIS BUCKLEY

BEIJING — From his hometown in northeast China, Kwon Pyong used the internet to mock and criticize the nation’s rulers, including posting a selfie in which he wore a T-shirt that likened Xi Jinping to Hitler.
But Mr. Kwon, an ethnic Korean who studied in America, disappeared into police custody last September, soon after he shared on Twitter a picture of the T-shirt featuring scabrous names for Mr. Xi, including “Xitler.” 

And on Wednesday Mr. Kwon faced trial on a charge of “inciting subversion,” said his two former defense lawyers, who were abruptly dismissed from the case days before the trial.
Mr. Kwon’s fate showed that even crude online posts about China’s rulers can lead to a prison term these days, Liang Xiaojun, one of the dismissed lawyers, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. The Communist Party authorities are especially sensitive about protecting Xi's image, and comparisons with the Nazi dictator seem sure to anger them.

“Before, there were cases of people like Liu Xiaobo tried for subversion for long commentaries and essays, but now even short comments on Weibo and Twitter can be treated as inciting subversion of state power,” Mr. Liang said. 

“That point is a change from before. There are other cases like it, including ones that haven’t come to trial yet.”

Weibo is China’s equivalent of Twitter, a popular platform for short comments shared with followers.
But Mr. Kwon, 28, mostly aired his views on Twitter and Facebook, which are both inaccessible in China, except for people with the knowledge and tools to burrow under a wall of online censorship.
“Let’s work together and topple this invisible wall,” Mr. Kwon said in the Twitter post that showed him in the T-shirt mocking the Chinese dictator. 

Mr. Kwon’s Chinese name is Quan Ping, but online he preferred to use his Korean name, and on Twitter he described himself as a “perpetual student, citizen, dedicated to overturning communism.”
The indictment against Mr. Kwon said the charge was based on 70 or more comments, images and video that he shared on Twitter and his Facebook page, Mr. Liang said. 

The comments and images “slandered and insulted state power and the socialist system,” the prosecutors charged, according to the Human Rights Campaign in China, an advocacy group that has followed his case.
But Mr. Kwon’s lawyers said they did not know which ones were classified as subversive and did not know whether the picture of the T-shirt was one of them because officials denied their requests to see Mr. Kwon and the case files. 

They also disputed the claim that such criticism amounted to subversion.
The two lawyers hired by Mr. Kwon’s parents were excluded from defending him in court days before the trial started, when a judge demanded extra paperwork and then Mr. Kwon’s father said their services were no longer needed.
“A judge from the court told us that we needed to provide a letter of introduction from our local bureau of justice” in Beijing, Zhang Lei, who was Mr. Kwon’s other defense attorney, said by telephone. 

“That’s an impossible request and outside the bounds of the law. It’s an unlawful and unreasonable demand.”
Mr. Kwon embodies a phenomenon that worries the Chinese communists: young people, exposed to foreign ideas, sometimes through study abroad, who feel free to criticize the government, Mr. Liang said.
“He’s from a younger generation that’s absorbed ideas about democracy and freedom,” he said. 

“They have a clearer spirit of opposition.”
In January of last year, Zhang Haitao, an activist in his 40s, was sentenced by a court in far western China to 19 years in prison on charges of “inciting subversion” through his writings on the internet and of illegally providing information abroad.
Mr. Kwon studied aerospace engineering at Iowa State University but worked for the family trade business after finishing his studies in 2014, Mr. Liang said. 

Yanbian, the city where Mr. Kwon lives and stood trial, is a hub for trade between China and North Korea, and South Korean businesses have also invested there, partly because of its ethnic Korean population.
But in his spare time, Mr. Kwon’s thoughts turned to the wider world. 

He often sent messages criticizing the Chinese government’s censorship and political controls and voicing support for dissidents and other banned causes. 

In one of his Twitter posts, he discussed being told to “drink tea,” a popular Chinese euphemism for being questioned by security officials.
“If I have to drink tea again, I won’t be shy and nervous,” he wrote on Twitter in September. 

“I’ll very clearly declare my views, as bright as a banner opposing the Communist Party. That’s my attitude. I won’t seek out trouble, but if it comes to me, I’ll live with it.”
But trouble came to Mr. Kwon that month, after he posted a picture of the provocative T-shirt and then, according to later accounts from overseas human rights groups, told friends that he would wear the T-shirt in a show of protest on Oct. 1, China’s National Day.
On Sept. 30, Mr. Kwon sent a message to friends, “There’s trouble,” and then he disappeared, according to the Human Rights Campaign in China.
His family later learned that he had been taken away by the police. 

Officials had told his parents that Mr. Kwon could expect a prison sentence of one and a half years, as long as he dropped Mr. Liang and Mr. Zhang as his lawyers, Mr. Zhang said. 

Mr. Kwon’s parents initially resisted that demand but on Monday told the lawyers that they were no longer needed.
The court did not give a verdict after the one-day trial, and Mr. Kwon’s former lawyers were unsure when it would announce a decision. 

Officials at the Yanbian Intermediate People’s Court refused to comment on the trial, and Mr. Kwon’s mother, Li Lianhua, told Radio Free Asia that she did not want to say anything.
“The authorities were insistent that he plead guilty,” Mr. Liang said. 

“He’s been under all kinds of pressure.”