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.

Sina Delenda Est

Next Stop for the Steve Bannon Insurgency: China
By MARK LANDLER

Stephen K. Bannon, the former chief strategist to Trump, views China as the greatest threat to the United States. “A hundred years from now, this is what they’ll remember — what we did to confront China on its rise to world domination,” he said. 

WASHINGTON — Stephen K. Bannon has held court in the Capitol Hill townhouse of Breitbart Media since he packed up his West Wing office last month, meeting with conservative lawmakers, advocating hard-line policies on undocumented immigrants and waging gleeful war on those he considers traitors to the Trump cause.
Now Mr. Bannon is taking his insurgency abroad.
Next week, he plans to travel to Hong Kong to deliver a keynote address at an investor conference, where he will articulate his call for a much tougher American policy toward China. 

CLSA, the Hong Kong brokerage firm that invited Mr. Bannon, is owned by a politically connected Chinese investment bank, Citic Securities.
People close to Mr. Bannon said he met recently with Henry A. Kissinger, the elder statesman who opened a diplomatic channel to China in 1972, to exchange views about the relationship with Beijing. Mr. Bannon said he has read all his books, but none of that swayed him from his preference for confrontation over diplomacy.
The meeting and speech kicks off an effort by Mr. Bannon, who served as Trump’s chief strategist, to influence his former boss on China policy as much as he does on immigration, trade or tax policy. 

Given the lack of strong voices on China in the administration and the inconsistency in its approach, Mr. Bannon believes he can make a difference, though his record when he was inside the White House was mixed.
It is no accident that of all the foreign policy issues he could have chosen, Mr. Bannon gravitated to China, where he once lived and which he now views as the greatest threat to the United States.

“A hundred years from now, this is what they’ll remember — what we did to confront China on its rise to world domination,” he said in an interview, previewing the themes in his speech.
“China right now is Germany in 1933,” Mr. Bannon said. 

“It’s on the cusp. It could go one way or the other. The younger generation is ultranationalistic.”
Mr. Bannon’s combative views on China are no secret to those who listened to Breitbart radio show before the election. 

In March 2016 he declared, “We’re going to war in the South China Sea in five to 10 years.” 

Last month, he told Robert Kuttner, co-founder of the left-leaning journal The American Prospect, “We’re at economic war with China” — one of a number of impolitic observations that hastened his departure from the White House.
But now Mr. Bannon is going to present this worldview to an audience of Chinese investors. 

His speech is likely to attract attention, if not raise eyebrows, at a forum where the past speakers have included Bill Clinton, Sarah Palin, Al Gore, Alan Greenspan and George Clooney. 

Among other things, Mr. Bannon will tell his audience that they made their wealth on the backs of American workers.
“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,” Mr. Bannon declared. 

“The reordering of the economic relationship is the central issue that has to be addressed, and only the U.S. can address it.”
Mr. Trump clearly shares that view. 

He made it a centerpiece of his campaign, and installed Mr. Bannon in an office near his, where he sought out like-minded economist Peter Navarro. 

But Mr. Bannon had as many setbacks as victories on China at the White House.
Shortly after Trump was elected, Mr. Bannon exulted when the president-elect threw in doubt America’s adherence to the “One China” policy. 

But he was undercut a month later when Trump, prodded by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, told Xi Jinping that he would honor the policy.
Mr. Bannon poured his energy into engineering Trump’s trade agenda. 

He cheered when Trump ordered investigations of China’s theft of technology from American companies and its dumping of steel in the world market. 

But he fought constant rear-guard actions against pro-China advisers, who warned Trump not to start a trade war with China at the same time that he needed its cooperation in confronting North Korea.
Trump has suggested that he will go easier on trade if China steps up its pressure on Kim Jong-un. 

Mr. Bannon contends that this is a sucker’s bet: China is stringing along the United States and has no intention of exerting influence on its neighbor.
“If you’re a great power,” he asked, “how come you can’t control the Frankenstein monster you created in North Korea?”
Last weekend, Mr. Bannon said he was thrilled when Trump tweeted that the United States would consider halting trade “with any country that does business with North Korea.” 

The statement was aimed at China, which conducts the lion’s share of trade with the North.
But Trump has assiduously cultivated a relationship with Xi, and his willingness to confront him on this issue is not clear. 

After speaking by phone with the Chinese dictator on Wednesday, he told reporters, “I believe that Xi agrees with me 100 percent” on the threat posed by North Korea. 

There is no evidence, however, that China plans to support Mr. Trump’s call for a cutoff of oil supplies to the North.
For Mr. Bannon, who lived in Shanghai when he ran an online gaming company, the key to understanding China’s motives is to look at its history, specifically the Taiping Rebellion and the Cultural Revolution. 

“The whole thing is about control,” he said. 

“They think that by 2050 or 2075, they will be the hegemonic power.”
“We have to reassert ourselves because we have retreated,” he said. 

“We have to reassert ourselves as the real Asian power: economically, militarily, culturally, politically.”

Han Paranoia

China's Bridge to Nowhere
By Joel Moser 

In the aftermath of the Cold War, the Soviet “Evil Empire” appeared to be more myth than reality—a public relations stunt perpetrated by USSR leadership to appear strong. 

In fact, the pace of Soviet expenditure on its military, at a quarter of its GDP, was unsustainable and its economy was headed to collapse. 

Are we witnessing a similar public relations stunt in China’s plan for world domination via infrastructure development instead of military might?
In its Belt and Road initiative, China has laid out plans to spend as much as US$8 trillion dollars on infrastructure intended to connect the Eurasian land mass as well as Africa to create the 21stCentury equivalent of the Silk Road, reestablishing China as the center of the globe and cementing global economic ties. 

At first look, this is a masterful plan as it proposes to create lasting bonds through transportation and energy links. 

A closer examination raises a series of questions.
First, can China, as big as it is, actually afford this build-up? 

The plan calls for incremental expenditures in an amount close to the total GDP of the country. 

True, China’s GDP will grow over time and the plan does not have very specific timeframes for completion, allowing for affordability pacing. 

However, big-ticket projects tend to grow in cost at a rate far in excess of inflation.
Next, consider the regions and countries intended to be connected by the plan. 

These include some of the most politically complicated states on the planet such as Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, as well as China’s frequently unmanageable neighbor Indonesia where a court in the capital city Jakarta recently convicted its ethnically Chinese former Governor of blasphemy and sentenced him to two years in prison. 

These are nations which are not likely to easily fall in line from the soft power of trade links, and China may come to see investment in these countries as misadventures akin to the United States’ failed attempts to insert itself in the affairs of several South American countries and elsewhere in the heady days after World War II.
Trillions of dollars of cement and steel may be more influential than covert CIA plots, but the United States, other NATO countries and the World Bank have also seen trillions of dollars of infrastructure spending in complicated places around the world quite literally blown up as politics rapidly shifted on the ground.
In the late 1960s through the early 1980s, the United States planed, funded and constructed numerous infrastructure projects, including in some of the very countries that are to be part of the Belt and Road initiative. 

Many were implemented by USAID in Iran, Laos, Syria and Lebanon. 

Through ensuing revolutions and wars, many of these projects, though completed, subsequently were literally destroyed, bombed out of existence.
What these experiences demonstrate is that poured concrete alone will not cement trading routes, trading routes alone will not create economic opportunities and infrastructure development, however massive, is not permanent in the face of civil unrest and political turmoil. 

Big infra assets like bridges, power stations and refineries are often the first targets of precision bombing raids when armed conflicts break out.
In calculating its return on $8 trillion of investment, has China factored in the political risk of violent regime change or civil unrest? 

Furthermore, how are they hedging these massive investments against the risk of disruptive technological shifts such as localized commercial scale 3D printing, advanced distributed solar power generation, or even solar powered air travel that may make heavy land and sea based transportation systems and midstream energy links largely obsolete?
Infrastructure is expensive and there are good reasons that most market driven investors will only put capital into stable countries and into projects with long-term off-take or use agreements. 

A country can make these forms of investment for policy reasons or with longer time horizons, but they are nonetheless subject to the same political and economic risks. 

Presumably China is aware of all of this and must understand how much of a gamble this capital deployment would be.
Why plan such an undertaking if it may be a giant bridge to nowhere? 

Because it plays well politically now, and the fulfillment of the plan will fall to the leaders of the future. 

Because Chinese builders need projects to stay busy at a moment in which the country has overbuilt its own infrastructure and there are few mega projects left to undertake—you can build only so many ghost cities.
Finally, because it’s a show for both internal and external audiences. 

The world has seen wasted infrastructure spending in unstable regions and a seemingly rising power spend itself to death in an effort to project a larger image on the world stage. 

Now it’s China’s turn to make the same mistakes.