VOLUME ONE

献给中国和中国人民的爱
 ABOUT THE AUHTOR

Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles
posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more
than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry
Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held
senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an
international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at
Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to
senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing
a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the
contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China
Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).

His full archive can be seen at

https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/+https://www.moonofshanghai.com/

He can be contacted at:

[email protected]
Other works by this Author

NATIONS BUILT ON LIES — VOLUME 1 — How the US

Became Rich

NATIONS BUILT ON LIES — VOLUME 2 — Life in a

Failed State

Nations Built on Lies — VOLUME 3 — The

Branding of America

Democracy –The Most Dangerous Religion

Essays on America

Filling the Void

Police State America Volume One

Police State America Volume Two

PROPAGANDA and THE MEDIA

BERNAYS AND PROPAGANDA

WHAT WE ARE NOT TOLD

The Jewish Hasbara in All its Glory

Kamila Valieva
 Contents

Chapter 1 -- History of Chinese Inventions

Chapter 2 -- Nüshu (女书)

Chapter 3 -- China’s High-Speed Trains. America, Where are You?

Chapter 4 -- Chinese and American Mobile Phone Systems

Chapter 5 -- China’s YiWu: Business Models You’ve Never Even

Heard of

Chapter 6 -- From Shanghai to Chongqing: The World’s Most

Expensive Railway

Chapter 7 -- Giving things names in the West and in China

Chapter 8 -- A Brief Introduction to Tibet

Chapter 9 -- Understanding China

Chapter 10 -- Some Things You Should Maybe Know About China

Chapter 11 -- Chinese Criminal Confessions

Chapter 12 -- DEALING WITH DEMONS

 Chapter 1
History of Chinese Inventions. The
Present and the Future.

China as a nation has the longest and by far the most vast record of
inventions in the history of the world. It is now reliably estimated that more
than 60% of all the knowledge existing in the world today originated in
China, a fact swept under the carpet by the West.
Joseph Needham, a British biochemist, scientific historian, and professor
at Cambridge University, is widely rated as one of the most outstanding
intellectuals of the 20th century. Chinese students visiting at Cambridge
repeatedly informed him that Western scientific methods and discoveries
discussed in his classes originated in China centuries before. Needham was
so intrigued that he became fully fluent in Chinese, then travelled to China
to investigate. He discovered voluminous evidence of the truth of those
claims and decided to remain in China to write a book to document what he
deemed a discovery of great importance to the world. Needham never
completed his task of cataloguing the history of Chinese invention. His one
book became 26 books and he died in 1995, with his work still continued
today by his students. One good introduction to this topic is Robert
Temple’s summary of Needham’s work. (1)

We were all taught in school that the printing press with movable type was
invented in Germany by Johannes Gutenberg in about the year 1550. Not so.
China not only invented paper but also the printing press with
movable set type, which was in common use in China 1,000 years
before Gutenberg was born. Similarly, we were taught that Scotsman
James Watt invented the steam engine. He did not. Steam engines were in
widespread use in China 600 years before Watt was born. There are dated
ancient texts and drawings to illustrate and prove the Chinese discovered
and documented “Pascal’s Triangle” 600 years before Pascal copied it, and
the Chinese enunciated Newton’s First Law of Motion 2,000 years before
Newton.

The same is true for thousands of inventions that the West now claim as
theirs but where conclusive documentation exists to prove that they
originated in China hundreds and sometimes thousands of years before the
West copied them. It was not for nothing that Marco Polo is described in
China as “Europe’s great thief”. The next few paragraphs are adapted mainly
from information in Temple’s book, which I strongly recommend.

The Chinese invented the decimal number system, decimal fractions,

negative numbers, and the zero, so far in the past that the origin is
lost in the mists of time. The Chinese tracked sunspots and comets with
such detail and accuracy that these ancient records are still used as the basis
for their prediction and observation today. The Chinese were drilling for
natural gas about 2,500 years ago, wells 4,800 feet deep, with bamboo
pipelines to deliver the gas to nearby cities. The Chinese pioneered the
mining and use of coal long before it was known in the West. Marco Polo and
Arab traders marveled at the “black stone” that the Chinese mined from the
ground, that would burn slowly during an entire night.

China had printed paper money almost 1,500 years ago, done in ways
to prevent counterfeiting. Wrapping paper, paper napkins and toilet paper
were all in general use in China 2,000 years before the West could produce
them. They were the first to invent and develop a full mechanical
clock with a true escapement, many centuries before the Swiss had done
so. The Chinese invented an ingenious seismograph still in use that tells
not only the severity but the direction and distance of earthquakes. The
Chinese invented hot-air balloons, the parachute, manned flight with kites,
the wheelbarrow and matches. They invented hermetically-sealed
laboratories for scientific experiments. They invented belt and chain drives,
the paddlewheel steamer, the helicopter rotor and the propeller, the
segmental-arch bridge. They invented the use of water power and chain
pumps, the crank handle, all the construction methods for suspension
bridges, sliding calipers, the fishing reel, image projection, magic lanterns,
the gimbal system of suspension. China not only invented spinning wheels,
carding machines and looms, but was the world’s leader in technical
innovations in textile manufacturing, more than 700 years before Britain’s
18th century textile revolution.

Chinese expertise with fine porcelain was so advanced millennia ago,

that even today it is admitted their ability has never even been equaled in
the West, much less surpassed. The Chinese discovered not only
magnetism but magnetic remanence and induction, as well as the
compass. They invented gunpowder, smoke bombs, the cannon, the
crossbow, plated body armor, fireworks, flamethrowers, grenades, land and
sea mines, multi-stage rockets, mortars and repeating guns. China had
irrigation canals that were also used for transport, and the Chinese invented
the canal locks that could raise and lower boats to different levels 1,500
years before the Americans built the Panama Canal. China has earthquake-
proof dams functioning today that were built around 250 BC.
 A 52-volume Chinese Traditional Herbal Medicine encyclopedia.

A millennium ago, the Chinese conceived and developed the science

of immunology – vaccinating people for diseases like smallpox,
knowing how to extract and prepare the vaccine so as to immunise
and not infect. They discovered the circadian rhythm in the human body,
blood circulation and the science of endocrinology. The Chinese were using
urine from pregnant women to make sex hormones 2,000 years ago,
understanding how they acted on the body and how to use them. Many
centuries-old Chinese medical books still exist, documenting all this and
much more. Around 1550, China compiled a huge 52-volume Chinese
Traditional Herbal Medicine encyclopedia that described almost 2,000
herbal sources and 10,000 medical prescriptions. Among them is
chaulmoogra oil, which is still the only known treatment for leprosy.
China designed and built the world’s largest commercial ships, which
were many times longer and ten times larger in volume than anything the
West could build at the time. In the late 1500s the largest English ships
displaced 400 tons, while China’s displaced more than 3,000 tons. Western
ships were small, uncontrollable and fragile, and useless for travelling any
distance. Thousands of years ago, Chinese ships had watertight
compartments that permitted them to continue journeys even when
damaged. Moreover, Chinese ships not only had multiple masts, but China
invented the luff sails which permit us to sail almost into the wind, just as
sailboats do today, and were therefore not dependent on wind direction for
their travel. Their luff sails contained sewn-in bamboo battens that keep the
sails full and aerodynamically efficient, as racing sailboats use today. The
Chinese invented the ship’s rudder – something the Europeans never
managed to do, able to steer themselves only with oars, and European sails
permitted them to travel only in the direction of the wind, which meant a
ship would have to remain in place, sometimes for months, awaiting a
favorable wind.
Chinese maps were the best in the world, by orders of magnitude, for
more than a millennium, and the precision of their maps became legendary,
being far in advance of the West. The Chinese invented Mercator projections,
relief maps, quantitative cartography and grid layouts. China had
compasses and such extensive astronomical knowledge that they
always knew where they were, could plot courses and follow them by
both compass and star charts, and could sail wherever they wanted,
regardless of the wind direction. As Needham pointed out, China was so
far ahead of the Western world in sailing and navigation that
comparisons are just embarrassing. It was only when the West managed
to copy and steal China’s sailing and navigation technology that it was able
to begin travelling the world and colonising it. James Petras wrote, “It is
especially important to emphasize how China, the world technological power
between 1100 and 1800, made the West’s emergence possible. It was only
by borrowing and assimilating Chinese innovations that the West was able to
make the transition to modern capitalist and imperialist economies.” (2)

China was 1,000 years ahead of the West in anything to do with metals –
cast iron, wrought iron, steel, carbon steel, tempered steel, welded steel.
The Chinese were so skilled at metallurgy they could cast tuned bells that
could produce any tone. Long before 1,000 A.D., China was the world’s
major steel producer. I believe it was James Petras who noted that in
about 1,000 A.D. China was producing about 125,000 tons of steel per year,
while 800 years later Britain could produce only 75,000 tons. (1) The Chinese
invented the blast furnace, the double-action bellows to achieve the
necessary high temperatures for smelting and annealing metals. They
invented the manufacture of steel from cast iron. They excelled in creating
metallic alloys, and very early were casting and forging coins made
from copper, nickel and zinc. The entire process of mining, smelting and
purifying zinc, originated in China. The Chinese developed the processes of
mining itself, and the concentration and extraction of metals.

China was highly advanced in agriculture, having invented the

winnowing fan and the seed drill, making an easy process of tilling, planting,
and harvesting. Europeans and Americans were still seeding crops by
scattering grain from a bag, a greatly wasteful practice that necessitated
saving 50% of each year’s crop for seed. China developed scientifically
efficient plows that have never been equaled and are still used all over the
world today. They invented and developed animal harnesses and collars that
first permitted horses to actually be used to pull loads. Europe had no
efficient plow, and their only way of harnessing animals was to put a rope
around their necks, which succeeded only in the animals strangling
themselves. The Chinese invented saddles and the riding stirrup. China’s
food production was orders of magnitude ahead of the world for more than
1,000 years, its advances in agriculture the enabling cause of Europe’s
agricultural revolution that first permitted it to begin feeding itself
adequately. The Chinese were wearing fine silk and cotton clothing
and using toilet paper while centuries later Europeans were still
wearing animal skins.

Armillary sphere at the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum

Few people in the West are familiar with China’s Armillary Spheres.
These wonders of the world, cast in bronze several meters in diameter and
beautifully decorated with dragons and phoenixes, are some of the oldest
and most accurate astronomical observatory instruments in existence, some
created more than 3,500 years ago when the Western countries had
no knowledge of such things. They determine and measure the positions
and equatorial ecliptic and horizontal coordinates of celestial bodies, the
positions and daily motions of 1,500 stars and constellations, and much
more. When the Western Forces invaded China in the late 1800s, they
were so captivated that they plundered most of these treasures and the
centuries of data from the ancient observatories, disassembling the
instruments and removing them to Europe, returning some to China as
part of the Treaties after the First World War.

It leaves one speechless to learn the vast extent of Chinese inventions that
existed hundreds of years and often millennia, before they appeared in the
West. Needham published not only ancient Chinese texts that can be
accurately dated, but photos of old drawings that clearly depict all of these
items. This isn’t a simple matter of gunpowder and fireworks, but of
discovery that encompasses the entire range of human knowledge, all of
which has been consciously hidden from the Western world. Needham
made his discoveries in the 1940s, but neither Western education
nor the media have ever referenced or acknowledged them. These are
not mere claims; the evidence is conclusive and available for examination
but the West has thoroughly erased China from the world’s historical
memory.

Western historians have distorted and ignored China’s dominant role

in the world economy until about 1800. There exists an enormous
amount of empirical data proving China’s economic and technological
superiority over Western civilization for the better part of several millennia.
Given that China was the world’s supreme technological power up to about
1800, it is especially important to emphasize that this is what made the
West’s emergence possible. It was only by copying and assimilating Chinese
innovations and China’s much more advanced technology that the West
was able to make the transition to modern capitalist and imperialist
economies. Until then, China was the leading trading nation, reaching most
of Southern Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe. China’s innovations
in the production of paper, book printing, firearms and tools led to a
manufacturing superpower whose goods were transported throughout the
world by the most advanced navigational system. Moreover, banking, a
stable paper money economy, excellent manufacturing and high agricultural
yields resulted in China’s per capita income surpassing that of Great Britain
until about 1800.

Not only this but, as James Petras pointed out, “… the majority of western
economic historians have presented historical China as a stagnant,
backward, parochial society, an “oriental despotism”.” China was never thus.
During the 13th century, Marco Polo described China as vastly wealthier and
more advanced than any European country, and leading European
philosophers such as Voltaire looked to Chinese society as an intellectual
exemplar, the British notably using China as their model for establishing a
meritocratic civil service. (3)

A first thought when reviewing this research is that the world must have
seemed very primitive to China 500 years ago, truly “third world” at the time.
When Zhang He and others conducted their voyages of exploration, they
must have been disappointed in what they found. The rest of the world had
no paper or printing, no mathematics, no science, little medicine of note,
almost no metallurgy to speak of, a most primitive agriculture, no
manufactures of any worthy kind, no porcelain, no spinning wheels or
weaving looms to make clothing. From reviewing the history of Chinese
invention, one develops an increasingly strong feeling the Chinese looked at
the world and found nothing of interest in all those societies that were
centuries, and in some cases millennia, behind China in almost every way.
One can easily theorise this is the reason China closed itself off from the
world at that time, concluding that other nations were so backward that little
would be gained from prolonged contact. One can imagine they returned
home and closed the door, perhaps planning to return in another 500 years
to see if things had progressed. With the addition of detail, this is most likely
how events transpired.

What China didn’t expect, was the West stealing all these ideas,
turning them into weapons of colonisation and war, returning to the nation
that was the source of that knowledge, and invading it to colonise, to steal
resources, and to enslave and massacre the population. China’s interest
was always only exploration and trade. The Chinese were never expansionist
or warlike, wanting only to protect their own borders from invasion from the
North. China was quite unprepared for the violent nature and savage
brutality of the White man who sailed the world, invoking his God’s
blessing on his countless atrocities. Coupled with a weak domestic
government and the inventiveness of the Baghdad Jews in using opium
to reap billions while enslaving a nation under the protection of the
British military, we have the severe downward swing for 200 years.

Two Great Historical Tragedies

China’s Summer Palace, the Yuanmingyuan.

The above summary doesn’t even begin to adequately catalog of the extent
of Chinese invention, of the sum of China’s discoveries and contributions to
the modern world. But unfortunately, much of China’s total sum of
knowledge and history of invention is lost to the world forever. A large part
of the recorded knowledge of China’s history was destroyed in one of the
greatest acts of cultural genocide in the history of the world – the looting
and burning of China’s Summer Palace, the Yuanmingyuan, which
contained more than ten million of the finest and most valuable
historical treasures and scholarly works from 5,000 years of Chinese
history. What could not be looted was destroyed, and the entire massive
palace burned to the ground. This wanton theft and utter destruction of one
of the world’s greatest collections of historical knowledge was engineered
by the Rothschilds and Sassoons in retaliation for Chinese resistance
to their opium. (4)(5)

This is an aside, but the destruction of the Yuanmingyuan was done for the
same reason that the Allies bombed Dresden to rubble during the Second
World War. Dresden had no military value but it was the spiritual and cultural
heart of Germany, its destruction meant “to open a wound in the German
soul that would never heal”. For precisely the same reason, the American
‘deep state’ was savagely determined to drop the first atomic bomb on
Kyoto, also the heart and soul of Japanese culture. Kyoto was protected by
Providence, with heavy overcasts of clouds that preventing the bombers from
locating it with sufficient accuracy, forcing them to their alternates of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But in terms of the destruction of a literary recording of culture and invention,

there was perhaps an even greater crime against the history of Chinese
knowledge – the destruction of the library and the Yongle Dadian at
the Hanlin Academy. (6) That encyclopedia of 22,000 volumes
written by more than 2,000 scholars over many years, contained
much of the total of 5,000 years of Chinese knowledge, invention and
thought. The British carried all those books outdoors, poured fuel on them,
and burnt the entire collection to ashes. Only God knows what was lost
in this tragic destruction, ordered by the same drug dealers as punishment
for refusing opium, meant to break China’s will by striking at the very heart
of the nation’s culture in the wanton destruction of something of such
inestimable value as to leave an open wound that would never heal. Only
about 150 volumes survived the incineration, 40 those residing today in
the US Library of Congress, which has no intention of returning them
to China.

Darwinism at its Finest

Westerners today justify their unacknowledged appropriation of Chinese

knowledge and subsequent claims to ownership on some variant of the
proposition that the Chinese invented those things, but never developed or
capitalised on them, but the claim is invalid self-serving nonsense since my
invention is mine whether or not I choose to develop it. The claim is also
untrue.

When the Chinese invented paper and printing, books became widespread
throughout China, as with the weaving of cloth and development of textiles.
China employed its inventions in unlimited ways for the benefit of Chinese
society. What they did not do is file patents, convert everything to privately-
owned IP, and transfer their ingenuity from social benefit to private profit.
Criticisms of China’s use of its inventions are not so much negating a lack of
application but the absence of commercialisation, these Western
justifications implying that any nation not immediately striving for profit
maximisation of its discoveries is morally negligent, the theft of those
discoveries then justified by those who would use them more properly. This
is the bank robber taking the high moral ground by claiming he put the
money to better use than the bank would have done.

To have foregone private commercialisation was neither a character flaw nor

a behavioral fault, but a reflection of the pluralistic and socialistic nature of
the Chinese people, the same reason that even today China’s patent and IP
laws and regulations are so much less aggressive than those of the US. Put
simply, China has never been as capitalistic or as individualistic as the West.
It is part of the greatness of the Chinese nation that this immense population
engaged in millennia of stunning research, discovery and invention and freely
distributed those fruits throughout the nation. This emphasis on the
greater good and overall benefit to society rather than individual
profit, is fundamental to the natural humanity of the Chinese people,
and cannot be permitted to be destroyed by the sociopathic Western
model so forcefully promoted today on the basis of a fictitious moral
superiority.

The West chooses to ignore the fact that the 200-year hiatus in China’s
innovation was due almost entirely to their own military invasions, when the
West was ravaging and destroying the nation. China’s development,
social progress, and invention, ceased only from the invasions by
both the Americans and Europeans, and most especially with the
Jews’ vast program of trafficking in opium in China.
Perhaps of more direct interest is that China’s lag in current technology is,
more than anything else, an unfortunate accident of fate that occurred during
a blip in time. After Mao evicted all the foreigners and China shook off the
effects of 200 years of foreign interference and plundering to begin the
transition to an industrialised economy, this was precisely when the world of
electronics and communication exploded. It was during that brief period of a
couple of decades that computers, the Internet, mobile phones and so much
more, were conceived and patented by the West. Virtually the entire
process passed China by, because during that brief period the nation
was entirely enveloped in the fundamentals of its economic and
social revolution, and in no position to participate. China’s lack of
patents and IP in the field of electronics today is due neither to
Western superiority nor Chinese lack of innovation, but to Western
aggression. The accumulation of American and European patents was in no
way due to Western supremacy in innovation but to the absence of the
Chinese.

The Present and the Future

China’s Inventiveness has not ended. With China recovering and once
again taking its rightful place in the world, it is continuing where it left off
200 years ago. Ignoring the historical setback, Chinese companies are simply
by-passing the earlier stages of innovation by foreign firms and proceeding
to subsequent stages where the field is open and foreign patents have not
precluded innovation and development.

If we examine the fields where China lags today in terms of patents and IP,
it is primarily in those areas of science that progressed during that brief
period where China was unable to participate. As soon as China found its
footing, innovation continued unabated as it had for thousands of years.
China missed the computer and Smartphone patents, but was perfectly timed
for the solar panel revolution and quickly emerged as the world leader – at
which point the US imposed tariffs of 300% on Chinese solar panels in an
attempt not so much to kill China’s export sales but to prevent the
accumulation of funds for further R&D. In any area not pre-empted by IP
restriction, China’s innovation has soared – usually to world leadership.
Despite US accusations of China copying foreign technology, China’s high-
technology achievements were entirely home-grown because the US has
been so determined to hinder China’s rise that by 1950 it engineered
an international embargo on all scientific knowledge and on almost
all useful products and processes to China, including legislation that
Chinese scientists cannot be invited to, or participate in, American scientific
forums, while bullying other Western nations into doing the same. In
October of 2019, all Chinese scientists and space technology
companies were denied visas to attend the weeklong International
Astronautical Congress in Washington, far from the first time such
has occurred.

We hear much in the Western media about China demanding technology

transfers as a condition of corporate residence in China, but this is mostly
propaganda. No doubt expectations for technology and knowhow transfer do
occur, since China doesn’t want to spend the rest of its life making toasters
and running shoes but, since entry to the Chinese market is a gift of billions
in profits, it is perfectly sensible to attach a price to it. However, one must
keep in mind that no foreign company is conducting cutting-edge commercial
or sensitive military research, or manufacturing quantum computers and
hypersonic missiles in China. Any technology actually available for transfer
would be almost entirely in consumer goods, and hardly constitute great
value or threats to US ‘national security’. And, in virtually all of the
cutting-edge fields and industries such as quantum computing, 5-G
telecom or solar energy, China has already surpassed the US.

A Brief List of Recent Chinese Innovation

In 2015, Chinese engineers announced the world’s first quantum

communications network, a 2,000 kilometer system linking Beijing and
Shanghai with data transmission encoded by quantum key distribution. In
August of 2016 China launched the world’s first quantum communications
satellite, and succeeded in test communication with the country’s existing
ground stations. In September of 2016, Chinese scientists achieved the
world’s first quantum teleportation between independent sources,
delivering quantum information enciphered in photons between two
locations.
In 2014, researchers at Nankai University in Tianjin developed a car
with a working brain-control unit, with sensors that capture brain
signals permitting humans to control the automobile with their
minds. In 2016 China launched a fully-operational space lab to conduct the
first ever brain-machine interaction experiments in space. Chinese scientists
believe brain-computer interaction will eventually be the highest
form of human-machine communication, having developed this process
much farther than any Western nation and holding nearly 100 patents.

In 2015, high school students from Tianjin won an International gold medal
for the creation of a microbe biological battery. Such attempts in the
past have failed due to poor performance and limited usefulness, but these
students conceived the idea of combining several types of bacteria into one
biological power cell, with each bacterium having specialised responsibilities
based on its own unique functions. Their tiny multi-bacteria cell reached
over 520 mV, and lasted over 80 hours. Scaled up, their biological
battery was able to generate as much power as a lithium battery,
with a much longer life and producing no pollution. These are Chinese
high school kids.

In 2015 Chinese scientists succeeded in modifying a human embryo to permit

the changes to persist through future generations, something that had never
been accomplished before, to alter human DNA for removal of
dangerous or undesired genes from future generations. Chinese
researchers are developing the technology and processes to make 3D-printed
skin a reality, custom-made skin for burn patients, printed according to their
wounds. The country leads the world in cat-scan technology, in DNA
mapping and synthesising, and many medical fields such as laser eye
surgery and cornea transplants.

In May of 2019, a Chinese start-up launched a revolutionary AI chip with

the computing power of eight NVIDIA P4 servers but up to five times faster,
with half the size and 20% of the energy consumption, and costing 50% less
to manufacture. Shanghai’s Fudan University developed a transistor based
on two-dimensional molybdic sulfide, meaning computing and data storage
happen together in a single cell, perhaps eliminating silicon-based chips
which are at their limit. DJI Technology, founded by a Chinese university
student, has become in only a few years the global market leader in small
consumer drones, and already attracting American sanctions for being too
successful in an area the US wants to control. The country produces
nearly 40% of the world’s robots, with vastly improved core
technologies, and is the world leader in 5-G technology.

Chinese engineers created a supercomputer seven times faster than

America’s Oak Ridge installation, the first in the world to achieve speeds
beyond 100 PetaFlops, powered by a Chinese-developed multi-core CPU and
Chinese software, while displacing the US with the most supercomputers in
the top 500. Upon the revelation of China’s super-fast supercomputer,
authorities reported the NSA had launched hundreds of thousands of
hacking attacks, looking to steal the technology for China’s new
microprocessors.

China’s megaproject engineering skills are already legendary, with the

longest sea bridges, the longest tunnels, the largest deep-water ports. China
has built the world’s longest and highest glass bridge in Zhangjiajie,
hanging between two steep cliffs 300 meters above the ground, and which
set 10 world records spanning its design and construction. The Three Gorges
Dam is the world’s largest, with 5-tier ship locks which can contain the
world’s largest ships, and also a shiplift for smaller vessels which is the
largest and most sophisticated in the world. China has formulated plans
to build an electron collider, four times as long (100 Kms) and operating
at more than seven times the energy capacity of the European CERN. In
2015, Chinese scientists completed the 500-meter radio telescope, by far the
largest in the world with more than ten times the area of the American
installation in Puerto Rico.

In 2014, architects in Amsterdam began work on what was to be the world’s

first completely 3D-printed house, a costly enterprise requiring three years.
At exactly the same time in Shanghai, a Chinese company completed ten 3D-
printed houses in less than a day, at a cost of less than $5,000 each, using
recycled construction and industrial scrap as the ‘ink’. I have seen these
homes; large, elegant, multi-story European-styled structures, and so sturdy
they can withstand earthquakes up to level 8 on the Richter scale.

We know about China’s fabulous high-speed trains, but few outside China
are aware of the intense high quality of the HSR network, built with the
highest standards in the modern world, including stability. When traveling by
train I sometimes place a coin on its edge on the windowsill, and I have
video of the coin remaining stable for four or five minutes before it
finally falls over – and this is at 300 Kms per hour. Shanghai has a
high-speed Maglev train (430 Kms/hr), while many cities have low-speed
Maglevs (200 Kms/hr), and Chinese engineers are ready to produce
commercially a 600 Km/hr Maglev. The same pace of development is true of
the nation’s urban subway systems. I have lost the source for these figures,
but the city of London needed 147 years to build 408 Kms. of subway lines,
New York City 106 years for 370 Kms., Paris 110 years for 215 Kms, while
Shanghai needed only 20 years to build 500 Kms.

It has escaped attention that these achievements were not sudden, but
developed from a deliberate plan in execution for 30 years, though it is only
recently that many of these efforts are bearing fruit. More importantly, China
accomplished this from a third-world industrial base while under a total
Western embargo on technology transfer. Chinese scientists have
developed nuclear energy plants, put men into space, photographed
the entire surface of the moon, built a space station, designed and
launched a private GPS system. We have Chinese-designed and built
deep-sea submersibles, and the country is rapidly developing its own aircraft
industry. Today, with its science and technological base so much more
advanced, and with education spending increasing at nearly 10% per year,
and very high R&D expenditures, invention and innovation can only increase.
A Closing Note

One of the most persistent myths propagated about China, a claim without
a shred of supporting evidence, is that Chinese lack creativity and innovation
due to flaws in their educational system. We have seen the accusations
hundreds of times: China’s educational system teaches only rote memory
while stifling innovation, the Chinese unable to conceptualise or innovate,
knowing only how to achieve high test scores but not how to think. Here is
Carly Fiorina speaking, the former CEO of H-P: “I’ve been doing business in
China for decades, and I will tell you that yeah, the Chinese can take a test,
but what they can’t do is innovate. They’re not terribly imaginative. They’re
not entrepreneurial. They don’t innovate. That’s why they’re stealing our
intellectual property … innovation and entrepreneurship are not their strong
suits. Their society, as well as their educational system, is too homogenized
and controlled to encourage imagination …” (7) The claim is complete
rubbish for more reasons than I have room to account here.

In 2015, Eva Dou reported in the Wall Street Journal of a study by McKinsey
who claimed that China had made all the “easy” innovations, like making
products better and cheaper, but that “the country has limited success
stories in ‘more challenging’ types of innovation that rely on scientific or
engineering breakthroughs.” McKinsey’s conclusions are not supported
by the evidence listed here. (8)

Notes

(1) Robert Temple, The Genius of China: 3,000 Years of Science, Discovery,
and Invention; https://www.amazon.com/Genius-China-Science-Discovery-
Invention/dp/1594772177

(2) James Petras; China: Rise, Fall and Re-Emergence as a Global Power;
Some Lessons from the
Past; https://www.countercurrents.org/petras070312.htm

(3) Ron Unz; The American Conservative; April 18, 2012; China’s Rise,
America’s Fall; Why Nations
Fail; https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/chinas-rise-
americas-fall/

(4) China Remembers a Vast Crime – The New York

Times; https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/22/arts/22iht-MELVIN.html

(5) Peking’s Summer Palace destroyed; https://www.history.com/this-day-

in-history/pekings-summer-palace-destroyed

(6) “The Destruction of a Great Library: China’s Loss Belongs to the

World; https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ552559

(7) Ex-HP CEO Carly Fiorina says Chinese ‘don’t innovate’;

Time; https://time.com/3897081/carly-fiorina-china-innovation/

(8) Chinese Innovation: Now Comes the Hard Part, Says

Study; https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/10/22/chinese-
innovation-now-comes-the-hard-part-says-study/
 Chapter 2

Nüshu (女书)

On September 4, 2004, Yang Huanyi died at her home in Central China. She
was 98 years old, and the last fluent practitioner of Nüshu, one of the oldest
and most beautiful, and certainly one of the more intriguing languages in the
world. (1) (2)

Yang Huanyi
Nüshu, (女书), (literally, women's writing and/or women's script) is
the only known language in the history of the world that was created
by women and that was used and understood only by women,
handed down for generations from mother to daughter. The origins of
the language are lost in the mists of time, with scholars today debating
almost every aspect of its existence, including its origin and creation. The
few written works remaining today are at most around 100 years old, though
some place the origin at more than 1,000 years ago.

Nüshu is what we today would term a 'dead language', one no longer in use,
and one which, without the intervention of Providence, would have died and
become extinct without even a funeral. This mysterious language was
accidentally discovered only about 40 years ago. In the early 1980s a teacher
accompanied his students to a remote area of China's Hunan Province to
study local customs and culture. During their studies, they found a strange
calligraphy which they discovered no man could understand, with characters
very different from Chinese letters and from any other script in the world.
 Pu Lijuan, He Jinghua’s daughter, displays a fan decorated with ‘nüshu’
script at her home in Jiangyong County, Hunan province, July 19, 2018. Yin
Yijun/Sixth Tone

Nüshu was a special form of writing and song that was used and understood
only by the women in Jiangyong County in China's Hunan Province, and in
corners of three adjacent provinces. Despite its long history, it seemed that
no one outside the area, including much of Hunan Province itself, had seen
it or was even aware of its existence. Immediately recognising the
importance of their discovery, the teacher sought help from professional
linguists who formed a research group where they collected samples and
recordings, and created a dictionary. Nüshu, which had been passed
quietly from woman to woman for uncounted centuries, had now left
its rural home with its secrets exposed, causing ripples of excitement both
at home and abroad. Nüshu has been officially declared a World Heritage
item, and listed as one of the world's most ancient languages and the only
exclusively female language ever discovered.

Because it was virtually a secret language, we can find no references to it in

old documents or historical works, and no one outside the area appears to
have been familiar with it. Yet that cannot be the entire story because in
Nanjing in 1999 some coins were discovered which bore inscriptions in the
characters of Nüshu, coins which had been minted by the Taiping
government dating from the early to mid1800s. These were legal coins,
which means Nüshu must have been in some kind of official use during that
period, but to date no documentation has been discovered. (People’s Daily
News international edition dated March 2, 2000).

The End of a Tradition

Nüshu declined in the 1920s in the midst of various social and political
changes, and use of the script was heavily suppressed by the Japanese
during their invasion of China in the 1930s-40s because they feared it could
be used to send secret messages. As well, during the Cultural Revolution
from 1966 to 1976, the language was discouraged as a kind of feudal leftover
in a time when the nation was trying to throw off two centuries of stagnation
and bring itself into a modern world. More social and cultural changes
occurred during the latter part of the 20th century, including the
standardisation of the Mandarin language and simplification of the
characters, resulting in the younger generation adopting Mandarin and
abandoning Nüshu which then fell into disuse as the older women died.

It seems always true that as times change, especially with major social
upheavals, our cultures and traditions evolve and sometimes dissipate.
NüShu fell victim partially to the Cultural Revolution which was rewriting
history for a new China, and simultaneous universal educational reforms
focused on Mandarin and rendered NüShu redundant, so it ceased to be
taught, and gradually disappeared from the culture of the time.

Nüshu in Daily Life

Using their script, the women wrote letters, poetry, and songs in books
and on paper fans, and they often embroidered the script into cloth
for handkerchiefs, scarves, aprons and other handicrafts. Instead of
writing letters, they would often embroider poems and messages onto
handkerchiefs to be delivered as essentially secret messages to their friends
and relatives back home. In addition to poetry and songs, they wrote Nüshu
in their prayers and chants to god, but perhaps the most notable use was in
their letters and vows to each other as sworn sisters.

It was a tradition among the girls of this area to enter relationships with each
other which were called Jiebai Zimei (結拝姉妹) or "sworn sisterhood"
which entailed pledging commitment to female friends who were not
biologically related but committed to a deep friendship. These sworn sisters
were generally were much closer to each other than to their real sisters, and
one of the main uses of NüShu was as a means of recording these lifelong
friendships in letters and poetry.
 These were serious relationships of emotional
companionship, almost akin to marriage and expected to last for life. The
girls would swear pledges to each other and share fortune and misfortune, a
practice that played a very important role in the invention and dissemination
of Nüshu. Much of the Nüshu writing and embroidery consisted of
letters between sworn sisters, and there is reason to believe that the
need for accurate expression of these emotional bonds was responsible for
the creation of the language.

One of the more charming traditions involved books knows as San Chao Shu,
(三朝书, literally third-day book) which were beautiful hand-made cloth-
bound booklets written in Nüshu and to be given to a daughter or a sworn
sister upon her marriage. In the traditional Chinese marriages of the time, a
bride would join her husband’s family and would have to move, sometimes
far away, perhaps rarely seeing her birth family or her sworn sisters
again.

These lovely San Chao Shu were wedding gifts delivered on the third
day after the young woman's marriage, typically expressing fond hopes
for the girl's future happiness as well as describing the sorrows upon being
parted from her. The first several pages were filled with songs and poems
for the young woman leaving the village, while the remaining pages were left
blank to be used as a personal diary. These books were looked upon as great
treasures and were considered very personal, so much so that they were
usually either burned or buried with the woman upon her death - a practice
which explains the dearth of examples of NüShu extant today.
When we examine the NüShu writings available, we realise we are looking
into not only the lives but the hearts of these village women, reflecting the
deepest feelings and emotions in their hearts, a form of expression that
became rooted in the consciousness of the women. These women created
something by and for themselves, a language perfectly tailored to the needs
of women for expression. The script is so feminine and the writing so
descriptive that together they touch the souls of these sworn sisters,
transmitting accurately through their letters, poems and songs their hopes
and tears, their joy and despair.
Nüshu has been described as "A light of civilisation in history, an
especially beautiful scenery in the history of women, a method to
build a rare and valuable, and beautiful, spiritual kingdom unique to
women". Nüshu is a large measure of a rich folk culture, a product of the
great Chinese civilisation, which was formed in a very special and complex
cultural soil. One scholar wrote that now that Nüshu has withdrawn from the
historical stage with the blessing of history, what remains today is "a
rainbow of human civilisation". (Zhao Liming)

It is more than fascinating that Nüshu could ever be created because, while
the purpose of all language is to communicate, Nüshu was created as a
language of emotion and feeling. This is so true that one Hunan woman,
writing a poem in Nüshu, was asked why she didn't write in Mandarin which
would be easier.

Her reply was that she couldn't, that it was too daunting to even think about
recording or expressing her feelings in another language but, using Nüshu,
she could do it.

Nüshu is not so much a language of the heart, but of the soul. One
woman described her expressions in Nüshu as an ability to whisper
her deepest hidden feelings, to describe not only tears, but "crimson-
colored tears".

It is well-known that different languages have different abilities to

communicate concepts. There are German words - for example,
schadenfreude - which cannot be translated into a single word in another
language.

Sometimes, a paragraph may be needed in one language to express a single

word in another. With most languages, the expression of facts is easy, but
feelings and emotions are more difficult to express verbally or in writing
without resorting to much flowery vocabulary.

The conclusion that seems to fit the circumstances is that this valley of
women in Hunan felt a need to express their emotional thoughts, feelings,
desires, sorrows and hopes, and so created a language specifically for women
which contained the vocabulary to do precisely that. And they expressed all
those delicate and indefinable feelings through the vocabulary they created
for Nüshu.

If this assumption is accurate, it is not a surprise that no man could

understand it nor that no man would be invited to understand it. Nüshu is
entirely a language of emotion and feeling; perhaps the first (and only) time
women were able to accurately express the secrets of their heart.
All Nüshu writings are from women to women, whether letter, song or
poem, each an artifact of a unique woman's culture reflecting and preserving
the spiritual feelings of female friends.

The language, a unique artistic wonder, was the basis not only for
communication but for cohesion, creating as one author wrote, "a romantic
spiritual kingdom based on the realistic feelings and sufferings of these
women". Simply put, the women needed a way to express themselves but,
lacking the necessary tools in the common dialects, used their unique
knowledge of their own hearts to create a new language with an appropriate
subjective vocabulary to reflect female emotions.

It was this that could create the scaffolding for the sworn sisters to
swear their vows, almost like a secret female sorority. Nüshu is a
great initiative of Chinese women and a contribution to human
civilisation.

It is interesting to note that in all the Nüshu writings discovered, there

are no love songs.

Many scholars have collected examples of the Nüshu script and created
dictionaries of some repute, but my feeling is that a cat cannot be turned
into a bird. In the case of Nüshu it is only in a very specific emotional
environment that the true and complex sentiment of a group of characters
can be understood. This cannot be translated into other languages which
have no vocabulary for those sentiments. The words to describe
subjective feelings of resonance with one's sisters, as one of the
basic needs of human spiritual life cannot be found in most
dictionaries, especially those created by men.

For its part, the Nüshu script is exclusively feminine. If there is one striking
sign of this language, it is the gender. Nüshu characters have a soft and
flowing, quaint and unique, female beauty. Considering that this was a
means to communicate privately, these lovely small letters were beautifully
designed.
Many scholars, instead of focusing on the material issues of the language
usage and intent, seem to busy themselves with similarities to Chinese or
other characters. However, Chinese is a character language with each
character representing an idea, or a word or part of a word. Nüshu on the
other hand, is phonetic, with the characters (letters) representing sounds
rather than concepts. They are not ideas, but pronunciations, as in
most Western languages. It is primarily for this reason that I believe
dictionaries and translations may be of limited use.

Nüshu characters are a primarily a storehouse of female culture, not a list of

nouns. Nüshu has more than 2,000 characters, some of which have no
spoken counterparts, and which display little mutual intelligibility with other
languages. In addition to all the above, Nüshu has a full set of rules for layout
with pronunciation, style, and a framework of grammar.I stated above that
scholars appear to focus entirely on elements that are almost irrelevancies
in the overall picture. To my mind, there are two factors most important in
the study of this language.

First is the female and feminine nature of the language, the emotional
foundation, a language created by and for women apparently for the purpose
of expressing the deepest and almost inexpressible feelings in their hearts.

The second is perhaps even more astonishing and more cause for wonder.
How did a group of peasant women living in a remote valley in
China's Hunan Province 1,000 years ago, women who were possibly
illiterate but who almost certainly had never attended a school of any sort,
manage to create a full-fledged language with 60,000 words and rules of
grammar, and an entirely new and very beautiful script designed to express
those 'inexpressible feelings'? That task today would be so daunting as to be
almost impossible for even the most accomplished linguists, yet it was done.

Every Silver Lining has a Cloud

When Nüshu was first discovered, many foreign 'scholars' made their way to
Hunan and looted the finest and oldest examples of the Nüshu writing, the
San Chao Shu, and the embroidered artifacts, all of which were of immense
historical and cultural significance to China. They are now gone forever
because of this predatory "research".

Additionally, too many foreigners have conducted research on Nüshu and

produced a flood of papers and books which are wrong at best and fraudulent
and insulting at worst. Nüshu has been the basis of several Western
documentaries, all bad, all serving primarily to denigrate China and, in one
way or another, to trash this beautiful historical artifact.More disappointingly,
many foreign so-called scholars have executed written and film works on
Nüshu which are intended to be offensive, to denigrate yet another beautiful
portion of Chinese cultural heritage. One author dismissed Nüshu as "a
language designed for a culture of lesbians", then claiming the Chinese
national government moved to save the language from extinction only
because it envisioned huge potential profits from cultural tourism.

Other uninformed 'scholars' state women learned this language because they
were forbidden formal education and prohibited from learning Chinese. Some
claim the women "rebelled" against a "grotesque male-dominated Confucian
society", the language emerging as a result of the conflict. Others view Nüshu
through a feminist lens, forming imaginary Western parallels with
"empowering women" by "strengthening their collective ego consciousness".
Some claim men disregarded the Nüshu language "in feudal China" since
women were considered inferior, denied educational opportunities and
condemned to social isolation with bound feet. And so on. Of all those I
have seen, none exhibit any understanding of the cultural or social
context, and none even recognise, much less appreciate, the
primordial underlying elements.

I am therefore by design providing no Western links for any part of this

article. I would strongly advise readers interested in Nüshu to avoid any
website that is not physically in China and created by authoritative Chinese
sources. There are dozens of foreign Nüshu websites purporting to be
Chinese but which are primarily US-based and which have little or no
accurate or factual information to provide.

Notes
(1) Last female-only Nüshu language speaker dies September 24, 2004, China Daily;
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-09/24/content_377436.htm

(2) China to reveal female-specific language to public. March 16, 2004;

http://en.people.cn/200403/16/eng20040316_137569.shtml

(3) Qinghua University Research Center of Ancient Chinese Characters

http://www.thurcacca.org/booksearch.html

(4) For Nüshu images:

https://image.baidu.com/search/index?tn=baiduimage&ct=201326592&lm=1&cl=2&ie=gb
18030&word=%C5%AE%CA%E9&fr=ala&ala=1&alatpl=adress&pos=0&hs=2&xthttps=11
1111

(5) https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%A5%B3%E4%B9%A6/608945?fr=aladdin
Chapter 3
China's High-Speed Trains. America,
Where are You?

Introduction

China has the world's longest high-speed rail (HSR) network with some
38,000 kilometers in operation, (1) which comprises nearly 70% of all the
world's high-speed lines (2) and more than three times that of the entire
European Union. (3) China has more than 2,500 high-speed trains in
operation, more than all the rest of the world combined, (4) and it also has
the fastest trains in operation anywhere, (5) with several generations now
operating at speeds between 350 Km/h and 400 Km/h. Shanghai's Maglev is
still the fastest operating train in the world, (6) with sustained speeds of 430
Km/h. China's rail system carries about 3.5 billion passengers per year,
nearly 70% of these on high-speed trains. During the 40 days of China's
Spring Festival (Chinese New Year), passenger volume reached a peak of
more than 400 million.
 China’s High-Speed Rail Network

The Chinese government planned the HSR program in part to compress

passenger travel on these dedicated tracks and free much of the slower
existing rail system for freight, to remove trucks from the nation's highways,
thus lowering costs and in turn making highways safer for automobiles. The
Shanghai-Nanjing route for example has 38 trains each way each day -
carrying perhaps 150,000 passengers, which frees a huge amount of track
time for freight. China's high-speed trains have dramatically reduced the
travel time between most major centers. Shanghai-Beijing is down from 12
hours to 4; Shanghai-Nanjing from 4 hours to 1; Wuhan to Guangzhou from
14 hours to only 3 hours.

There are always potential difficulties establishing routes due to the number
of communities to serve and the consequent number of stops - which negate
the advantage of high-speed trains. China seems to have arrived at an
excellent solution. As an example, the 275 Km. route from Shanghai to
Nanjing serves 6 communities between the two terminal stations, with some
trains on this route travelling on an express basis and making no stops (1
hour), with others stopping at one or several cities on route, with different
trains making different combinations of stops (1.5 hours). This has proven
to be a convenient method to serve all cities on the route while still
maintaining low average travel times.

Many of the statistics and other information available online on China's (and
other) train travel are inaccurate at best, one website claiming China in 2019
had 1.4 trillion train passengers. Even Statista is quite inaccurate, confusing
test runs of experimental trains with regular operating speeds of scheduled
rail. (7) France's TGV is listed at its maximum one-time test speed of 575
Km/h, when it operates at only 300 Km/h. Statista has operating speeds
wrong too, listing China's Fuxing at 418 Km and Hexie at 486 Km/h, which
normally operate at only 300 and 350 Km/h although they have proven
capable of operating at these higher sustained speeds.

Train and Passenger Classes

China has three generations of high-speed trains in operation: G, D, and C.

The G-trains are the fastest commercial-use high-speed trains in the world
with speeds of 350 Km/h to 400 Km/h. The D-trains operate at 250 Km/h
and the first-generation C at 200 Km/h. Below this, there are still the 'normal'
trains with designations of Z, T, K, N and more. The Z, T and K trains run at
160 Km/h, 140 and 120. Slower trains are used for short rural trips where
time is not so important.

These train alphabets are not nothing. I once took a G-train from Shanghai
to Haining (the world-famous leather market), a trip of maybe 30 minutes if
I recall correctly. I didn't have a return ticket since I wasn't certain of my
return time, so I simply asked the wicket lady to put me on "the next train
to Shanghai". That was a big mistake. N-train. Ten kilometers per hour on
the flat, much less uphill. That train stopped at every town, village, pig farm
and strawberry patch on its way to Shanghai, and many times we had to pull
off the track to permit a faster train to go by. Two and half hours to return
home. I wondered why the ticket was so cheap. The kind of mistake you
make only once.

I would note too that punctuality is a hallmark of Chinese transportation

generally, this certainly applying to the HSR network. If the schedule states
the departure time as 11:02, then at 11:02 the doors silently close and the
train is moving. I've experienced a few departure delays, typically due to an
arrival that is late, but usually by only 5 or 10 minutes. I don't have available
the percentage of on-time departures and arrivals but it must be in the high
90s.

These high-speed trains typically have cars that are First-Class, Second-
Class and Business Class, and trains not dedicated to short runs have sleeper
cars which are very clean and perfectly comfortable even in older trains, the
later generations offering lovely duvets, a separate TV for each bunk,
electrical outlets, lights, Wi-Fi. Regular sleepers have four bunks to a room
while the highest grade has only two berths to a compartment, suitable for
couples, and equipped with a sofa, a wardrobe, and private bathroom.
Sleepers typically carry a 25% or 30% cost premium over regular seats.

Business Class

These offer a pleasant alternative to air travel for the typically rushed and
pressurised one-day business trips, for example from Shanghai to
Guangzhou or Hong Kong. We board our train in the evening after dinner, do
a bit of work or watch TV, and awake at 7:00 AM downtown at our
destination, with enough time for breakfast before our first meeting. On the
return trip, we have a leisurely dinner with friends, board the train across
the street, and awake at 7:00 AM back in Shanghai. With two full nights'
sleep, there is no jet lag and no residual fatigue.

Here are some typical ticket prices:

G-train

Beijing-Shanghai, 1,350 Kms; 350 Km/h (4 hours)

2nd Class, 550 RMB ($80)

1st Class, 900 RMB ($135)

Business Class, 1,700 ($250)

D-Train

Kunming-Lijiang, 500 Kms; 250 Km/h (2 hours)

2nd Class, 220 RMB ($30)

1st Class, 350 RMB ($50)

C-Train

Beijing-Tianjin, 125 Kms; 200 Km/h (1 hour+)

2nd Class, 55 RMB ($8)

1st Class, 90 RMB ($13)

It's almost impossible to compare train fares with the US because in China
the fares vary only by distance and train type. Amtrak has a fare schedule
that on first approach appears occult, apparently following the convoluted
airline model of changing fares by time of departure and other secret
paranormal factors, so a particular price could be almost anywhere. On some
routes, twice the distance costs half the price. Still, they appear to be much
higher than in China by a factor of perhaps 5 or more.

China's Maglev Trains

Shanghai's 430 Kph Maglev Train

The first Maglev train in China was a Siemens design installed in Shanghai,
with service beginning in 2004. It was until recently the world's only
regularly-scheduled operating Maglev (at 430 Km/h), but now they are
becoming common in China. Maglev technology is simple in principle at low
speeds, but smoothness and stability at high speed are exceptionally
complicated. Maglevs have a higher level of safety in that they cannot
be derailed since they 'wrap around' the track, and maintenance
costs are low compared to rail trains because there is no wear on the
track bed and few moving parts to degrade or require maintenance
and replacement.

Chinese engineers initially produced quite successful low-speed Maglevs (200

Km/h) entirely on their own IP, for use throughout China as city trains, done
to gain experience and develop their own proprietary designs and
technology. These trains are now operating in Beijing, Changsha, and other
cities, running on short local routes. There are few other Maglev trains in
existence. Korea built a Maglev track to shuttle visitors at the Daejeon Expo,
which still runs the few kilometers between the Expo Park and the National
Science Museum, but it is very slow, and another in 2016 that runs only a
few kilometers between the airport and a subway station, also very slow.
Japan built its first "commercial maglev line" in 2005, with a route less than
10 kilometers and a maximum speed of only 100 Km/h - about the same as
Shanghai's new subway lines.

China's 600 Km/h Maglev

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-yJjIoZ11M
In addition to billions poured into R&D for regular HSR trains, Chinese
engineers continued their Maglev research at a brisk pace, and have pushed
Maglev technology to the point where China is now beginning commercial
production of a fabulous 600 Km/h (nearly 400 Mph) Maglev which will
replace traditional high-speed rail on many routes. (8) (9) Engineers spent
much time on wind tunnel testing of the design of the locomotives and cars
to reduce air resistance to a minimum, greatly assisting both high speed and
stability. Chinese engineers have managed, again on their own IP, to bring
down the cost for this very fast train to only two-thirds that of regular high-
speed trains. This new Maglev will help to fill the gap between regular HSR
and airplanes that fly at 900 Km/h or more, and it is likely that this gap will
be closed further.

The Changes

It is now legendary that when the Chinese government set its mind to an
objective, it doesn't waste time. Everything you have read above has
happened in only the past 16 years.

"At the beginning of the 21st century China had no high-speed railways. Slow
and often uncomfortable trains plodded across this vast country, with low
average speeds making journeys such as Shanghai-Beijing a test of travel
endurance. Today, it's a completely different picture. [China] has . . . the
world's largest network of high-speed railways, and all have been
completed since 2008." (10)

An aside: A Brief Note on Subways

Subways are not exactly high-speed rail, although China's new trains are
pushing the envelope in this area as well, at least up to 100 Km/h (almost
as fast as American high-speed trains). However, another example of the
Chinese not wasting time when they decide to do something. Shanghai and
other major cities have set an objective that every place within the inner
cities is within about 5 city blocks of a subway station. Here is a list of a few
major cities with the current length of subway track and the time required to
reach that level: (11)

London 131 years, 400 Kms.

Paris 122 years, 225 Kms.

Berlin 119 years, 148 Kms.

New York 113 years, 399 Kms.

Shanghai 28 years, 900 Kms.

The Pleasures of Train Travel

One of the great advantages of HSR (High-Speed Rail) train travel compared
to flying is the saving in wasted time. A flight in most any country normally
involves a one-hour trip to the airport with a requirement to arrive at least
1.5 hours prior to departure which is frequently subject to delays. At the
arrival end, there is always the seemingly long wait to deplane, the long walk
to the baggage carousels and the exits, then the one hour or more trip
downtown.

When we take into account the commute and the necessary pre-departure
allowance for check-in and security clearance and the 2-Km walk to the
departure gate, then the post-arrival delays and the commute downtown at
our destination, trains are equal to flying in trips up to 1,500 Kms, and much
faster than flying for shorter trips while also being less expensive. The
frequency of departures, at least between major centers in China is
astonishing, the Shanghai-Beijing route having some 75 or 80 HSR trains
each way each day, often leaving less than 10 minutes apart with as many
as 2,000 passengers (two trains linked into 16 cars). Many other routes are
similar. The same is true with airlines in China, with flights seemingly
departing from everywhere to everywhere every 30 minutes or so.

In China (and in most cities everywhere), the railway stations are downtown
so the commute is minimal, one arriving at the station with luggage in hand
only 20 or 30 minutes before departure. There is no ‘check-in' process as
with the airlines, only the usual security check and luggage scanners when
entering the station where you can spend time in comfortable waiting rooms
or simply find the correct platform and board your train. Even though many
stations are huge, walking distances are normally much shorter than in most
airports. At the destination, since that station is also downtown, taxis and
subways are conveniently at hand. Also, in many cities airports and train
stations are next door to each other, conveniently facilitating travel
continuation.

Another advantage of train travel is the considerable convenience and

comfort, trains being much superior in both categories with an absence of
pressure and time apprehension. Trains eliminate most unpleasant
elements of air travel, with the attraction of being able to see the
countryside. On a plane, we are forced to adhere to a rigid schedule: the
time for coffee or a meal, the time to close the window curtains and darken
the cabin so the staff can rest. If the food cart is out, you cannot get up to
walk around or go to the bathroom. Everything seems regulated and under
pressure. Leaving your seat is often a major inconvenience.

By contrast, on a train you are free to do as you please. Your luggage is

accessible at any time, the food carts come by regularly, the dining car is
always there, seats have twice the leg room, the aisles are wide enough to
accommodate passengers; everything much more relaxed, pleasant, and
enjoyable. And you have the advantage of constant Wi-Fi and GPS signals,
with AC power and USB outlets usually available at your seat.

China's high-speed trains are very quiet, without wind noise, and mercifully
free of the incessant hum of aircraft engines and, with the flawlessly-welded
rails, even the soft clacking of the rails is gone (I rather miss that). The seats
are as wide or wider than airline business class, they recline partially (recline
fully in business class) and, with the comfort and silence, it is very easy to
sleep on a train. I would add that you are more alert (and healthier) on a
train because aircraft are pressurised to 8,000 feet; you don't normally go
above 10,000 feet without supplementary oxygen.

They are also very steady. China has the highest standards for stabilising
high-speed trains in their longitudinal, lateral and vertical dimensions, a rail
expert stating "It is no exaggeration to say the Beijing-Shanghai rail lines
were built with the highest standards in the modern world. China leads the
world in rail stability." Here is a Xinhua video of one of China's high-speed
trains where a coin rests on its edge on a windowsill for more than 8 minutes
before it finally falls over – this at 350 Kms per hour. (12)

https://youtu.be/fumYdO9XknE

A Bit of Background

"High-speed rail" emerged first in Japan in the early 1960s with the
construction of the Shinkansen 'bullet train' which wasn't really all that fast
at only 160 Km/h, but such speeds were unheard of in those days and the
train was a world marvel. The European countries, led by Germany
(Siemens) and France (Alstom), followed in the 1980s, with Canada's
Bombardier joining the group at about the same time. Nothing much was
done outside of Europe, though the Europeans did embrace high-speed train
travel and made good design progress.

It was widely assumed initially that there was no market for train travel, that
the world would follow the North American model and rely primarily on the
auto with the airlines as long-distance backup. But more than 40 years ago
Chinese government officials saw the potential and disagreed, and began
planning what would become the world's largest HSR network, with
enormous sums invested in the project. One expert wrote, "Chinese
engineers have exhibited enormous ingenuity and creativity and are still
aggressively pushing the rail technology envelope."

It is generally agreed that China's success in high-speed rail development

and its cost reduction, has resulted in "validating the feasibility of widespread
adoption and greater affordability. Developing countries are particularly
grateful that China has brought the cost of HSR to affordable levels." One
expert wrote,

"It appears now that China will dominate the HSR market for the foreseeable
future."

And indeed, developing countries are increasingly attracted to the prospect

of China's affordable HSR trains as an impetus for their own economic
development. At the time of writing, Chinese railway firms were building a
high-speed line in Turkey linking Ankara and Istanbul, another project in
Venezuela, and expecting contracts in Brazil, Russia, Saudi Arabia and
Poland.

Railway routes in China are expanding to mesh with new routes in Vietnam
and Thailand, and there are plans to extend a route all the way to Singapore.
Chinese rail officials are in the planning stages of a high-speed rail route
passing through Xinjiang Province in Western China, through Kyrgyzstan and
other ‘Stans', connecting with lines in Turkey and proceeding Westward into
Europe.

It may soon be possible to travel by HSR all the way from Shanghai to London
– at a fraction of the cost of flying, and with far more comfort and the ability
to see maybe 15 countries on route.

Chinese engineers have said it is well within the limits of today's technology
to build a high-speed rail line between China and North America, the
line passing through Siberia, with a tunnel under the 55-mile Bering
Strait separating Russia from Alaska, then down the West Coast of
Canada and the US. It would then be possible to take a fast train from San
Diego to Paris and London. However, politics will make such a development
impossible.

Technology Transfer is not Free

Whenever the subject of technology transfer arises, there seems to always

surface a flurry of accusations about copying or stealing. Readers should
carefully note that China did not "steal" anyone's rail technology;
instead, it was all purchased. China paid billions of dollars for that
transfer of technology. It is the same in all important industries
today. China has the money, and is willing to pay handsomely for technology
it needs to further its development.

To compensate for a late start, the Chinese government began (in only 2004)
by purchasing rail technology abroad, signing agreements with Alstom and
Kawasaki to build HSR train sets for China in cooperation with local firms.
Kawasaki, who designed the original Hayate bullet train, signed a deal with
the Chinese ministry of Railways for the transfer of a full spectrum of HSR
technology. They began with Kawasaki manufacturing 50 HSR train sets in
Japan and exporting these to China fully-assembled, then progressed to
establishing factories in China where Kawasaki helped the Chinese
manufacturers to produce another 50 train sets locally. China also paid
Kawasaki for the training of manufacturing staff first in Japan and then at
the factories in China. This process carried a heavy price; the arrangement
with Kawasaki cost China around $800 million, plus countless millions for
training and many technology updates. The contract with Kawasaki included
"the transfer of the whole spectrum of technology and know-how for the
bullet train", so that these trains became in fact Chinese-owned IP.

With this experience under its belt, China then duplicated the process with
Siemens, Alstom and Bombardier, in similar deals for a full transfer of
technology and IP rights so that China could freely manufacture these train
sets domestically and sell them internationally. Similar to the procedure with
Kawasaki, Chinese engineers were sent to Europe for extended periods of
study and also had these firms assist China in establishing domestic
manufacturing facilities. All the firms trained Chinese engineers while helping
the country develop its own supply chain for train components, and all of this
involved several billions of dollars in fees.

But it wasn't all gravy because the Chinese rail companies paid billions of
dollars for was in fact old technology from those four companies. Knowing
the Chinese wanted to produce trains based entirely on their own IP and
technology, Kawasaki and Siemens in particular refused to sell their more
advanced products and would sell China only rail technology that was already
two or even three generations old. These foreign companies were actually
planning to take full control of China's vast market for HSR transportation,
expecting to fully supply the "the most ambitious rapid rail system in
history", with rewards in the billions.

That did not deter the Chinese. As a first step they disassembled, evaluated,
and combined all those technologies into one train, combining the best
features of each. Then, they applied their formidable R&D abilities to improve
and enhance those features and create entirely new trains built exclusively
on Chinese-owned IP. The result was trains that were faster, smoother,
quieter, and less expensive than the newest generation of their former
suppliers. To say that the foreign firms underestimated the power of Chinese
innovation and the speed and quality of R&D in China, is an understatement
of some magnitude, with both Kawasaki and Siemens finding themselves left
at the starting gate only a few years later.

"The Western firms confused their head start with their R&D capacity,
attributing both to natural superiority, confidently assuming they were more
innovative rather than simply having begun earlier. The assumption was that
Japanese and German R&D capability coupled with their huge lead would
maintain an impassable gap and permit them to capture the entire Chinese
market." Their willingness to sell their technology was from an expectation
that the Chinese would need at least 30 years to absorb and implement it
before being ready to proceed on their own. The reality was somewhat
different: they found themselves having to compete with Chinese firms who
adapted and improved their technology and produced superior products only
three years later.

And Some Sellers Remorse

When China proved its ability to combine technologies from all firms and
create a new, superior product, the Japanese appeared quite bitter, Kawasaki
going so far as to claim that China's trains were just ‘tweaked versions' of its
original bullet train with minor variations to the exterior paint scheme and
interior trim.

Even nastier, Japan's Ministry of Transportation was quoted as

saying that Japanese trains could be just as fast, but China's trains
were faster only because the Chinese ignored safety and didn't care
how many people died.
Of course, the real problem was that it was impossible for Japan to compete
with China on international markets since they hoarded their technology for
too long and, by the time they changed their attitude, the world had passed
them by and their technology was old, with Chinese trains much nicer, 100
Km/h faster, and considerably less expensive. As someone wrote, "Marketing
is difficult when your only selling point is that the other guy's fast and
affordable trains are copies of your slow and expensive ones". Something
similar occurred with Shanghai's Maglev train.

Due to pride of authorship as with the Japanese, Siemens also refused to

consider a sale of technology, preferring to hold out for astonishingly high
prices of the finished product. The result was that Chinese engineers turned
their full R&D attention to Maglevs and Siemens now finds itself permanently
sidelined in the market.

World Leader in Construction Quality

China's HSR system is built to an intense high quality. Chinese high-speed

trains run on special dedicated, often elevated tracks laid on deep and
heavily-reinforced beds of high-density concrete with vertical and horizontal
deviations measured in millimeters, these tracks supported by massive
columns of high-strength concrete spaced very closely.

With high-speed trains there is no chugging uphill and racing downhill; HSR
tracks are, insofar as is humanly and technologically possible, a straight and
level line. Typically, a horizontal elevation is selected for a particular route,
with the rail bed maintaining this throughout the route. Depressions and
valleys are filled in with bridges, and mountains and hills are met with
tunnels.

This can be more difficult than appears at first glance. China has some
astonishingly-beautiful landscapes that are perfect for tourist admiration but
not so attractive to railway engineers. One such route is a line running
through beautiful but challenging mountainous terrain from Wuhan and
Yichang (the site of the Three Gorges Dam), to Wanzhou City, just East of
Chongqing. This was China’s most difficult railway to build and is the world's
most expensive railway, costing 60 million RMB (roughly US$10 million) for
each kilometer. It took a staggering seven years and 50,000 workers to
complete. Of the route’s total length of 380 Kms, 75% percent or 280 Kms,
consists of 253 bridges and 159 tunnels. Each and every kilometer of the
railway contains at least one bridge or one tunnel, most often one of each,
leading the locals to refer to the railway as the "tunnel and bridge museum".

China’s tunnel and bridge museum

It is ironic that this railway was meant to operate at the highest speeds of
the day, but the terrain proved so difficult and consumed so much
construction time that when completed the system was two generations old.
And, given the immense difficulties, there is nobody interested in starting
again to update the track and systems. But still, this railway reduced the
Yichang-Wanzhou travel time from 22 hours to just five hours, bringing new
opportunities for residents who live in the steep and remote Wuling
mountains. One local resident said, "We used to pay 100 Yuan (US$15) for
a one-day bus trip to Yichang before. Now, 30 Yuan can get us there in two
hours." I covered this in a brief article which you may enjoy reading. (13)

A Note on Train Safety

Chinese high-speed trains are often completely separated from the

landscape, running on dedicated tracks elevated well above roadways, with
no level crossings or cross-traffic, and thus no possibility of the common
variety of vehicle accidents. These high-speed trains descend from their
elevated perch only when approaching a station, utilising regular trackage
for this purpose but only at very low speeds, thus permitting transportation
literally from city center to city center. You can see the elevation and extreme
support in the photo. There are of course sections of trackage at grade level
in areas where safety is assured, but extreme precautions have been taken
to avoid roadway crossings which are usually handled by either elevations or
tunnels.

As with every country, China does of course have its share of train accidents,
with older trains derailing from landslides or other causes but, given the
country's massive rail network, the number of trains operating and the sheer
number of trips taken, the country's accident record is actually remarkably
low, as are the fatalities.

China's railway system has dozens of installations across the country where
every high-speed train is constantly monitored for many metrics like speed,
axle temperatures, weather conditions, and obviously also for precise
location and track position of every train.

Their focus on safety is extreme. The country's high-speed system has

had only one accident since inception (at Wenzhou in 2011), one that was
eerily reminiscent of Boeing's 737 Max, where a major programming change
was not covered in the operating manuals for the Japanese signaling
systems. The Japanese, apparently feeling a concern that the Chinese could
reverse-engineer the systems code, deliberately omitted some of the
operating functions from the manuals, and so provided faulty documentation
that left the Chinese operators with an imperfect and incomplete
understanding of the signals systems.

In this case, a train was hit by lightning and was stalled on the track. When
this occurred, Chinese engineers immediately knew something was wrong
and followed the operating manual, but they had no way of knowing the
system was telling them that a train was stalled on the same track, because
the manual was incomplete. This was the actual cause of the crash.

It was true that local officials in Wenzhou panicked and stupidly tried to cover
up the fact of the crash, but that doesn't change the cause. I would note
further that this was by no means the first time Chinese engineers had been
deliberately misled on either the function or operation of IP they had bought
and paid for. There are many tales of foreign engineers telling outright lies
about the purpose or function of various components, leaving the Chinese to
either figure it out for themselves or discover through adverse events the
actual purpose.

This accident was widely-reported in the Western media, but only to gloat at
China's misfortune. Forbes and the WSJ (and of course the NYT) ran articles
that were particularly nasty, with the Carnegie Endowment publishing what
seemed a very stupid political article claiming the train accident "Shows the
Dangers of China's Nuclear Power Ambitions". (14)

The point appeared to be that, since China had one rail accident, they could
not be trusted to ever build anything. The child-writers at the Economist
gleefully ran an article with the cute title of "Whoops!" and, in another
context, the Economist wrote, "To err is human. To gloat, divinely satisfying."
Exactly.

I would also add that on the event of that accident, the US media were so
delirious with schadenfreude that few bothered to report the actual cause. It
happens that most every opportunity to criticise China will be transformed
into a proven failure of China's one-party government.

In reporting on this train accident, the entire Western media eagerly pinned
the blame not on a Japanese signals failure but on China's one-party system.
But Wikipedia lists 70 pages of rail accidents for the US alone, having several
major and a bunch of minor ones every year. Since theology must be
universal to be credible, it seems clear where the fault lies for all these
terrible disasters: democracy causes train crashes.

The topic of rail safely seems heavily politicised. For some unknown reason,
the Western news media persist in promulgating a fiction that Japan (unlike
China) has a perfect train safety record, but the truth is that Japan's bullet
trains derail and crash with some regularity. Wikipedia obligingly provides a
full listing of train accidents in China all on one page, but one must work very
hard to find a similar convenient listing for Japan.
Kawasaki Meets Godzilla

"Another Japanese high-speed train crash".

Rail Infrastructure is a Public Good, not a Private Benefit.

Due to its unique government structure, China is able to plan and amend its
entire travel infrastructure as a whole, considering air, rail and road, taking
into account only the benefits to the entire country rather than having to
appease a multitude of private interests. HSR trains have cut travel time so
dramatically that airline services on many routes have been suspended in
whole or in part. The airlines may not always be pleased, but China's
transportation system is designed for the maximum overall benefit to the
nation, not to serve specific private interests or friends of the Administration.

China has not succumbed to the sometimes-intense privatisation pressure

from Western bankers and has retained control of its infrastructure, an
enormous blessing for rapid and efficient development. Chinese leaders
recognised from the beginning that economic development follows
transportation, and thus maintaining control of the transportation
infrastructure derives from a determination to distribute the benefits of
development to the entire nation. The reality is that not all infrastructure is
destined to be financially profitable – profitability being the only measure by
Western standards. A privately-developed railway system would be built only
on the most profitable routes, those likely to amass billions for their owners
but that would leave perhaps half the nation destitute for transportation and
sentenced to perpetual poverty. Thus, railway privatisation would saddle
China’s central government with the costs of building and supporting all the
unprofitable routes without benefitting from the profitable segments. This is
one of Western capitalism’s main mantras: privatise the profits and socialise
the losses. If you're interested in this topic, here is an essay you might enjoy
reading: Private Enterprise and the National Good. (15)

In the absence of competing interests, a nationwide plan can be conceived,

examined, discussed and approved in a much shorter time than in countries
with a different system, and implementation times much reduced as well.
China's new HSR line from Shanghai to Beijing, a distance of about 1,300
Kms was a masterpiece of unobstructed planning and execution.

For construction, the government hired almost 140,000 workers to build

multiple sections simultaneously, the entire project completed in two years
at a cost of less than $20 billion. By contrast, in the US, the cost of an HSR
line along the Eastern seaboard, a distance only half as long, has been
estimated at $120 billion and might require 20 years to complete.

The province of Alberta in Canada is considering an HSR line of only 300 Kms
connecting the two major cities, yet the planning stage is expected to take 5
years and cost $50 million; if approved, the subsequent construction process
is projected to require another 5 years at least. The interim negotiations for
right of way, the bidding processes, the dealing with all the various private
interests as well as the cities involved, are expected to add 5 years to the
process.

It is critical to note that economic development follows transportation.

Countries like Canada and the US would never have developed without the
cross-country transportation systems being in place. But it is almost certainly
too late for both Canada and the US with high-speed rail, too many decades
of auto-dependent development condemning both countries to irreversible
transport deficiencies. In the US, General Motors (aided by a few others)
managed to convince the individual states to abandon all investment (and
maintenance!) in railways and other public transport, and instead make huge
public expenditures on highways that were useful only to those who owned
private automobiles, effectively stranding all other citizens at home with no
way to go anywhere and virtually forcing everyone to buy a car. This is not
trivial, but instead a critical historical narrative.

One observer wrote that "A theme likely to be emphasised in history will be
the enormous strategic error made by both the US and Canada in enslaving
themselves to individual motorized transportation." Here is an article I
strongly urge you to read: (16)

As with most other subjects, the Internet is not lacking uninformed nonsense
on HSR trains. One US source tells us, "The United States has no HSR
corridors because high‐speed rail is an obsolete technology that requires
expensive and dedicated infrastructure that will serve no purpose other than
moving passengers who could more economically travel by highway or air."
The preceding comment is incorrect in too many ways to count, ignoring the
political factors that are actually responsible for the absence of HSR in the
US. Rail is inevitably the least expensive form of land travel (except for
bicycles), is provably less expensive than driving (sometimes much less),
and generally less expensive than air travel.

The American Experience

In 2012 and 2013 the US wallowed in an anguish created by envy of China's
high-speed rail network, America's rickety and accident-prone rail system
suffering badly in comparison. When it became apparent that the Americans
could never duplicate China's success and, confronted with the imminent
failure of their ambition to join the world of high-speed rail, the Americans
revised the definition of high-speed trains from 400 Km/h to 250 and then
150, before abandoning their quest altogether.

Then, rationalisation through the uniquely American moral lens of politics

and religion: "Our slow rail network is the price we pay for the great
things about America like our democratic political system and our
freedom of religion."

An internet reader commented: "The American failure to realise an HSR

system is not because China has better leadership, vision, planning and
execution, and the wisdom to sacrifice short-term benefits and minority
interests for the long-term gain and the greater good; it's because Americans
have democracy and love freedom. The bickering and indecision, the
squabbling, the vacillation and eventual paralysis of all levels of US
government on this issue, an impossibility in any sane country, are actually
a badge of merit in America, evidence of their virtuous freedom. So, let China
build its high-speed trains. The more trains they have, the less free they
become. Americans would never be so foolish as to sacrifice freedom for good
transportation or democracy for roads and bridges."

I don't know the author of this brief passage below, but I want to share the
quote with you because he captured perfectly the American situation:

"At the end of 2013, California was still hoping to build the nation's first high-
speed rail line, an 830 Kms track from Los Angeles to San Francisco, that
would be scheduled for completion in 2029 (more than 16 years) and would
cost about $70 billion not including the inevitable cost over-runs. By contrast,
China built its 1,320 Kms Shanghai-Beijing HSR line in only three years at a
cost of 200 billion Yuan – about $32 billion. So, the US high-speed train – if
it's ever actually built – will be 60% slower than China's, will take five times
as long to build and cost almost five times
as much for an equivalent distance. Of course, the Americans could just ask
China to build their HSR in only 18 months at a cost of only $20 billion, but
that would mean admitting Chinese superiority, and that means the US
will never have high-speed rail."

Amtrak is the only intercity passenger rail in the US that operates at speeds
higher than freight trains, but hasn't been very popular, with its highest
passenger numbers at around 30 million in a year compared to China's nearly
4 billion. And Amtrak has never made a profit, requiring government
subsidisation of about $1 billion per year. I have no explanation for the lack
of popularity of train travel in the US. It isn't primarily a love affair with the
auto, since Europeans also love to drive but also love train travel. At least
some US rail facilities are acceptable, so it would seem the problem is due to
a sum of other factors.

Amtrak

Amtrak is a very strange duck, a high-speed wannabe that seems determined

to get most of the important things wrong and, if I can use an analogy, is
too busy reading to take the time to learn to speed-read. It is difficult to
make positive statements about the company because the underlying
negatives make positive statements seem almost surreal.
Recent media reports that the introduction of Amtrak's new Avelia Liberty
trains (If it's America, it's always 'liberty' or 'freedom') manufactured by
France's Alstom are facing yet another delay of 18 months, pushing the total
delay to more than three years. The cause? Surprising, to say the least. To
begin, under new instructions to ban everything Chinese, the company had
to turn to France to purchase their rolling stock, but what Amtrak has
purchased is 3 generations old in China, at the very bottom of anything that
today would be termed "high-speed rail", and is old in France as well. Reading
between the lines, it seems Alstom agreed to reproduce some older-
technology equipment to match America's abilities, but things haven't gone
so well.

According to Amtrak executives, the need for more testing is the cause of
things being behind schedule, with Amtrak citing "rigorous" testing "required
by federal regulations", somehow implying American safety standards of
exceptional rigor, but the details seem to tell a different story. In fact, a
review of the details reveals that the real cause was "the discovery of
compatibility problems with the Northeast Corridor tracks that prompted
modifications to the train design", as well as "an incompatibility with . . . its
catenary system" - which is the overhead electrical source that provides
power to the trains. (17)

If this isn't clear, Amtrak executives discovered, no doubt to their complete

amazement, that the trains they purchased didn't fit the tracks on which
those trains would run, nor could they connect with the available overhead
power sources. The spin placed on this by Amtrak executives was that "The
train had to be modified to work harmoniously with the infrastructure."
However, it wasn't an issue of 'working harmoniously', but of working at all.
Amtrak provided to Alstom the design necessities for 30 new train sets, which
were manufactured to those specifications but, when delivered, the company
discovered their design was so badly flawed that the new trains didn't match
the trackage or the power supply, and had to be modified. This sounds like
a Three Stooges episode or a Jackie Gleason comedy. How is it possible for
thinking persons to design and manufacture trains that can't fit their own
tracks?

According to media reports these new Avelia trains are built under an FRA
rule that establishes "new safety standards for high-speed trains, . . . to
allow for operation at the highest speeds on shared tracks". The intended
insinuation is that these new so-called safety standards are more rigid, but
it seems they are actually more relaxed, to accommodate Amtrak's inability
(or unwillingness) to comply.

Part of the problem is that Amtrak runs almost exclusively on what they
euphemistically call "shared tracks", which means running on 60 year-old rail
beds that are used primarily by slow freight trains, and that Amtrak wants
to run its trains at speeds much higher than are safe. Hence the "new safety
standards" created by the FRA "to allow for operation at the highest speeds".

Amtrak Also Meets Godzilla

"Most American (rail) infrastructure was built in the early to mid-20th century
(1920-1950), the continent having been simultaneously wired for electricity
and phone service while constructing the interstate highway system along
with thousands of bridges, tunnels and more. But the US has spent almost
no money on maintenance and repairs on any of this infrastructure for almost
60 years now. The situation today is dire and, in many instances, critical, but
money is no longer available (except for Israel and Ukraine).

Derailments and other accidents occur almost daily on America’s dilapidated

and unsafe rail network which, like the highways, has received only urgent
patching rather than proper maintenance and repair." (18) (19) (20)"In
June of 2013 an Interstate bridge on a main commercial corridor between
Seattle, Washington and Vancouver, Canada, collapsed and fell into the river
below after being hit by a truck. This was not a high-speed collision; the
truck simply bumped one of the main support pillars at low speed, but the
weakened and dilapidated pillar broke from the strain and, without that extra
bit of support, the entire bridge immediately collapsed. In prior
examinations, the heavily-travelled bridge had not only been rated as
functionally obsolete but structurally deficient and requiring replacement.
This is only one of thousands; the great majority of the physical
infrastructure of the US is in a similar condition, involving railroads,
highways, dams, bridges and more. More than 160,000 bridges in the US are
officially categorized as dangerous, at risk of collapse, with such collapses
now regularly occurring. (21) (22) (23) The same is true for subways and
elevated inner-city rail systems like that in New York City; rickety, dirty,
dangerous, and looking for a reason to collapse." (24)

Welcome to New York

Back to Amtrak, the delivery delay "hiccups" will force the company to keep
its "legacy fleet" in service, with this in turn causing severe revenue losses
from the oddly-unexpected need for extra "mechanical investments" to
"reduce train malfunctioning". In non-propaganda English, this means that
Amtrak's old, one-foot-in-the-grave, trains needing badly to be scrapped
before an imminent fatal collapse, will now require substantial maintenance
and repair to hold out until executives can accurately measure the width of
their tracks and modify the new trains they've purchased.This is not nothing.
Amtrak experiences operating difficulties we don't even read about in comic
books. One Amtrak passenger train in Maryland recently broke apart while
traveling, with some of the passenger cars separating from the rest of the
train at 125 mph and going on their own merry way. (25) Until this, I
thought I'd heard everything. Amtrak executives said, "We are currently
investigating the cause of the car separation." I guess I would be doing that,
too.

Would you like to travel at 250 Km/h on this track? Amtrak wants to.

But the most important issue is that no one in the US, neither the
government nor the railways, seems prepared to maintain and repair
rail tracks and beds to an acceptable standard, much less having the
foresight to build dedicated trackage meant for high-speed trains.
Attempting to run trains at speeds of 200 mph on 60 year-old un-maintained
tracks that were built for freight trains at a maximum of 50 mph, is not only
reckless but downright stupid. Yet, this is where we are. And Amtrak's legacy
of accidents and crashes is all the evidence necessary.

Train speeds are constantly an issue with Amtrak. We can read much hype
about Amtrak trains traveling at 200 or even 250 Km/h (150 mph), but in
real life they barely average 75 or 80 mph, and this is the fastest train in
America. This is partly the fault of the tracks, since Amtrak operates almost
exclusively on freight train tracks and 'shares' the tracks with these freight
trains, and is often held up by them. I'm told it is quite common for an Amtrak
train to get stuck behind a slow freight train. (26) But even with all of this,
very few of Amtrak's locomotives have the ability to exceed 110 mph or 175
Km/h, which is well below anything considered as high-speed rail today.

DC to Boston is roughly 700 Kms or 435 miles. Amtrak's Acela Express Train
2150 takes nearly 7 hours, for an average speed of only 100 Km/h, or 60
miles per hour, not exactly high-speed. That's not entirely the fault of the
train, since it makes ten stops on the route, a case of bad planning if I ever
saw one. As mentioned above, China's solution to this is to have some trains
run on an express basis with no stops between the two terminals while others
make several different stops each, thus still serving all the communities but
with a much higher average travel time.

Similarly, Amtrak's record of on-time arrivals is abysmal. According to

Amtrak's 2020 Annual Report, little more than 55% of trains arrived on time,
and this can be blamed almost entirely on poor management. If China and
many European countries can have on-time rates of up to 98%, so can
anyone who knows how to plan.

Richard Branson's Brightline

However, unknown to the world at large, America does indeed have a "high-
speed train", Richard Branson's new 'Brightline', that runs 100 Kms from
Miami to West Palm Beach in Florida. According to the promotions, these are
"sleek, neon-yellow trains, which travel at speeds of up to 127 Kms/hr (!!!)".

To be fair to the Americans, they initially promoted this as a "higher-speed

train", a small but worthy concession to reality that quickly disappeared. To
be fair to the sleek, neon-yellow train, it is quite unable to reach its
advertised top speed and in fact seldom reaches even 100 Km/h, faster than
a freight train, but not by much.

Also unknown to the world, this American version of HSR has, in its first few
years since inauguration, had numerous derailments, scores of accidents,
and caused well over 100 deaths. In what should have been a surprising
development, several of the accidents and deaths occurred during the train's
initial test run, after which it was inexplicably cleared for service. But perhaps
no matter because Brightline assured us that "safety remains the company's
top priority".

Interestingly, the US Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) data show 60%

fewer deaths than the media reports of actual fatalities because (if you can
believe this) they inexplicably (and almost certainly unjustifiably) classify
most of the deaths as "possible suicides", and then sanctimoniously impose
"reporting restrictions intended to safeguard privacy". (27)

If this isn't clear, the FRA is claiming that 60% of Brightline train accident
deaths were from motorists deliberately stopping on the tracks in order to
kill themselves. Given all the options for committing suicide, this would not
be my first choice. How can American authorities fabricate such
preposterous lies and why would the media support them?

Also, according to the FRA, "a Brightline locomotive derailed … at four miles
per hour …". The report continued that this was the second derailment within
two months, the main cause being that this US "high-speed train" is using
tracks and rail beds built more than 60 years ago, intended only for slow-
moving freight trains, and have not been maintained.

Another Brightline “Assisted Suicide”

In an astonishing display of arrogance and defiance, Brightline refused to

confirm the accident for nearly six months, even during sworn testimony
to a Senate Committee, then called the derailment "minor", and dismissed
the critics' concern as a "baseless fear tactic". (28) These issues are
noteworthy in several ways: Running "higher-speed" trains through level
crossings (at ground level), is reckless in the extreme and begging for
fatalities. Even more, running passenger trains on dilapidated trackage and
freight-rail beds that haven't been maintained for 60 years, is worse.

A second item is so illustrative of a pathological quirk that appears to exist

only in the US. From Brightline's home webpage:

"Hand-stitched leather seats. Sit 2 or 4 together at a table. Relax pre-

departure in our first-class SELECT lounge with an ever-changing lineup of
enticing bites and beverages. Lounge business services including iPads, a
scanner & printer. Access to conference rooms in our stations (a $50/hr
value). Complimentary onboard Wi-Fi." (29)
Hand-stitched leather seats and an ever-changing lineup of enticing bites on
a train that derails at 4 miles per hour and has already killed more than 100
people. This is the way Americans design their cars. Appearance is
everything and substance is nothing. American auto designers hold
frequent market tests where they introduce citizens to new automobiles, the
purpose being to see if the new degradations in quality and safety can pass
these public tests undetected. A so-called high-speed train running on rickety
tracks and derailing at 4 mph is glossed over for leather seats and Wi-Fi.
Only in America. One internet commenter wrote, "This proves that Americans
are too stupid for high-speed rail."

“How many more deaths do we need to read about before something

is done.”

Another news report stated that - according to the same FRA - this train has
had "the most fatalities along the corridor in that time period". (30) (31)
The situation is so bad that there are at least two Florida law firms now
specialising in Brightline accident victim litigation. (32)

A recent article in the Orlando Weekly called "almost-high-speed Brightline

the deadliest train line mile-for-mile in the U.S.", (33) because it apparently
has the worst death rate of all 821 train lines in the US. Yet Branson plans
to extend the line to Disneyworld and has obtained billions in tax-free bonds
for the expansion, but there are current lawsuits to prevent this, determined
"to ensure it never reaches Orlando". (34) Nevertheless, and again, "the
service intends to use existing freight lines that have not handled regular
passenger service in nearly a half-century" and which haven't been
maintained for 60 years. (35) (36) Only in America.

This last item may contain research worthy of a Master's thesis, this being a
newspaper headline on one of the derailments: "Brightline accidents tragic,
but is railway really to blame?" (37) The article stated that this "innovative
high-speed passenger rail service has been in operation for only about a
week and a half, and already people have died", then went on to say that
"most readers" put the blame not on the railway but on "the decision-making
of people".
 Does This Look Like a High-Speed Train to You?

There was an almost irresistible poignancy about this claim. In reading the
reports, I could not shake the feeling of listening to a small child,
disappointed at some failure but lacking the maturity to see reality as it was,
and making an excuse typical of an 8 year-old mind. I believe we could
argue this to be the consciousness level of the typical adult American.

Epilogue
There was a sadness in my heart while writing much of this article. Putting
aside any fleeting pleasure in criticising Americans, there was a kind of
despondent cheerlessness in a realisation of what might have been but can
never be. Today, not only Chinese and Europeans are enjoying the manifold
benefits and pleasures of high-speed train travel, but also citizens of
Vietnam, Turkey, Venezuela, Brazil, Singapore, Thailand, Poland, Russia,
Kyrgyzstan, Saudi Arabia and many more. American citizens surely deserve
this fine mode of travel as much as anyone else, and yet their own heavily-
politicised and corrupt society prevents it, and there is no solution.

The American government could easily make friends with China and have
genuine high-speed trains (400 and 600 Km/h) everywhere, but Captain
America doesn't want to make friends. He would rather be the bully on
the block and knock someone down, rather than building himself up. The US
sacrificed real 5G communications for its entire population for the
pleasure of hurting China and trashing Huawei, and to protect the
continuing freedom to spy on them.

This is happening in so many areas, all with the same cause. It has been
partly comical but mostly painful to watch the US during the past 8 or so
years, agonising over the prospect of high-speed railways and seeing so
many efforts collapse due solely to petty political ideology. It is astonishing
that such a large and important nation could have such immature
and even infantile politicians - at every level.

In only one or two decades, China has become a world leader or at least a
peer in so many areas - IT, telecommunications, high-speed trains,
quantum communications, DNA synthesising and mapping, green
energy sources, space exploration, astronomy, mind-machine
interfaces, small drones, aircraft production, 3-D printing.

The Chinese have built their own space station, photographed every square
meter of the moon, launched their own GPS system, built the deepest deep-
sea submersibles, and much more, to say nothing of all the massive
engineering projects. None of this was an accident and none of it happened
overnight; all were the result of planning begun 20, 30, and even 40
years ago, the results only now becoming evident.

The Americans especially, but really all Western countries, could never
accomplish such speedy and successful development due primarily to the
political system which prevents long-term planning and which is so indebted
to a small group of elites that the common good and the welfare of the nation
are lost. The only proposals that survive are those permitting a small group
of bankers and industrialists to feed at the public trough, while all those
benefiting the public are stillborn. Planning cannot be done for projects
beyond the life of the current government, which might be only 4 years and
often less, because the opposing party would most likely kill any project,
either on ideological principles or to prevent credit being given to "the
opposition".

And, on the high-speed trains themselves, it seems that no one in American

government or industry has the good sense and political will to say not only
"Let's do it" but "Let's do it right." And that means a serious commitment to
long-term adult-level planning of high-speed travel and the investment
required to build a dedicated support infrastructure that can handle it. The
continued pretense of having so-called "high-speed trains" running on
dilapidated 60 year-old freight tracks, will lead to nothing but disaster.

This entire process of Americans so desperate to "save face" is founded on a

delusion of superficiality we seem to find only in America: I paint my Pinto
red and pretend it’s a Ferrari.

Notes
(1)
https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/statistics/202101/10/content_WS5ffa36f3c6d0f72576
9438ad.html

China's high-speed rail lines top 37,900 km at end of 2020

(2) https://www.theb1m.com/video/the-unstoppable-growth-of-chinas-high-speed-rail-
network

The Unstoppable Growth of China's High-Speed Rail Network

(3) https://www.statista.com/topics/7534/high-speed-rail-in-china/

High-speed railway in China – statistics & facts

(4) https://www.chinadiscovery.com/china-high-speed-train-tours/high-speed-train-
facts.html

China High Speed Train Facts - Longest, Fastest & Craziest

(5) https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/07/worlds-high-speed-trains-railways/

These are the fastest trains in the world

(6) https://www.chinahighlights.com/shanghai/transportation/maglev-train.htm

Shanghai Maglev Train — The Fastest Train in the World

(7) https://www.statista.com/statistics/557186/high-speed-trains-maxmimum-speed/

World's fastest trains in 2021, ranked by record speed

(8) https://youtu.be/cuc03kxeHQs

China’s 600 Maglev Train; CCTV

(9) https://youtu.be/a7VjaEUFWxk

China’s 600 Maglev Train Rolled off the Production Line; CCTV 1:24

(10) https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_5eed36d754a03637b1ec2f3074f2e805

Past, present and future: The evolution of China's incredible high-speed rail network

(11) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems

List of Metro Systems

(12) https://youtu.be/fumYdO9XknE

Coin on Windowsill of Chinese High-Speed Train

(13) https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/3586/

From Shanghai to Chongqing: The World’s Most Expensive Railway

(14) https://carnegieendowment.org/2011/07/29/wenzhou-crash-shows-dangers-of-china-
s-nuclear-power-ambitions-pub-45213

Wenzhou Crash Shows the Dangers of China's Nuclear Power Ambitions

(15) https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/5652/

Private Enterprise and the National Good

(16) https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/the-american-love-affair-with-the-
automobile-the-unspoken-history-of-the-electric-car-december-09-2019/

The American Love Affair with the Automobile

(17) https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/04/13/amtrak-acela-trains-
delay/
Amtrak’s faster, higher-tech Acela trains are delayed again

(18) https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/7172/

The Crumbling of America

(19) https://www.american-rails.com/1950s.html

1950s Railroads, The Industry In Decline;

(20) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_railroad_accidents

American Railroad Accidents

(21) Deadliest bridge collapses in the US in the last 50 years;

https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/15/us/bridge-collapse-history-trnd

(22) https://news.yahoo.com/government-keeps-american-bridges-collapsing-
162153121.html

(23) https://www.cbsnews.com/news/thousands-of-us-bridges-vulnerable-to-collapse

(24) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-system-failure-
delays.html

New York subway system

(25) https://patch.com/maryland/havredegrace/amtrak-train-detaches-125-mph-near-
havre-de-grace

Amtrak train breaks apart traveling 125 mph along Acela corridor

(26) https://www.trainconductorhq.com/how-fast-do-amtrak-trains-go/

How Fast Do Amtrak Trains Go? Really? They’re Slow!

(27) https://abcnews.go.com/Travel/wireStory/higher-speed-florida-train-highest-us-
death-rate-67434427

Brightline death rates

(28) https://floridapolitics.com/archives/247058-brightline-february-train-car-derailment-
comes-light-critics-call-disturbing

Brightline derailments

(29) http://newsite.gobrightline.com/homepage

Brightline home page

(30) https://www.injuryattorneyfla.com/brightline-train-accident.html

(31) https://cs.trains.com/trn/f/111/t/267542.aspx?page=2
(32) https://www.tcpalm.com/story/news/local/shaping-our-future/all-aboard-
florida/2018/06/21/brightline-fatality-29-year-old-man-who-stepped-front-
train/721236002/

(33) https://www.orlandoweekly.com/news/mile-for-mile-floridas-brightline-is-the-
nations-deadliest-train-line-26398130

Mile for mile, Florida's Brightline is the nation's deadliest train line

(34) https://www.orlandoweekly.com/news/new-lawsuit-would-keep-floridas-higher-
speed-train-brightline-from-reaching-orlando-10824920

New lawsuit would keep Florida's 'higher-speed' train Brightline from reaching Orlando

(35) https://www.orlandoweekly.com/news/brightline-deaths-in-south-florida-spur-push-
for-state-oversight-10274789

Brightline deaths in South Florida spur push for state oversight

(36) https://www.orlandoweekly.com/news/floridas-high-speed-train-brightline-hit-a-
pedestrian-for-the-sixth-time-10656101

Florida's 'higher-speed' train Brightline hit a pedestrian for the sixth time

(37) https://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/opinion/letters-brightline-accidents-tragic-
but-railway-really-blame/9evqeaR6V9bXTiqiZEJ0lK/
Chapter 4
Chinese and American Mobile Phone Systems

At the risk of appearing to be a shill, I think it is safe to say that China

arguably has the best mobile phone service in the world, certainly second to
none, while the US and Canada have arguably the worst, surely the most
fragmented and dysfunctional, and certainly the most expensive. Let's look
at some details.

I'm uncertain about the US but, so far as I am aware, in Canada and many
European countries, mobile phones can be purchased only from a telecom
company, one of the more clever but clearly anti-social provisions in Western
communications legislation. This gives the phone companies a truly 'captive
market' in that, if you want a particular phone, you have no choice but to
submit to all that company's policies and to pay their demanded prices. A
major difference in the communications landscape is that Chinese phone
companies do not have a monopoly on the sale of mobile phones and
are in fact minority sellers.
To buy a mobile phone in China, you go to any one of thousands of shops in
your city, each selling hundreds of different brands and models of mobile
phones, and negotiate the best price you can get for the phone you want.
And you CAN negotiate: "There are three shops across the street selling this
same phone. Either give me a better price (or a free expensive umbrella, or
a nice stuffed animal), or I'll go there instead." Some Americans will
recognise this as "competition".

After you buy the phone, you buy a SIM card (about $3.00), which contains
your phone number, network connection authorisation, and some free air
time. You insert the SIM card, turn on the phone, and begin making calls
while still in the shop. That’s the whole process. Except for the SIM card, it’s
the same as buying a toaster.You can choose from various phone companies
to provide service, but everything is pretty much the same and, while there
are many various "usage plans", you needn't subscribe to them and can
simply use your phone on a pay-as-you-go basis. Noteworthy is that in China
you can change phone companies without changing your phone or your
number. If you buy a new phone, you simply insert your old SIM card and
everything is as it was. You can purchase a second (or third) SIM card and
have different local numbers to use in different cities, if you want to do that.

For sure one of the best features is that the entire country is wired, even in
remote locations. Some time back I was on holiday in Inner Mongolia
and could happily send photos on WeChat while riding my camel in
the desert. Given the extensiveness of wireless coverage, in more than 17
years in China I could count the number of dropped calls on the fingers of
one hand. And it isn’t only China itself, but the entire Asian region that is
seamlessly connected. I recently called a friend in Shanghai to invite him for
lunch, and he said, "I can’t. I’m in Vietnam".

If anyone from anywhere in the world calls me, the system knows where I
am and my phone rings. I never have to think about service provider
compatibility, roaming, and all the other restrictions that exist in Canada or
the US. If I travel to Beijing, I receive a text message welcoming me and
telling me my calls are now local calls. And in a sense, all mobile phone calls
in China are 'local'. The landline system still uses area codes, but the mobile
phone system abandoned them decades ago and simply uses an 11-digit
phone number, so calling anywhere in the country is the same. The system
is so functionally useful that I cannot recall ever meeting anyone in China
who had a personal or home land line.

The system also monitors abuses, presenting warning notices upon receiving
a call from a number reported to belong to telemarketers or telephone scam
operators. As well, the SMS system is used very effectively for some kinds
of public notices like a simultaneous warning to 100 million citizens of an
approaching typhoon.

Phone calls in China cost maybe $0.01 per minute, and SMS messages are
the same for sending; receiving is free. The typical monthly cost for a smart
phone in China, including typical internet usage, is maybe $15.00, compared
to around $100.00 in the US or Canada, and sometimes as much as $200.00.
Many young kids in China stream movies on their phones and can run up
higher bills, but the $15.00 cost is probably typical and maybe even high. I
should add that in China the ‘basic phone bill’ includes all the ancillaries which
are usually sold at extra cost in the West: caller ID, call-holding, and many
others.

International calls have a special provision: I first dial a 5-digit number

before the phone number I'm calling and that automatically places me on
some kind of heavy discount basis. Perhaps other countries have this feature
now, but I can speak to a friend halfway around the world for less than $1.00
per hour.
Once on an extended trip to Canada I thought I'd buy a Canadian SIM card
for my phone for the sake of convenience. That was a mistake. The phone
company charged me $30 for the SIM card and another $30 as a "connection
fee". That last one rankled. In the days of land lines, the phone company had
to send a man out to your house to physically connect your phone, so you
paid a connection charge. But today there is no such thing as a 'connection'.
When you turn on your phone, the SIM card pings the tower and you're
connected. On my return to China, I discovered I'd lost my China SIM card;
not a big deal but I didn't want to lose my phone number. Happily, for 5 RMB
(about $0.75), the nice girl at China Mobile reprogrammed a new SIM card
with my old number and life was normal again.

There is one other item I would raise that seems to be primarily an American
phenomenon: dirty tricks. One such was Marriott Hotels a few years back
using illegal frequency jammers to block guests' Wi-Fi hotspots and other
such devices, shutting them out from the Internet entirely, then charging
them between $250.00 and $1,000.00 per device to connect to the hotel's
own wireless network. A Marriott spokesperson with the unlikely name of
Gaylord Opryland, claimed it was only "a security precaution" to protect hotel
guests from "rogue Wi-Fi hotspots", and that the hotel used only "FCC-
authorized equipment provided by well-known, reputable manufacturers",
i.e., the CIA. The claim apparently didn't fly with the FCC who fined the hotel
chain $600,000 for the scam. (1) (2) I suppose it's possible this kind of thing
happens in China too, but I have never heard of it.

I once had that experience on a cruise ship traveling from Shanghai to Tokyo.
As soon as we boarded the ship, even while still in port, all signals
disappeared and we had no choice but to pay the cruise line's exorbitant fees
to be able to use our own phones. I refused just on principle, but I discovered
there was one small portion of one lower deck where the jamming wasn't
effective, and I could still communicate with Shanghai until we were more
than 300 miles out of port. No idea how the signal could carry that far, but
it did.

Also, there is something unreal about the mobile phone market in North
America. I don’t know if I can define it well enough to make it sensible, but
it has overtones (or undertones) of what appears to be some combination of
religion and ‘national security’. It suggests there exists something
intrinsically mystical or inherently menacing about mobile phones and thus
the rapacious practices of the phone companies are disguised as necessities
to save the country from unspecified evils. Yet a mobile phone is nothing but
a toaster with a SIM card (minus the toaster part). The propaganda of greed.

Of course, capitalists in China are just as greedy as capitalists

everywhere, so the phone companies are usually on the lookout for a way
to raise the price of something, and occasionally make attempts, furtive or
otherwise, to raise rates or sneak in more charges. But if the people begin
complaining, the government is not at all bashful about kicking the telecoms
in the shins and telling them to roll back the price increases. And they do.

For a long time, it wasn't possible to buy a Wi-Fi hotspot in the US, Canada,
or Europe; these devices had to be rented at a cost of around $50.00 per
month, and with about an equivalent monthly cost for usage. It seems they
are now available for purchase, at prices ranging from around $100.00 to
many hundreds, plus usage charges. In Canada, they seem to cost between
about $300.00 and $650.00. Perhaps readers can update this.

In Shanghai, I have two phones and I tether them, using one as the Wi-Fi
hotspot for the other and also for my laptop, so I always have my own Wi-Fi
wherever I am. It's possible to buy a dedicated Wi-Fi hotspot for $25 or $30,
and pay around another $10 for usage, but my way is more convenient since
my other devices connect automatically and I don't have yet one more device
to carry or one more battery to die when I need it. Plus, I have no bandwidth
limitations, and never any service disruptions.

This is partially an aside, and you will no doubt hate me for telling you this,
but the high-speed internet connection (DSL) for my home in Shanghai costs
500 RMB (about US$75.00) for two years, and that comes with at least
300 TV channels; I haven't made an accurate count. On the other hand,
Canada has the world's highest internet costs at around $100 per
month and showing no signs of decreasing.

The price disparities are not primarily from lower costs or wages, but that
the mobile phone systems in Western (capitalist) countries were not
designed for the people but for the mobile phone companies, resulting in the
exclusive assigned regions, the resulting network and frequency
fragmentation, à la carte menus, high costs and poor service. The few
companies (with their assigned and protected markets) collaborate to keep
prices high and prevent customers from escaping the trap. And US
government protection of the telecom monopolies has been vicious: at least
until recently, Americans would pay $500,000 and spend ten years in prison
for unlocking a phone, the act represented as some kind of abhorrent
immoral felony when it was merely a justifiable act of self-defense against a
grossly-predatorial system.

China recognised that rapid communications and transportation were vital to

increasing economic development, some estimates claiming China’s GDP is
15% higher than would otherwise have been without its current mobile
phone system, and another 30% attributed to its nearly universal rapid
transportation, especially the high-speed trains.

The World of 5G

China seems to have taken the lead in rolling out the new generation of
mobile networks with about 2 million 5G base stations operating now, and
covering 60 or 70 major urban centers, essentially all those with a population
of one million or more. The country installed more than 650,000 of them in
2021 alone, and the pace is increasing if anything. The number of 5G
subscribers is over 500 million and climbing quickly. Also, in 2021 5G
smartphones accounted for more than 80% of all handset shipments with
nearly 300 new models released. (3) (4) (5) Not only that, but China is
already heavily into research for 6G, the next much-faster generation of
mobile communications.

According to a recent article in the WSJ, (6) "At this point, football fans have
seen so many ads from AT&T and Verizon claiming to have the fastest and
most reliable 5G service on the planet that those without a 5G smartphone
might think they are really missing something. Don’t be misled. Unless you
are traveling internationally, you won’t enjoy faster speeds with a new 5G
enabled smartphone than you’d get on a 4G phone streaming games from
New York, Los Angeles or many other U.S. cities.
AT&T’s and Verizon’s new 5G networks are often significantly slower than the
4G networks they replace. America is far behind in almost every dimension
of 5G while other nations - including China - race ahead. America’s average
5G mobile internet speed is roughly 75 megabits per second, which is
abysmal. In China’s urban centers 5G phones get average speeds of 300
megabits per second. . . fast enough to download a high-definition movie in
two minutes."

Many MSM media articles attempt to explain why the US has fallen so far
behind in this area, but this is mostly propaganda with everyone avoiding
the elephant in the room. Americans have a right to be disappointed in the
performance of their telecom companies whose marketing hype much
exceeded their ability to deliver, but this wasn't really their fault and the
blame lies elsewhere - in the world of politics and espionage, unfortunately.

Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO, wrote in a recent WSJ article (7) that
"The U.S. government’s "dithering" has left the country "well behind" China
in the race to build out 5G technology.", but that's a dishonest presentation.
The US is indeed far behind China, but "dithering" was not the cause. I will
try to explain.
The Trouble With Huawei

There are two major issues here, both political. The first involves
Huawei, the Chinese IT giant. Huawei was far ahead of the rest of the world
in 5G, holds a large portion of the most useful and critical patents in this
area, and had the current capacity to ship almost unlimited numbers of base
stations and the rest of the 5G infrastructure to the world.

The first and most obvious problem was that (in the eyes of the US
Administration) China was "eating America’s lunch" in IT innovation
and invention and the White House wanted to derail this by
destroying Huawei and clearly made every possible effort in this
regard, including bullying and threatening half the known world
against using Huawei’s products.

Unfortunately, the US telecom companies conducted their marketing

campaigns on the expectation of installing Huawei's equipment, which hopes
were dashed by the sudden violent attacks on Huawei and the eventual
banning of their equipment. This left the US telecoms with literally nothing
to offer and no place to go. Ericsson and others did have equipment available,
but most of it was quite inferior and with little production capacity, leaving
the US telecoms with no option but to goose their 4G infrastructure and
present it as "5G", which it wasn't. They did their best, but the results were
mediocre.

Huawei was suddenly promoted as unreliable and a grave threat to US

national security, and the US telecoms thus became one of the innocent
victims of the trade war with China. But what was behind this? Huawei
had already been in all the Western countries during 1G, 2G, 3G and 4G, and
there had never been a whisper of technical issues nor any concern with data
security or espionage, so what suddenly changed with 5G? As it happened,
Huawei's 'lunch menu' was the smallest part of the problem. (8)

The Five Eyes

The real issue was espionage, and not by China. It is so widely-known

and accepted that there is no practical value in disputing the assertion that
Cisco and other American hardware and software firms install back doors to
all their equipment for the convenience of CIA and NSA access. There is a
video on YouTube where a Microsoft executive is challenged during a speech
to explain why Windows had a built-in back door specifically identified in the
program code as "NSA Back Door". The Microsoft executive did not deny
the existence of this feature, nor could he have done because he knew that
the man asking the question was the person who discovered it. In the event,
he refused to respond and changed the subject. And it's widely-known
that as far back as 30 and 40 years ago all Xerox machines and fax
machines delivered to foreign embassies and consulates in the US
were "espionage-ready".

All of Cisco's equipment, and that of most other American manufacturers,

were designed to accommodate wide-spread NSA information-gathering on
Americans, as evidenced by Edward Snowden, but even this was the smaller
part of the problem. The real issue was the US' creation of the "Five
Eyes" espionage network that included Canada, the UK, Australia and
New Zealand. Briefly, this was set up to break every law in the book while
pretending no laws were being broken. It is generally against the law for a
government to spy on its own citizens, but that law doesn’t apply to a foreign
government. So, Canada spies on Australian citizens and sends the
information to the Australian spooks who can claim they did nothing wrong.
Rinse and repeat.

According to Snowden, the Five Eyes was a "supra-national intelligence

organisation that does not answer to the known laws of its own countries",
his documents clearly revealing that these five countries were "spying on
one another's citizens and sharing the collected information with
each other in order to circumvent restrictive domestic regulations on
surveillance of citizens".

But suddenly Huawei is replacing Cisco and those other American firms with
its better and less expensive products and filling the American mobile phone
landscape with Huawei equipment. This part might be troublesome but
manageable, but the CIA and NSA can hardly approach Huawei and
ask the company to build back doors into their equipment so the US can spy
on everybody including China. There is no solution to this problem. With the
installation of Huawei equipment into these five countries, Five Eyes is dead
in the water, and the US government was forced to make a decision
between providing world-class 5G communications for the benefit of
the country or to protect the functioning espionage network. They
chose the latter. And it wasn’t sufficient to ban Huawei only from the US
because this company’s equipment would castrate the NSA’s effort in the
other four nations. Thus, US bullying to ensure each of its five eyes is
Huawei-free.

There was no way to explain this to the public. We could not have an NYT
article telling the American people that they cannot have a 5G phone system
because that would prevent NSA and CIA spying, so the only option was
to trash Huawei's reputation as a grave security threat, and hype
that ridiculous accusation to the point where the public would accept
an inferior service. And that’s the entire story, like it or not.

* Notes
(1) https://www.huffpost.com/entry/marriott-wifi-blocking-fcc-charge_n_5928678

Marriott Illegally Blocked People's Internet Access And Charged Them Up To

$1,000 Instead

(2) https://www.commlawblog.com/2014/10/articles/enforcement-activities-fines-
forfeitures-etc/marriott-whacked-for-600000-for-war-on-rogue-wi-fi-hotspots/

Marriott Whacked for $600,000 for War on Rogue Wi-Fi Hotspots

(3) https://www.statista.com/statistics/1291496/china-share-of-5g-smartphone-
shipments/

(4) https://www.statista.com/statistics/1291342/china-quarterly-number-of-5g-end-users/

(5) https://www.statista.com/statistics/1119453/china-5g-base-station-number/

(6) https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-5g-america-streaming-speed-midband-
investment-innovation-competition-act-semiconductor-biotech-ai-11645046867

China’s 5G Soars Over America’s; In some U.S. cities, it’s slower than the old 4G
system.

(7) https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/17/us-well- behind-china-in-5g-race-ex-google-ceo-

eric-schmidt-says.html

‘Pathetic’ performance has left U.S. ‘well behind’ China in 5G race, ex-Google CEO
Eric Schmidt says

(8) https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/4059/ Huawei, Tik-Tok and WeChat

 The YiWu Commodities Market

A brief bit of background for context. YiWu is the world’s largest supermarket.
YiWu is a small town (it’s actually a city with more than one million people,
but in China that’s a small town) in Zhejiang Province, 45 minutes by high-
speed rail from Shanghai. The surrounding area contains countless
thousands of smallish (and some largish) factories producing vast amounts
of small goods – hand and small electric tools, umbrellas, bags and luggage,
toys, giftware, small appliances, kitchenware, small electronic items,
adhesive tape. The products are mostly standard utilitarian items we
generally refer to as commodities.
With this intense concentration of manufacturing clusters, YiWu has the
largest commodity markets in the world. The largest wholesale factory
market in YiWu, the International Trade Center, consists of eight 5-story
buildings totaling about 5 million square meters and containing about 80,000
shops, each shop owned by one of the small area factories. It is so large that
the aisles in each building have street names; maps are normally required
for navigation.

To save you the arithmetic, if you spend 8 hours per day, 5 days per week,
with only 1 minute in each shop, you would need more than 8 months to visit
all of them. And that’s only one market of about 20 in the city. Many markets
specialise in a particular product: umbrellas, artificial flowers, stationery,
toys, candles cosmetics, fashion jewellery, bags and leather products shoes,
tissue, cloth, socks, lingerie . . . Typical markets would have 2,000 shops
selling only belts or 10,000 shops selling small ceramic tea pots.

The YiWu Lighter Industry

One of the locally-produced items is cigarette lighters, this industry around

YiWu consisting of about 4,000 families who own and operate about 1000
factories, all producing either components or entire assembled products.
These families might consist of only a husband and wife with a few hired
hands, or possibly a large extended family from the grandparents, uncles
and aunts, and offspring of university-graduated age. In each case, a factory
may hire as many or as few outside workers as necessary.

The Business Model

Several years ago, each of the factories produced finished goods, often
competing directly with each other, and lacking standardisation or
compatibility among them. Over time, various factories proved better at
producing some kinds of components than others, while some excelled in
assembling or packaging the finished goods. The factory owners met
repeatedly to discuss their overall situation and eventually agreed to
cooperate and specialise. Today, some factories produce all the various
components for a wide range of brands and styles while others focus on
assembly or packaging. Each factory in this existing network serves its part
in the system to produce sufficient volume to fill all existing orders. However,
it is also free to manufacture its own brands of lighters or to produce other
products in addition to lighters. So long as the basic cooperative
requirements are met, and since each factory is privately-owned, there are
no restrictions on activity.
This cooperative functions in a very real sense as a huge, well-organised
manufacturer and exporter with tens of thousands of employees and 1000
manufacturing locations – but with no board of directors, no executive-level
or middle management, no policy manual, no fancy offices, no bureaucracy
and no corporate overhead. Due to the decentralised structure and
specialised, tight product focus, the group can move swiftly to meet any
challenges. Sometimes the development process from product conception to
produced sample can take less than 24 hours. The group can accept and fill
orders of any size, the production being done by whichever locations have
available capacity.

Financing is never an issue because the capital investment load is distributed

so widely, modernisation or the addition of capacity being done in small
increments according to the ability and ambition of each manufacturing unit,
and of course each person in the entire plan has a vested personal interest
in ensuring that costs are kept to a minimum. This structure has an enormous
hidden advantage in the existence of perhaps 10,000 marketers, all of whom
fill every spare moment searching the internet for more customers for this
cooperative enterprise, each having much to gain from this effort since
all revenue goes directly into their own pockets.
This loosely-structured but tightly-knit cooperative permitted the myriad
small companies to function as a much larger and far more powerful entity,
with results that were stunning, YiWu increasing its share of the worldwide
lighter market from around 30% to over 70% in only a few years, and the
YiWu area generating a GDP of nearly US$ one trillion (one-third that of
California). It is worth noting that, aside from some newly-graduated children
joining the family business, there are no MBAs here. The entire business
model was invented by the older generation, many of whom hadn’t
completed their high school education.

It is unlikely that such an entity would long survive in the West, because
the Chinese concepts of family, cooperation, harmony, either do not
exist in the West at all, or not in the same way or to the same extent.
This is only one story of innovation in China. There are countless thousands
of others, in ways and places we might never imagine.

There is actually a bit more to this story. At the business school at the
university in YiWu, a prerequisite for graduation is that all students
must establish and successfully run their own business. These may be
only online shops selling any manner of products, but they are all profitable.
As well, local students are often sufficiently fluent in many languages to act
as agents for the millions of foreign buyers who come to the city each year,
helping them to navigate the system, act as translators, find satisfactory
products, negotiate prices and terms.
Some of these kids earn as much as US$100,000 in a year while still in
school. We don’t see this at Harvard or Western, nor do we see
student parking lots jammed with BMWs and Ferraris.

The Yiwan Railway Work was finally completed in 2010 on China’s

Yiwan Railway, a route paralleling the lake formed by the Three
Gorges dam, a 380 km East – West line running through beautiful but
challenging mountainous terrain from Wuhan, the capital of Hubei
Province, and Yichang (the site of the Three Gorges Dam), to
Wanzhou City, just East of Chongqing.

Chapter 6
From Shanghai to Chongqing: The
World’s Most Expensive Railway
China's Yichang-Wanzhou Railway:
253 Bridges and 159 Tunnels

Conducting safety inspections./VCG Photo

The Yiwan Railway

Work was finally completed in 2010 on China’s Yiwan Railway,

a route paralleling the lake formed by the Three Gorges dam, a
380 km East – West line running through beautiful but
challenging mountainous terrain from Wuhan, the capital of
Hubei Province, and Yichang (the site of the Three Gorges
Dam), to Wanzhou City, just East of Chongqing.

The route was originally proposed by Sun Yat-Sen in 1903 to

shorten the rail journey between the mountainous regions in
the southwest and eastern parts of China. The project initially
began in 1909, but was repeatedly abandoned from
insurmountable technological problems due to the difficult
natural environment, until the central government decided to
relaunch it in 2003.

This railway is a part of one of China’s most important national

transport corridors. The project achieved its main objectives of
increasing corridor capacity, removing transport barriers, and
reducing transport costs, and has already contributed
significantly to economic growth and poverty reduction in the
project area, and potentially benefitting the entire Western
area.

China’s Tunnel and Bridge Museum

This railway line through a stretch of mountains on the edge of

the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau was China’s most difficult and
expensive to build. It took a staggering seven years and 50,000
workers to dig and drill 159 tunnels and build 253 bridges. In
one extreme case, it took nearly six years to drill a tunnel
through Qiyue Mountain along the route. Of the railway’s total
length of 380 Kms, 75% percent or 280 Kms, consists of
bridges and tunnels.

Each and every kilometer of the railway contains at least one

bridge or one tunnel, most often one of each, leading the locals
to refer to the railway as the “tunnel and bridge museum.”

60 Million RMB per Kilometer

The railway goes through some of the most difficult terrain in

the country, with many sections running through karst
topography, and the railway’s chief designer claiming this to
have been the hardest project he had ever worked on. The line
involved more than 20 billion RMB in total investment, about
60 million for each kilometer, and is China’s most expensive
railway, costing double the 30 million RMB per kilometer for the
Qinghai-Tibet Railway which was the second most expensive.
It is a bit of anticlimactic irony that this railway required so
much time to build that railway technology surpassed it during
its own construction. The Yichang-Wanzhou railway was
designed for trains traveling at about 200 kph, which were the
fastest at the time construction began, but was two generations
behind by the time construction was completed. Given the
construction difficulties, there is probably no one in China
interested in upgrading this railway in the immediate future.

This railway reduced the Yichang-Wanzhou travel time from 22

hours to just five hours, and travel time from other Central or
East China cities to Southwest part of the country are now also
significantly shorter, bringing new opportunities for residents
who live in the steep and remote Wuling mountains. One local
resident said, “We used to pay 100 Yuan (US$15) for a one-day
bus trip to Yichang before. Now, 30 Yuan can get us there in
two hours.

Infrastructure and Privatisation

China has invested heavily in railways in remote areas like the
Three Gorges, Qinghai, Xinjiang and Tibet, in an attempt to
connect the length and breadth of the country with convenient
and fast transportation. Chinese leaders recognised from the
beginning that economic development follows transportation,
and thus maintaining control of the transportation
infrastructure derives from a determination to distribute
the benefits of development to the entire nation.

The reality is that not all infrastructure is destined to be

financially profitable – profitability being the only measure by
Western standards. A privately-developed railway system
would be built only on the most profitable routes, those likely
to amass billions for their owners but that would leave perhaps
half the nation destitute for transportation and sentenced to
perpetual poverty. Thus, railway privatisation would saddle
China’s central government with the costs of building all the
unprofitable routes without benefitting from the profitable
segments. This is one of Western capitalism’s main
mantras: privatise the profits and socialise the losses.

It was the same with mobile communications. Recognising the

development potential attributable to rapid and inexpensive
communications, China’s central government decreed that the
entire population must benefit equally, or at least have more
equal opportunity to benefit, and thus the entire country was
wired, including the deserts and the most difficult mountainous
areas (such as Wuling) with sparse population and no realistic
hope of profitability. But with China’s universal mobile phone
system, farmers in some of the most remote mountain villages
are on the internet daily, learning better agricultural methods,
checking and negotiating prices and arranging sales. And with
this new railway through some of nature’s most formidable
barriers, local farmers and business people (who would have
been ignored by private enterprise) can not only easily arrange
delivery of their produce but quickly travel between regional
population centers, stimulating enormous increases in tourism
and all manner of commerce, thus benefiting the entire region.
Chapter 7
Giving things names in the West and
in China

In most parts of Northern nations like Canada or Russia, we have one word
for snow: "snow”. If we want to be really precise, we will distinguish between
dry snow and wet snow because wet snow is heavy and shoveling it from
your driveway is one of the more popular methods of inviting a heart attack.
But in the world's far North the native Inuit people have more than 30 words
for snow because they live with it for most of the year and minor differences
in snow characteristics can greatly affect hunting and survival. We have
names for things that are important to us.

For example, one of the most important categories of things in North

America is alcoholic drinks. The basic categories are beer, wine, and
spirits (which are distilled), and many products not fitting easily into these
categories.

o We have beer, bitter, ale, stout and lager; cider, mead,

kumis and sake.
 o We have Chianti, Bordeaux, Beaujolais and Burgundy.

o We have red wine, white wine, rosé wine, fruit wine, table
wine, sparkling wine, ice wine and champagne.

o We have sweet wines, dry wines, fruit wines and potato

wines.

o We have fortified wines like Port, Madeira, Sherry and

Vermouth.

o We have absinthe and Aquavit; we have brandy, cognac

and Armagnac.

o We have schnapps and fruit brandies.

o We have gin, vodka, rum, scotch, bourbon, rye and sake.

o We have tequila and Ouzo.

o We have dinner wines, table wines, aperitifs, cocktails,

mixed drinks, straight drinks, neat drinks.

And we have special places for getting drunk.

o We have bars, wine bars and music bars.

o We have dance bars, topless bars and gay bars.

 o We have cocktail lounges.

o We have pubs, beer halls, taverns and beer gardens.

And I haven't even begun.

And what does China have? Almost nothing.

One word — jiu — for anything with alcohol in it.

And if we want to be precise, we have beer (pi jiu), grape wine (pu
tao jiu) and the white stuff that should kill you but somehow doesn't
— bai jiu. And China has no places where people go to drink alcohol; no
taverns, no pubs, no cocktail lounges, no nothing. You can buy beer, wine
and spirits in any supermarket or convenience store, but you drink those at
home (or in the park, or sitting on the curb). You can of course order them
in most restaurants. But that's all. Almost nothing to drink, and almost no
place to drink it.

In the category of family, in the West the "family” is the mother, the father,
and the kid. That's it.
We have uncles, aunts and cousins, and we have grandparents, who are not
family but are "relatives”, meaning we don't like them but were born with
them and had no choice.

But in China, "family” means the entire extended family plus, occasionally,
favored outsiders or even foreigners, in total comprising perhaps 50
people sharing not only emotional but often financial bonds as well.

In the West, we have only a handful of names for family members, generally
ending with second cousins. But in China we have potentially hundreds of
names for family members, far beyond mother, father, son and daughter.

We have names for younger and older brothers, names for the father's older
and younger brothers and those of the mother's and father's parents, their
younger and older brothers and sisters. We have names for the
grandmother's third cousin on her father's uncle's side of the family. It
doesn't end. You can see that in China, we waste all our words on trivial
things like family members while in the West with our democracies and
American values we save our words for really important stuff like things you
can get drunk with.
Clearly, China needs to change its attitude.

An American acquaintance once asked me if all Chinese people had

"American” names. I tried to deflect that by saying they were 'Western'
names rather than 'American' but she countered by saying, "Well, that's the
same thing”. But it isn't the same thing. Her name, Theresa, is French. Her
husband's name is Russian; her son's name is English. There is no such
thing as an American name.

Actually, that's not quite true. There are three categories of American names.
Pocahontas is an American name, as are girls' names that end in 'i' like
Whoopi and Bambi. The third category is the sometimes-cute names that
black mothers give to their football-player sons, like Jemahl and Freezone.
That's the list. But to Americans, who copied all their names from people of
other nations, the names are now as American as Coca-Cola. Except that
Coca-Cola is Spanish.
Chaper 8
A Brief Introduction to Tibet

Westerners appear to have a willful blindness about Tibet, with strong

opinions often held by those who haven’t been there and whose knowledge
appears gleaned from misguided propaganda in the popular press. The
Western media have imposed on our imaginations an image of a fabled
theocracy where a reincarnated god rules over a peaceful people spinning
prayer wheels in a pastoral idyll. The West’s fascination with Tibet has turned
it into a mythic place upon which we project our dreams and our own spiritual
fantasies. The result is what I call the Shangri-La syndrome (1), millions of
Westerners choosing to believe in an attractive but wholly mythological,
romantic fantasy which has never existed.
The first adjective that would come to mind about Tibet is ‘desolate’. Those
who have been in the far North beyond the Arctic Circle, or above the tree
line in the North American Rocky Mountains or the European Alps, will have
some idea of the Tibetan landscape – which is 10,000 feet above the tree
line. There is nothing hospitable about the isolated conditions or climate in
Tibet and few of us would live there by choice. Tibet is a high-altitude desert
with little oxygen, almost no rainfall, and harsh temperatures. Only sparse
numbers of the hardiest animals can survive there and, in much of the land,
the severe climate means that nothing, or almost nothing, can grow. No one
in Tibet has ever seen a tree or even a bush.

Native Tibetans are not dissimilar to the Mongolian ethnic groups in

China, being partially nomadic but susceptible to education and societal
structure with built stable communities. It is noteworthy that few Tibetans
will naturally or spontaneously engage in commerce whereas virtually all
Chinese will do so, leading Westerners to view the Han Chinese shops in
Lhasa as ‘commercial exploitation’ or some such. This is perhaps an aside,
but this is one reason we see no street beggars in China (except for one
subset of Xinjiang Uigurs). Even the most impoverished Chinese old woman
will purchase green onions in a market, lay them out for sale on a cloth on
the sidewalk, and live independently.

The Western press refer euphemistically to Tibet’s pre-1950 social structure

as a benign ‘feudal system’, but it was no such thing. When Mao went in
to clean it up, Tibet was a slave colony. Virtually all the people were
literally owned by the Dalai and other lamas, the people forbidden to own
land, and worked their entire lives without pay. The highest monks each
owned 35,000 to 40,000 slaves.

The level of poverty in Tibet (outside the monasteries) until the 1950s could
not be imagined by Westerners; it would have to be seen to be believed.
Tibetans couldn’t afford fabric clothing, still wearing sheepskins as they did
centuries earlier. Life was brutal, harsh, and corrupt. Life expectancy
was barely 30. The prettiest girls and boys were confiscated to the
monasteries for sex. Education was forbidden to all but the monks because
education was expensive and educated peasants were considered dangerous
to the system. The Dalai Lama prohibited any development of industry
because wealth of the population brought independence from the religion.
The Lamas, however, sent their children to British schools in India,
and freely transferred the Province’s financial assets to British
banks.

The so-called Tibetan religion was so intertwined with government as to be

inseparable, and was merely a method of population control – with more
forcible methods when religion failed. To this end, torture was rampant. For
anyone who cares to look, the internet contains no shortage of photos of the
torture rooms, especially at the Potala Palace and Gandan Monastery,
with instruments used for crushing fingers and cutting leg tendons.
There are handcuffs of many sizes, including small ones for children,
instruments for cutting off noses and ears, others for breaking off the hands.
One favorite of the Dalai and other Lamas was an ingenious method of
gouging out eyes. They had carved a special stone cap with two holes
that was pressed down over the head to force the eyes to bulge
through the holes, in which position the eyes were gouged out, after
which boiling oil was poured into the sockets. (2)

Typical daily events in Tibet involved the Lamas and their thugs rounding up
peasants insufficiently enamored with the life to come and desiring a bit more
of the life that is today, normally exemplified by cutting and extracting ankle
and leg tendons, sentencing those people to lives as creeping reptiles.
Another common punishment was severing hands at the wrists.
One example typical of those widely reported was of a man objecting when
a Lama attempted to confiscate his attractive wife to the monastery for sex.
The Lama had the man’s hands placed on a flat stone and beaten with clubs
until they were reduced to a pulpy flesh and separated. For good measure,
they repeated the process with the man’s brother and sister. Both died from
the assault.

Tibet has been described as the darkest slavery system in human

history, one even darker and more backward than medieval Europe and in
some ways even worse than in the US, with no rights or freedom in any form.
Virtually the entire population of Tibet consisted of private property to be
used, sold, given as gifts, used to pay debts or traded for other property. The
Dalai and other Lamas ruled not only their earthly lives with absolute
power, but literally terrorised the people under the guise of rewards
and punishment in their afterlives, in part justifying religious privileges
of breeding at will. Hence the lack of education and focus on religion.

The Dalai Lama was responsible for all this. The US pressure to give him
a Nobel Peace Prize was an obscenity equivalent to paying such respects to
the American Commander of Guantanamo Bay. Many Western news
articles refer to the Dalai Lama as a spiritual leader, but he was never so
much that as the former head of a shockingly inhumane and repressive
government. There is literally nothing published in the popular Western
media about Tibet that even remotely resembles its true history. When the
CIA realised their inability to strip Tibet from China, the Dalai Lama
changed his tune to one of freedom for the people rather than
independence from China, but included in that definition of freedom was a
return to the old ‘feudal’ system.

Vintage 1864 Colton Atlas Map: Asia–Russian Empire-Tibet-Arabia

(Authentic)
Tibet had been under China’s governance for many centuries though it was
largely self-managed up to the 1950s, a fact long-recognised by the world
but today conveniently omitted in an eagerness to disparage China. Even a
US Rand-McNally atlas from the 1800s clearly displays Tibet as a
province of China. China’s so-called ‘invasion’ of Tibet in the 1950s is one
of the more repugnant examples of historical revisionism promulgated by the
West.

China, through Chou En-Lai, tried for ten or more years without success to
negotiate with the Dalai Lama the freedom from slavery of the Tibetan
people. The greatest cause of his failure was that the Americans became
involved in the midst of all the discussions, with the CIA training insurgents
in Nepal and launching terrorist attacks in Tibet. It was then, when China
finally moved in to stop the slaughter and oppression, that the CIA
engineered the Dalai Lama’s “flight to India”, which T. D. Allman termed “one
of the CIA’s greatest cold war propaganda triumphs. The Western media
were filled with lurid reports of massacres and desecrations of priceless
religious relics.”

China has invested heavily in Tibet’s economic development, as well as in

housing, infrastructure, and education and health services. The Chinese
national government recently built more than 60,000 new homes in Tibet,
given to the people free of charge, to remove them from poverty, put them
together in real communities, and help to protect the environment. Many
Westerners won’t care to hear this, but there is no oppression in Tibet, and
the average Tibetan has never enjoyed such a standard of living as today.

In Tibet, as in Xinjiang, the government is teaching Mandarin Chinese to the

locals. This is not, as the NYT or WSJ will tell you, “genocide” of their culture.
The Tibetan (or Uigur) language is not being replaced. Instead, the
locals are learning a second language – the basic language of the nation – to
further help remove them from isolation. Religion is the same. Temples,
prayer flags and prayer wheels are so common in all the ethnic areas in China
as to be a nuisance. The only change is that religion has been separated from
politics, most particularly the American terrorist kind.
In truth, China’s government has spent countless billions trying to
bring Tibet out of the Stone Age. Education is now almost universal, the
$4 billion (pressurised) Qinghai-Tibet railway brings in billions in tourist
dollars and finally provides a way to move goods in and out. Tibet’s economic
rate of growth and standard of living are higher now than in much of the rest
of Western China. This is so true that China has pampered Tibet over the
remainder of the undeveloped Western rural provinces like Qinghai and
Gansu which are now poorer than Tibet.
It has been well-documented by many authors that the CIA and NED
fund all the ‘Free Tibet’ groups in North America and Europe.

“A main reason why so many in the West have taken part in the protests
against China is ideological: Tibetan Buddhism, deftly spun by the Dalai
Lama, is a major point of reference of the New Age hedonist spirituality which
is becoming the predominant form of ideology today. Our fascination with
Tibet makes it into a mythic place upon which we project our dreams. When
people mourn the loss of the authentic Tibetan way of life, they don’t care
about real Tibetans: they want Tibetans to be authentically spiritual on behalf
of us so we can continue with our crazy consumerism.” (4)

Since the early 1950s there has been systematic and substantial CIA
involvement in stirring up anti-Chinese troubles in Tibet, so Chinese fears of
external attempts to destabilise Tibet are not irrational. In fact, there is an
enormous body of documentation, perhaps falling a bit short of
incontrovertible proof, that the sudden violence in Tibet in 2008 was
merely America’s gift to China for the Olympics, rather like their gift to
Russia for the Sochi Olympics. Xinjiang is of course the same, in this case
with incontrovertible proof.

But in fact, Western interference and attempts at genocide began more than
100 years ago. Few people today seem aware that the British instigated a
war in Tibet in the early 1900s, later boasting that their machine guns mowed
down thousands of Tibetans (who had only knives or sticks), without
themselves suffering a single casualty.

But still, everybody wants to save the Tibetans. In this context, consider the
(European) white man’s record of saving domestic populations: they totally
exterminated the ancient Inca, Maya and Aztec civilisations as well as the
Carib Indians and 95% of the North American natives. Australia exterminated
about 90% of their aboriginal people, New Zealand about 75% of theirs,
Canada about the same, and everyone participated in exterminating
the entire race of Tasmanian people, slaughtering every man, woman
and child on the island. It would thus appear much to the benefit of
Tibetans that they have not been saved.
Notes

(1) Shangri-la was originally thrust upon the world in the 1933 novel ‘Lost
Horizon’ by British author James Hilton
https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Horizon-Novel-James-
Hilton/dp/0062113720 who described it as a mystical, harmonious
valley, gently guided by devoted lamas, the name since becoming
synonymous with a mythical earthly but isolated paradise whose
inhabitants are virtually immortal. However, Shangri-la really does
exist, a charming town in the remote NorthWest of China’s Yunnan
Province.

(2) Anna Louise Strong; Tibetan Interviews, 1959;

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/strong-anna-
louise/1959/tibet/index.htm

(3) T. D. Allman; A Myth Foisted on the Western World, The Nation Magazine;
https://shugdensociety.wordpress.com/2010/07/03/a-myth-foisted-on-the-
western-world/

(4) What if China now is our past and future? Le Monde Diplomatique, By
Slavoj Zizek; https://mondediplo.com/2008/05/09tibet
Chapter 9
Understanding China

We have a saying that after spending one month in China you could write a
book;

after a year in China, you could write a chapter;

in five years you could write a paragraph,

and after five years you could write a note on a postcard.

That saying has become almost an urban legend but it is essentially true. I
can still recall the day when, walking down a street in downtown Shanghai
after being in the country for about a month, I experienced an illusion of such
extreme clarity that I said to myself, “I could write a book on this place”. I
cannot explain the mental or sociological processes that combine to cause
that initial illusion of understanding and clarity, nor the forces that so
effectively and progressively dismantle it to a condition where the more time
we spend in China the less we understand it.

My Chinese friends tell me I have a deep understanding of China, of its people

and culture and, while the praise is flattering, it is also largely undeserved.
Indeed, after fifteen years in the country, there are days when I am
blindsided by something so basic that I am convinced I understand nothing,
and I would have to say that if China cannot be understood by Westerners
from the inside, it most assuredly cannot be understood by Westerners from
the outside who have no useful contact with anything Chinese.

Westerners live in an illusionary black and white world framed for

them by the programming from their Zionist media and are mostly
incapable of escaping their ideological indoctrination. There is an adage that
you cannot understand a painting when you are inside the painting, that you
must step out of that painting and look back on it, to see it as it really is.
Few Westerners are capable of this because of the propagandised
indoctrination taking place from birth. This social indoctrination is true of
course for all societies, but the Zionist West, unlike the vast majority of the
world’s population, views virtually everything about other nations and
peoples through a series of political-religious ideological lenses that cast a
rather severe chromatic aberration on anything seen through those lenses.

These ideologies are of capitalism, democracy, colonialism,

militarism, White supremacy, Darwinism, Christianity and Zionism,
these forces conspiring to twist the truths of China so as to almost
eliminate any possibility of real understanding while simultaneously
disdaining any real need to do so. The White man, the Zionist West, here
including Japan, sees the world as Metropole and periphery, the non-white
world populated by inferior beings meant to be exploited by coercion or
military force, their resources used to enthrone the West while enslaving the
world, all according to God’s plan. To see the truth of this, we need only
examine their deeds, history providing ample testimony to this assertion.

The Western media are notorious for their incessant and shrill China-
bashing, but it seems true that virtually everyone outside China is reading
from the same script. We must have hundreds of publications and websites
named China Labor Bulletin, China Economic Review, China Auto News,
China anything and everything . . . , that are not in any sense Chinese, but
are media sources established by Westerners who are primarily but not
exclusively Zionists and who, mostly deliberately, misinterpret and
misrepresent the facts and fundamentals of China.

We have Western-produced statistics on everything related to China, from

GINI coefficients to bank debt, from GDP to National Income and standard
of living, from education to health care to longevity and infant mortality, all
of which, even when based on numbers initially obtained from official Chinese
government sources, are then massaged and misrepresented to prove the
opposite of reality. We have hundreds, and perhaps even thousands, of
books about China, mostly written by these same people viewing the country
through those same ideological lenses and thus mostly being works of
historical fiction, many reprehensibly so.

The ingrained notion of superiority, white supremacy in fact, is a major

obstacle to understanding even for the well-intentioned. When the Chinese
travel to a foreign land and witness a foreign culture, they think “I’m
different”. When Americans (and Canadians, Brits, Aussies) encounter
a foreign culture, they think “I’m better”. It is also true that the
Americans particularly, but the entire white and English-speaking world in
total, have no respect for, and see no value in, any other culture, secretly
believing that all the world wants to be like them and that claims to cultural
protection are merely an excuse to avoid the inevitable, which is to become
American clones. It is in this combined and complicated context that sincere
individual Westerners attempt to understand China, an exceedingly difficult
task in the circumstances.

The Chinese are not handicapped by the horrors of Christianity or party

politics, and they mostly do not view outside events through a distorting lens.
Westerners are fond of portraying the Chinese as being brainwashed, but in
my long experience the Chinese are the least brainwashed of all
peoples while Americans are the poster boys in this regard.

Due to all of the above, when Westerners look at any aspect of China, they
may see it clearly, but most often do not understand what they see.
Because they view the world through their ideological lenses, they
interpret their misunderstanding in terms of what that event would
mean if occurring in their country and in their culture. And from this
misinterpretation of a misunderstanding, they then make judgments and
form conclusions which are invariably wrong and often foolish.

As one example, a high-ranking American politician said recently in an

interview that the Chinese need to rid themselves of what she termed their
“shyness and lack of confidence”. It was beyond the limits of her
understanding to realise that what she was seeing was neither shyness nor
a lack of confidence, but modesty, one of the most beautiful
characteristics of the Chinese people. Noah Webster wrote “modesty
results from purity of mind”, and further that “unaffected modesty is the
sweetest charm of female excellence, the richest gem in the diadem of their
honor.” Westerners are often tempted to agree with the above politician’s
appraisal because Chinese will seldom react or respond to these open
provocations, however, the lack of response is most often simply
because the Chinese are too modest and polite to tell you what they
really think of you.

I can testify that the Chinese are not lacking in confidence compared to any
other civilisation, and also that they have little respect for the American
version of “in your face” which they view not as confidence but as
arrogance, rudeness and disrespect. And yes, I know better than you
that some Chinese can behave very badly, many tourists coming to mind,
but these are in no way typical Chinese but some kind of aberrational subset
I have not yet been able to clearly define.

As another example, I was walking down a street with an American

acquaintance who commented on the proliferation of “wheelchair ramps”
which appear on virtually every street intersection in every city small and
large. He then proceeded to give me a dissertation on China, the Chinese
people and the Chinese culture, based on the apparent ubiquity of these
passages. I had to interrupt my education to inform him that those were not
wheelchair ramps but were instead designed for bicycles.
More than a few Western journalists have told us that China’s conviction rate
for accused criminals is 99.9%, this number having been extracted from thin
air because China does not assemble and publish those statistics for all levels
of courts from all cities, towns and counties. However, the comparable
conviction rate in the West, at least for Canada and the US, is about 60% or
a bit less, this differential attributed to the highest level of democratic
virginity in the West and an extraordinarily high level of police and judicial
corruption in China. But is that necessarily true?

More importantly, what does the 60% Western conviction rate mean? It
means that nearly half of all the people charged with a crime, were in fact
innocent and that it required the trauma and expense of a court trial to keep
an innocent man out of prison. Or, if we want to be stubborn, we can look at
this from the other side and claim that 100% of those charged were in fact
guilty, but that a clever and expensive lawyer let them walk free. Is
that better?

It is true that China has a high conviction rate, but that is because Chinese
police conduct what are perhaps the most thorough and conscientious
investigations of any country. The police will not lay a charge until they are
100% certain of a man’s guilt and also that they have not only sufficient
evidence for a conviction but also the greatest volume of circumstantial
evidence for a judge to determine the most appropriate sentence. It is the
Western system that is corrupt and badly flawed, not China’s, and China has
no FBI to lay fraudulent charges as a method of harassing political dissidents.

I was once standing on the Maglev platform at Shanghai’s Pudong Airport,

and watched while a man and his wife were having a heated discussion with
a policeman that lasted for several minutes. I wasn’t close enough to learn
the topic of their debate, but the argument ended with the man’s wife kicking
the policeman in the shins. I can think of more than a few Western cities
where that wouldn’t have been a good idea.

The truth is that people in China are not afraid of the police. In Canada or
the US nobody will pass a police car that is driving at the speed limit on a
highway, but in China it happens all the time. I commented on that to a
friend who said, “Why should I be afraid of him? He’s my servant, not
my master.” In China, I can argue with a policeman and challenge his
conclusions without fear of arrest for “disorderly conduct”, but in real life it
goes much farther than this.

I once lit a cigarette in a shopping mall (Yes, I know. Don’t tell me), and a
policeman approached to tell me I couldn’t smoke in the mall. Of course I
already knew that; I was preoccupied and wasn’t thinking. I told him that,
and I apologised and told him I would leave. He walked me partway to the
door, his colleague joined us and said something humorous and we laughed,
and I went outdoors. I saw them when I returned, I waved and they waved
back, and we were friends. The important consideration is that he didn’t want
to punish me; he didn’t want to start a war; he just didn’t want me to
smoke in his mall. So long as I was willing, a warning was sufficient.

If I accidentally drive my car where I shouldn’t, the result is the same. In

Chinese cities, we sometimes see a car parked on a sidewalk, this usually
because the owner has an urgent necessity to stop for only a minute in an
urban area where parking is almost non-existent and traffic is heavy. But so
long as the street is clear and the sidewalk has sufficient room for pedestrians
to pass, the police will ignore the car for a short while, cars normally being
towed away only if they actually block traffic and cause bedlam; never as a
means to collect revenue as is so common in the West.
This is an aside, but the only country in the world similar to China (to
my knowledge) is Italy. In Rome, I once asked a policeman (this is a true
story) if I could leave my car in a driveway for a few minutes while I ran
across the street to have a quick coffee. He agreed, but asked that I leave
my keys in the car in case he had to move it. The driveway was the
emergency entrance to a hospital.

In the US, in Canada, and in many European countries, overstaying a visa –

by even one day – will give you cause for permanent regret. Normally, you
will sit in a jail cell until you have paid your fine and have a paid ticket out
of the country, at which point the police will take you to the airport and put
you onto the plane, and you will be prohibited from returning for quite some
time. I once overstayed my visa in China by about three weeks although in
my defense it was due to a misunderstanding that wasn’t my fault, an excuse
that would bring me no sympathy in Canada or the US.

But going through China’s customs and immigration exit, the officer gave me
a stern look and said, “You know, you shouldn’t do that”. It was only then
that I realised what had happened, and when he understood the unwitting
nature of my transgression and my sincere regret at its occurrence, he let
me board my plane free of harm. Once again, he didn’t want to punish me,
he didn’t want to start a war; he just wanted me to obey the laws.

Once, for reasons I cannot recall, I filed all my utility bills neatly together in
a desk drawer and forgot about them. A month or two later, I found little
white notices stuck onto the outside of my front door, which were requests
for payment. The management office asked me to leave with them the bills
and the cash, and they called the utility companies who sent a courier to pick
up the payments. No penalty, no interest, no recriminations, no denial of
service. The utility companies didn’t want to punish me; they didn’t want to
start a war; they just wanted me to pay my bills.

I once arrived home after dinner to discover my house had no electricity. It

was merely a breaker that was quickly reset, but at the time I wondered
aloud to a friend if perhaps the electricity had been cut off because I’d
forgotten to pay my bill, and she said “I’ve never heard of such a thing”.
Westerners are fascinated by the Chinese cultural concept of Guanxi, which
Wikipedia tells us “defines the fundamental dynamic in personalized social
networks of power, which can be best described as the relationships
individuals cultivate with other individuals, and is a crucial system of beliefs
in Chinese culture.” Also that Westerners use the term “instead of referring
to “connections” and “relationships” as neither of those terms sufficiently
reflects the wide cultural implications that Guanxi describes.” (1)

This is both true and false, proving that Wikipedia doesn’t understand Guanxi
any more than do the columnists at the New York Times. We have a saying
in the West that “It’s not what you know, but who you know”, the concept of
an individual benefitting from friendships and connections being universal
and not particular to China.

But in China, friendships and so-called ‘connections’ have a flavor of trust

and responsibility that exists nowhere else in the world, at least not to my
knowledge.

A good friend was purchasing a new house for her parents and wanted to
pay the full price in cash with the signing of the contract so as to benefit from
an attractive discount. She was $200,000 short and called to ask if I would
lend her the money to complete the payment.

I agreed without even having to think about it, and transferred the money
to her account the same day. If I recall correctly, she gave me an IOU at one
point but I have no idea what I did with it, and the loan was repaid.

In reverse, when I purchased my last house I wanted to pay the entire

amount in cash with the purchase contract for the same reason, but most of
my money was sequestered in bank GICs that didn’t mature for several
months and I was $35,000 short.

I was chatting about my house with another friend and asked if she would
lend me the money. We immediately walked across the street to her bank
and she gave me the cash, no questions asked.
There is an organic strawberry farm near my home, with the sweetest
strawberries I have ever tasted (the most expensive, too). I sometimes
would buy a basket as a gift for the girls in the property management office.
One day, I locked myself out of my own house, having neglected to leave a
set of keys at the office. But a young girl at the office took great pains to find
a locksmith, who had to come from another city 40 Kms distance to unlock
my door. When I discovered I had no cash with which to pay him, the young
girl, maybe only 20 years old, negotiated the man’s price down by 40% and
paid him from her own account.

To say that such things wouldn’t occur in the West, even with family, is a
huge understatement. In China, they are normal, underpinned by a cultural
quality of trust and obligation that cannot be fathomed by someone living in
the West. The English language, precise as it is, has no vocabulary to explain
the quality of these relationships and the inseparable obligation inherent
therein.

One major complaint that corporate executives, especially Americans,

express about China is that the Chinese often don’t follow the terms of a
contract. From an American point of view they are correct, but that American
point of view is as black and white as is their political religion, hence the
culture shock. To Americans, the Chinese signing of a contract is only an
intermediate stage in a permanent negotiating process whereas it should
rightfully form part of the Ten Commandments since it is written in stone.
This is easy to understand but it bypasses completely the Western ideological
intellect.

I want to use an analogy here, one that compares China to Japan but that
applies equally to the West. Japanese chopsticks are tapered to a pointed
end and, when the Japanese eat fish, with these chopsticks they can easily
first pick out all the bones and then eat the fish. But Chinese chopsticks are
not tapered and are typically blunt at the ends. Thus, the Chinese eat the
whole fish, and then pick out the bones one by one as they find them. In the
West, this is how we view a marriage. We know there will be rocky periods
in the future, but we want the marriage and we proceed with the implicit
understanding that we will work through those periods as they arise. The
Chinese apply the same intent toward business dealings. It isn’t wrong; it’s
just different.

One day, when my children were much younger, I arrived at home to find a
window broken. I asked what happened and who did it, and one of my sons
confessed. But what do you suppose my reaction would have been had my
son said, “I refuse to answer on the grounds that I may incriminate myself”
or worse, if he had said, “I don’t think you can prove I did it, so I plead not
guilty. Give it your best shot.” I am by nature a gentle person, but any kid
of mine taking such a position would receive a slap on the head he wouldn’t
forget.

And now we come to China’s judicial system, which operates in exactly the
same way we raise our children. If you are caught doing something wrong,
you confess, you admit to your crime and, if you have some good sense, you
apologise, express your regret for what you have done, and throw yourself
onto the mercy of your father. It helps immensely if your regrets and
apologies are sincere.

But, with Chinese police and courts, if you want to be stubborn and
arrogant and force the police into a lengthy investigation and the
courts into a long trial, you will receive no mercy when found guilty,
and no clever lawyer will save you. That is precisely what we teach our
children. If a child lies and tries to avoid blame, the punishment will inevitably
be more harsh, and that is as it should be. In this sense, the Chinese judicial
system is perfect while the Western system is stupidly flawed. In Chinese
courts, lawyers are not permitted to lie or to cast unfair aspersions
or to attack vulnerable witnesses as they do in the West.

It is the same with the process of plea-bargaining that the Americans are
desperately attempting to push onto China as a superior method of dealing
with crime. But it is not superior; it is instead an enormous fraud being
perpetrated. The problem is that Chinese judges have proven almost
impermeable to bribery and Chinese lawyers have not been trained to lie in
a courtroom. So what to do when Americans are charged with crimes in
China, as they increasingly are and increasingly will be? The benefit of plea-
bargaining is that it removes judicial decisions and sentencing from the
judges and the courts and turns this discretion over to two sets of lawyers
on the hopeful theory that lawyers can be bribed more easily than can
judges. Again, in this respect the Chinese system is perfect while it is the
Western (American) justice system that is so badly flawed. We need think
only of the recent events in the US where Jeffrey Epstein avoided 200 years
in prison for his international underage sex trafficking ring, accomplished
only by removing decisions as to guilt and punishment from the courts and
placing it entirely into the hands of lawyers and money, all done without the
benefit of sunlight.

Let’s return for a moment to the Western media. I will begin with John
Bussey at the Wall Street Journal who, in one brief article titled, “China:
Bullying to Prosperity”, won a Nobel Prize for dishonest and unethical
reporting. This was his article in part:

“Watching China bully Wal-Mart Stores this week – and watching Wal-Mart
prostrate itself under the beating – is an embarrassing reminder of a simple
fact: China, the world’s fastest growing major market, has the upper hand
with U.S. business. Its array of protectionist barriers, weak rule of law, and
siren-like market make events like this all but inevitable. In the company’s
stores in the city of Chongqing, nonorganic pork was labeled “organic.” This
was the mistake. The pork was otherwise fine. Seizing on this error at a time
when inflation is a hot-button issue in China, officials accused Wal-Mart of
cheating the public by charging premium prices for regular meat. They fined
the company, shut down all 13 Wal-Marts in the city and jailed a number of
Wal-Mart employees. The actions played well in the national media. There’s
little if any recourse in authoritarian China when something like this happens
to a U.S. company. There aren’t regular courts. Like many other U.S. firms
that have run afoul of nationalist sentiments in China, Wal-Mart could only
beg forgiveness. It has nearly 350 stores in China with revenue of $7.5
billion. So Wal-Mart dropped to its knees.” He finished with an astonishing
claim where he cleverly quoted a (non-existent) “American executive in
Beijing who watches these matters” who supposedly said Wal-Mart had done
far more than Chinese companies “to secure the safety of the [country’s]
food supply.” (2)

We should all feel sorry for poor baby Wal-Mart, with only $7.5 billion in
revenue in China and being forced to “drop to its knees” because “there
aren’t regular courts” and “authoritarian” China has “a weak rule of law”. Bad
China, no question.

But that’s not exactly how it was. China had had years of trouble with Wal-
Mart repeatedly breaking every law on the books. Those same stores had for
years been selling ordinary pork labeled as organic, each time being caught
and fined a trivial amount, 8 times in the prior 7 months alone. It was so bad
that when the inspectors were leaving the store with the confiscated illegal
products, Wal-Mart’s staff were already busy labeling yet more ordinary pork
as organic. It was just a game where the retail price was several times higher
and the profits so huge that the nuisance of inspectors was trivial. What
changed the game was that this last time the inspectors made a wrong turn
as they were leaving the store, and found themselves in a refrigerated room
with 75,000 kilograms of ordinary pork labeled as organic. And thus was Wal-
Mart “securing the safety of China’s food supply”. But according to the WSJ’s
Bussey, a low-level clerk made an innocent “mistake” and mislabeled a few
packages of meat, but the mean, authoritarian Chinese government which
has no courts and no rule of law, made the company “drop to its knees”.

I can provide dozens of heavily-documented cases where foreign companies,

mostly American, have committed the most egregious crimes in China, yet
were repeatedly warned rather than being severely punished as they would
have been in any Western country. In one case, Coca-Cola was forced to
destroy about 100,000 cases of bottled drinks because of an atrociously high
level of chlorine which, it was discovered, was poured into the drinks to kill
an equally high level of fecal bacteria. In the West, the company’s business
license would have been canceled, especially considering the lies the
company told, even going on national television to claim their product was
“perfectly safe” when it patently was not. It is also worth noting that of the
ten largest corporate consumer frauds perpetrated in China in recent years,
eight of those were by American companies like P&G, OSI, Nike, GSK,
KFC. (3) (4)

In a similar instance, the Western media stridently reported, ad nauseum,

that “a Chinese human-rights lawyer” had been imprisoned by “The
Communist Party”, ostensibly for being a Chinese human-rights lawyer. Once
again, bad China. But once again, that’s not exactly how it was.

It was true that this lawyer had on one or two occasions acted for someone
who had a complaint about the system, the story being weaved in the
Western Zionist press that he was unjustly tossed into prison for daring to
assist a challenge against the “authoritarian, totalitarian, and brutal”
“Chinese dictatorship” and, even worse, daring to challenge the shaky
position of The Communist Party of China who would exterminate anyone for
the sake of maintaining their “feeble grip on power”. In only one article of
nearly 100 that I read on this particular case in the Western press, was there
even a suggestion of an extenuating circumstance. In only one article, the
very last sentence made vague passing mention of “a tax problem”.

That “tax problem” was a bit more than nothing. In China, there are various
classifications of purchase receipts, only one of which is usable for corporate
expense tax deductions. In many Western countries, even a cash register
receipt is usable in this regard, but in China we must have an official receipt
containing a government stamp. Since these receipts are equivalent to a tax
credit of 25%, they are valuable and are sometimes traded. If I have official
tax receipts my company cannot use, I can sell them to you at 10% of face
value and you can save 15% on your corporate income taxes. In this case,
this ‘human-rights lawyer’ and four of his friends, all lawyers, had been
running a business where they printed counterfeit tax receipts and sold them
to unsuspecting businesses, in total more than $300 million worth. All five
were arrested and thrown into prison but, according to the Zionist media,
this lead lawyer (only) was imprisoned not by the courts, but by “the
Communist Party”, and not for a massive counterfeiting fraud but for
defending the poor and helpless who were victimised by the vicious
communists.

When Westerners have only a diet of daily articles like this presented to them
by their most trusted media, how is it possible for anyone to accurately
understand anything about China?

China is renowned for its low crime rates. Cities like Shanghai and Beijing,
along with Tokyo and Singapore, lead the world in almost all aspects of
personal safety. I have travelled through almost every part of this country,
from the largest cities to rural areas, in daylight and darkest night, alone and
with companions, and in 15 years I can honestly say I have never once had
the slightest concern for my personal safety, and in fact the thought had
never entered my mind.

In this context of absence of crime, China has bypassed cheques and cards
in favor of a universal mobile phone payment system but is still in some ways
a cash society, surprisingly still using bills for many large transactions. In
any city in China we see on a daily basis people standing in line at an ATM,
patiently waiting while one person is feeding huge wads of bills into the
machine, 10,000 RMB at a time, the pile of cash often exceeding perhaps
$US50,000. This is such a common transaction as to be completely ignored
by everyone. In my 20 years in China, I have never heard of anyone being
robbed at an ATM.
Urban governments in China often expropriate for redevelopment downtown
land containing old and dilapidated housing, leading the Western media to
decry the “brutal, authoritarian displacement” of citizens, but once again
that’s not exactly how it really is.

These old homes are not heritage sites but mostly miserable and
impoverished one-room hovels sharing a common kitchen and bathroom,
where windows and doors leak wind and rain, and lacking both heating and
air conditioning.

The local governments move an entire small urban community into a suburb
where they have built lovely new apartment buildings that are turned over
to the people free of charge. The new homes are one or two-bedroom
apartments, built to a good standard, with real toilets and bathrooms and
kitchens, far nicer than these displaced citizens could ever have hoped for.
Anyone who doesn’t want to move, will be paid a cash sum for their old home
but, with urban housing being very expensive, accepting the new home is
the universal option.

In similar fashion, the Chinese national government recently built more

than 60,000 new homes in Tibet, given to the people free of charge,
to remove them from poverty, put them together in real
communities, and help to protect the environment. The Western
media unanimously refused to report this.

Further with housing, China’s national and city governments take action to
moderate house prices on the dictatorial communist premise that houses are
homes to live in, not “assets for speculation and profiteering”. In the very
large centers homes are quite expensive, much less so in the suburbs and
second and third-tier cities, but even so about 90% of all Chinese own their
own homes and about 80% of these are fully paid. Bank mortgages are
uncommon in China although growing to some extent. The Chinese do not
like “the feeling” of being in debt and a high savings rate is contained in
Chinese DNA, leading to housing down payments of typically 40% to 50%
with the balance being borrowed from the extended family and repaid
interest-free over time. China is the only country to my knowledge where a
young couple can easily borrow money for a house purchase from aunts,
uncles, cousins, grandparents, and pay cash for their first home, and low-
income couples are often able to purchase below-cost subsidised housing
from the government or, surprisingly, from many State-owned corporations
that build low-cost housing from their surplus profits. Socialism at its finest.

On this same note, I wrote in my article on Socialism that in Xi’An there is a

school with one of the finest campuses in the world, hectares of green grass,
an Olympic-sized swimming pool, flower gardens, lovely condominiums and
townhouse residences for the faculty and students. The school was built with
surplus profits of a local state-owned tobacco company that wanted to give
something to the community. The firm not only built the school but pays the
annual operating costs.

Further with housing (and other major purchases), the Chinese do not like
the feeling of buying anything that is used, this applying to homes,
automobiles, major appliances. If the Chinese purchase a used car, it will be
a first car and a maximum of one or two years old, the remainder
disappearing into the rural areas as temporary but affordable transportation.
If a Chinese buys a used home, their first act is to completely gut the interior,
stripping the entire dwelling to bare concrete, and reconstructing the entire
home to make it ‘new’, this renovation simply taken for granted as part of
the purchase cost.

Let’s return for a moment to the unpaid utility bills. In the West, utility
companies typically cut off electricity or gas immediately on the due date,
then charge the homeowner a substantial re-connection fee, a financial
penalty, and extra interest on the due amount. This harsh attitude is
surprisingly derived from the West’s twisted Christianity where, according to
the bankers, you have committed a sin – an offense against God – by failing
to pay your bill on time and therefore “deserve” to be punished. The utility
company doesn’t cut off your electricity because it needs the money but
because it wants to punish you, to make you suffer for your transgression
against the god of money.

The Chinese, not having been terminally infected with this sacrilegious
version of religion, cannot fathom the existence of such an attitude. The
West, in their eagerness to destroy China, cannot in turn fathom the
concept that “freedom of religion” inherently includes the possibility of
freedom FROM religion. But the Chinese do in fact have what we might term
a religion (in addition to Buddhism), one that derives from Confucius,
and teaches gentleness, forgiveness, and understanding. Confucius
taught only reform and education, never punishment, at least not in a
civil context. This brings us to the surprising but inescapable conclusion that
the Chinese are far better Christians than are the Christians themselves.

This is one reason China, with more people than the US and Europe
combined, has only 1/1,000th as many lawyers. The Chinese way is to
settle disputes by discussion and negotiation, never by force. This is so true
that in many police stations in China, the first room you see when you walk
through the door is a ‘negotiation room’ or a ‘dispute settlement room’.
The police will moderate many forms of disputes that can potentially be
settled without the filing of criminal charges or civil lawsuits. The American
way, and in fact the white man’s way is to call the police and hire a lawyer,
which is why Americans spend more each year on lawyers than they do on
the purchase of new automobiles. The Chinese way is better.

This is probably an appropriate place to point out that, aside from the normal
border disputes between neighboring nations, all the world’s wars have
been initiated by the Christians and Jews, following in the footsteps of
their God whose major commandment was “Thou shalt not kill”. In case
you don’t know, China has never started a war with anyone, and the
country’s last battle was a minor border skirmish about 50 years ago, one
that was begun by India not by China.

One indication of the inherent socialist and humanitarian nature of the

Chinese people is their attitude to innovation and IP, a powerful point of
dispute between China and the capitalist West. In the West, in years past,
patents were granted for a period of only three years, enough time for an
inventor to either produce or sell his invention, and this only for creations
deemed to be socially useful. There was no patent protection for Barbie’s
plastic breasts or Apple’s ridiculous “rectangle with rounded corners”.

We can think of it this way: if you tell me a humorous story and I repeat it
to another person, you are not offended if I fail to credit you as ‘the owner’
of the joke and in fact you are pleased that my appreciation was sufficient to
relate it onward. This is essentially the Chinese position on innovation. They
are not offended that you liked a creation so much as to copy it and improve
it and, in real life, this flurry of activity from the entire nation that surrounds
a new invention produces real creativity and development. Most every new
invention is primitive at the outset, requiring much modification and
amendment to result in its eventual perfect form. In the absence of the
designed hindrances to innovation and competition by the West’s brutal IP
laws, the natural Chinese way is to permit a new invention to escape into the
national population where potentially millions of people will contribute to the
modification and development, resulting not only in an astonishingly rapid
evolution of a new product but its free ability to benefit the entire population
instead of being jealously restricted to the selfish benefit of one person. This
is the reason that China’s IP laws are so much less aggressive than those of
the West, especially of the US. The natural, innate and deep-seated Chinese
concern is for the benefit of the nation, of all people, and I worry that China
is being corrupted by the vicious greed inherent in Western capitalism
evidenced by the country’s “tightening” of its IP legislation.

There is one other item worth noting here, that of the pace of change
in China. Western countries required the best part of 100 years to
industrialise and move from agrarian societies to urban
development, while China managed this in perhaps 30 years, one
generation. When young people in China are married today, they want a
new house, a new car, and a foreign vacation. When their parents were
married, they wanted a bicycle, a radio, and a sewing machine. I have spoken
to many Chinese in their early 30s who tell me that when they graduated
from university only ten years ago they couldn’t have imagined owning a new
home and having a car and taking European vacations only ten years later.
Such enormous change inflicted on a society with such speed,
naturally creates a great many strains, and it is much to the credit of
China’s national government and the extraordinary quality of its
leaders that these strains have been managed while maintaining a
powerful coherence in Chinese society, the exceptions being mostly
minor.

This is so true that consistently in all polls at least 85% and often 95% of the
population express great trust in their government and support of its actions.
(5) The NYT ran a recent editorial that must have choked them in the writing,
but that grudgingly admitted the Chinese very broadly support their system
of government and that it appears to be working very well for them. In an
Article in The Economist magazine, the writer, in deep shock, bemoaned the
fact that “a disconcertingly high percentage of China’s population
appear very happy with their government”. A few years ago, the
Americans, disbelieving these statistics, attempted to provoke the Chinese
people to a “Jasmine revolution”, flooding the Chinese social media with a
call to congregate in Wangfujing in downtown Beijing to protest against their
“brutal totalitarian government”. Unfortunately for the Americans, the
Chinese had no such interest and nobody showed up to protest.
The only participant was then-US Ambassador Jon Huntsman who came
to view the (non-existent) results of his handiwork, and who was recognised
and so ridiculed by the shoppers present that he put his tail between his legs
and ran for cover. (6)

However, due to the rapidity of social change, it is possible in China today to

see remnants of the prior generation incongruously mixed together with
those of the new age. What this means is that your picture of China can be
very much colored by your focus. The national government has indeed
brought 800 million people out of poverty in a very short time but we
can still find pockets of poverty simply because it is not possible to
do everything at the same time. So, in a railway station somewhere, we
can see in one view the sleekest and fastest fifth-generation 350 Kms/hr.
high-speed trains next to a first-generation 50 Km/hr. train. When totally
different generations coexist simultaneously, we can look at any sector and
find evidence to prove whatever point we want to prove. Those who want
to disparage China will simply choose a focal point that places the
country in an unfavorable light and present that as the basic
condition of the entire country.
*
Notes

(1) Guanxi – Wikipedia

(2) John Bussey | The Wall Street Journal

(3) China scandal costs OSI Group hundreds of millions

(4) Drug Giant Faced a Reckoning as China Took Aim at Bribery

(5) http://www.unz.com/article/should-we-compete-with-china-can-we/

(6) China’s jasmine revolution: police but no protesters

Chapter 10
Some Things You Should Maybe Know
About China

1960 -- The rural workforce turned their attention from the fields to
factories
 Militia members march in formation past Tiananmen Square during the
military parade marking the 70th founding anniversary of People's Republic
of China, on its National Day in Beijing, China October 1, 2019. (Photo:
Thomas Peter/Reuters)

It seems that whenever the topic of China arises, we are flooded with the
most amazing observations, statements, conclusions, almost all of which
appear to come from outer space. There surely cannot be another subject on
this planet on which so many people are so amazingly misinformed and arrive
at the most unrealistic conclusions.

We have a saying that after spending one month in China you could write a
book; after a year in China, you could write a chapter; in five years you could
write a paragraph, and after five years you could write a note on a postcard
- about the food. That saying has become almost an urban legend but it is
essentially true. I can still recall the day when, walking down a street in
downtown Shanghai after being in the country for about a month, I
experienced an illusion of such extreme clarity that I said to myself, “I could
write a book on this place”. I cannot explain the mental or sociological
processes that combine to cause that initial illusion of understanding and
clarity, nor the forces that so effectively and progressively dismantle it to a
condition where the more time we spend in China the less we understand it.

And yet, after living in China for nearly 20 years, I find myself constantly
challenged and "corrected" by persons who have never been to China, have
obviously never read anything useful about the country, and who may not
even actually know a single Chinese person. Yet this total lack of knowledge
is apparently not a hindrance to the huge amount of philosophical
pontificating about "how things really are in China".

I have often thought that I could stand and speak on China for an hour and
that my audience (of Canadians and Americans) would sit with their mouths
open and their faces blank for that full hour. They would have nothing to say
and no questions to ask, because they would be unable to fathom a set of
cultural circumstances where the events I report would be able to exist in
their world. The disconnect would be almost total. I recently wrote an article
titled "Understanding China" that contains some cultural elements of the
above kind. (1) You might care to read it; it's brief and interesting.

But for the rest of it, for an 'understanding' of China, I would be tempted to
say, "don't bother". Don't bother trying to understand China because that
understanding is likely beyond your grasp. I am reminded of the Englishman
who said that, after 25 years of marriage, he was "only beginning" to
understand his French wife. It's like that. China is a civilisation that is
millennia old, with the origins of traditions and thoughts lost in the
mists of time. Italy and Greece have a touch of this flavor; the other
Western nations not so much, and the US and Canada really have
nothing. It isn't easy to explain, but it's true nonetheless.

We are heavily penalised by the Western Jewish-owned media in each and

every one of its aspects, because the media frame for us a picture of China
that is nearly 100% false or at least badly misleading, this done from
ideology and their personal agenda. We cannot overcome that without an
inordinate amount of time and effort.
I would say that in general there is very little available in the English
language on China, on its history or culture, that is accurate or of much use,
and the European languages are not much better. There are some exceptions
- the writing of Anna Louise Strong (2) (3), and tracts by some mostly
obscure authors who managed to relay a more or less faithful representation
of China in their day.

Keep in mind that the Khazarian Jews were actively involved in the
destruction of China (opium, banking theft, political and social
destruction, massive wars and the most despicable cultural
genocides, among other things) for about 200 years and the
Americans weren't far behind them.
Thus, almost anything written by either the Jews or Americans is likely to be
rubbish because both were more intent on papering over their sins than in
presenting an accurate picture on any topic or aspect of China.

Jewish encyclopedias boast that opium in China was "entirely a Jewish

business" and that Sassoon refused to let any non-jews participate. And the
Americans, in addition to half a dozen military invasions, had their Treasury
Department, their beloved Jewish-owned FED, J. P. Morgan and Citibank (4)
(5), and many others, all cooperating in looting the carcass while they were
busy fostering yet a massive civil war through Zhang Jie Shi (Chiang Kai-
Shek to you) and T. V. Soong, busily destroying any remaining semblance
of government, economy, and society.

Both parties failed because of Mao Tze-Dong and they of course

bitterly hate him to this day.
Recent Jewish Expulsions of Note

Everyone knows that the Jews have been expelled from countless countries
for at least the past 500 or even 800 years. What most people don't know is
that the process never really stopped. One of Castro's first acts upon his
successful revolution in the early 1950s was to expel all the Jews from Cuba,
which is why that poor little country has been subject to barbarous and
almost homicidal sanctions for the past nearly 70 years.

The city of Nagasaki and the country of Japan likewise expelled all the Jews
prior to WWII, which is almost certainly the reason these two were selected
by Bernard Baruch (a Jew) as the targets for the atomic bombs (the
"Jewish hell-bomb", in case you don't know, 99.5% totally-Jewish-
developed). (6) Hitler wanted to expel all the Jews from Germany to
Madagascar (his "final solution"), but he failed because the Jews managed
to bring the US into the war.

Eichmann in Argentina. Source

Likewise, Mao's first act on taking power after winning China's so-called 'civil
war' (which was not against other Chinese but against the Jews and
Americans) was to expel all the Jews from China, confiscating (as did Castro)
all their ill-gotten opium assets that included all of Shanghai and the Mainland
branches of the HSBC.

Mao actually expelled all foreigners, but the Jews were certainly the target.
All Jewish publications I've seen, tell us only that the Jews left China "in a
hurry" after the war, without specifying exactly the cause of that 'hurry'. The
Jews have hated China ever since, and have been the cause of all the
isolation, trade embargoes, non-stop media hate campaign, and much else
directed against China since that time.

Shanghai Saved 40,000 Jews from Hitler

Shanghai did no such thing. Populations inside and outside China (but
especially inside) are being pumped by the Jews with fictional tales of how
the "wonderful warm-hearted Chinese" welcomed all those Jews escaping
persecution in Germany. So many tales of fond memories of the
Shanghainese loving the Jews. But that isn't exactly how it was.

Shanghai already had a large contingent of wealthy opium Jews and, since
the city was entirely under the control of the Japanese Imperial Army at the
time, this was where the Japanese sent all the Jews on their expulsion from
Japan. Neither Shanghai nor 'China' had anything to say about it, and the
"wonderful warm-hearted Chinese" didn't even know what happened.

There were a few Jews who may have come overland through Russia
and Siberia or by ship, but they were few and their transit passes
were for the US, not China.

It is worthy of note that the "wonderful warm-hearted Chinese" didn't do too

well under their new Jewish masters. The stories you may have heard about
signs in Shanghai reading "No dogs or Chinese allowed", are true, and
those signs were erected by the Jews, not the Japanese.
Mao Tze-Dong: Killing Chinese and Drowning Kittens

It was Jews' expulsion from China and the resulting bitter hatred of Mao that
have led to 70 years of garbled hate-history of China and of Mao in particular.
It may surprise some of you to learn that Mao never actually "killed"
anybody. All of those stories are Jewish hate literature spawned by their
resentment of having to leave China with some flesh still remaining on the
bones. This was the cause of China's great famine around 1960 when the
European Jews used the services of the UN to launch a worldwide
food embargo on China when that country suffered several years of natural
catastrophes and experienced a severe food shortage. Using the
Americans as the Banker's Private Army (and genocidal enforcer),
the entire world sat for three years and watched about 20 million
Chinese starve to death. Not one country dared to give China any
food, nor to sell food to China at any price. (7)

It was the European Khazarian Jews who killed all those millions of
Chinese, not Chairman Mao, and they even had the chutzpah to
progressively over-estimate their handiwork to as high as 80 million
deaths. That is one indication of the savage and inhuman natural proclivities
of the European Khazarian Jews - the Rothschilds, Sassoons, Kadoories,
Sebag-Montefioris, Lehmans, de' Medicis, Mendelssohns,
Bleichroeders, Warburgs, Lazars, and a hundred other names you
have never heard of.

It is the Jews who have created all the tales of China's famine being due to
Mao's "mismanagement" of food stocks, and tales of how the man killed or
executed millions of his own people - for no apparent reason since he was in
the process of healing the country and attempting to rebuild it by pulling
everyone together. He succeeded. If not for Mao, there would be no
China today.

China's Jewish Communism

Similarly, all of the tales you have heard about China's Communism, the
Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, China's one-child
policy, and so much more, are the result of the Jews attempting to paper
over their own final "contributions" to China's "progress".

In case you didn't know, Communism was a 99.985% Jewish

enterprise, from Marx and Engels onward. In Russia, the Jews managed
to exterminate not only the Russian Royal Family, the Romanovs
(Romanoffs) and virtually all of the clergy, but also more than 30% of the
total Russian population including the entire middle class and property-
owners, to say nothing of looting the entire nation of money, gold, art, icons,
Royal Treasure, as they left.

The Khazarian European Jews - the usual list of suspects - were entirely
responsible for introducing communism to China. The Jewish Bolsheviks sent
an envoy - Grigori Naumovich Voitinsky (real name Zarkhin, a Russian
Jew) in the hope of duplicating the destruction of Russia in China. Voitinsky
failed in his mission and was expelled, so the Jewish vision of communism
never took root in China. The plan for Russia (and all European countries)
was to have only a small cadre of Jews controlling the entire nation of
peasant-cattle to serve them. This was the picture presented to China, one
which was refused.

However, part of the communist philosophy did take hold in China, that of
the oppression of the lower classes by the educated and wealthy, and it was
this that was almost entirely responsible for the mistakes Mao made. He
refused to consider exterminating the upper and middle classes as
the Jews recommended and as they had done in Russia, but he did go
so far as to try to level the playing field. Thus, doctors were sent to work on
farms, and similar, in an attempt to narrow the gaps between the classes.
Those attempts failed, and for decades the Jews have pilloried Mao in every
way possible without revealing that he was only following their pattern for
"nation-building", but in much gentler fashion. It is the Jews, not the Chinese
who should take responsibility for Mao's social-planning failures.

China's Jewish One-Child Policy

Similarly, it was another Jew, one of the Malthusian cult whose name escapes
me at the moment, who was sent to China with instructions to cull the
Chinese population - for the good of all humanity. This effort had rather more
success. The man did manage to scare the hell out of the Chinese about the
prospects of feeding such an enormous population, and the adoption of the
one-child policy was the direct result of this encounter. Naturally, China no
sooner adopted the Jews' recommendation than they used it to pillory China
yet one more time as a nation "brutally violating human rights". Once again,
it is the Jews who should take full responsibility for China's family-
planning policies since these were taken entirely on their 'advice'.

And so on. Think of almost anything bad that you have read about China, or
almost anything bad that you 'know' about China and, if you scratch the
surface, you will find a Jew. I know that doesn't sound very nice, but it
happens to be the truth.

The point of all the above is that nearly everything you know, or think that
you know, or that you believe to be true, about China and its history, is
wrong. History is written by the victors or, alternatively, by those who
control all the media and who own virtually all of the book
publishers. And they lie because they are busy covering up their complicity
in most of the crimes that have been committed against humanity anywhere,
and certainly anything involving China. My comments above haven't even
scratched the surface of the Jews' crimes in China, much less anywhere else.

Nobody in China has an Imagination

Again, we hear in the Jewish media so much about how "China" and the
Chinese have never invented anything, have no imagination, and know only
how to copy and steal. But the truth is 180° from this. It is reliably
estimated that at least 60% of all the knowledge in the world today
originated in China. Yes, that's really true, and the estimate is not mine.
We were all taught in school that the printing press with movable type was
invented by Johannes Gutenberg in Germany in around 1550, but China
not only invented paper but had printing presses with movable type (on both
top and bottom) 600 years before Gutenberg was born. Similarly, every
schoolboy knows that the Englishman James Watt invented the steam
engine, but China had working steam engines 600 years before James Watt
was born.

The truth is that Chinese invention has always led the world, with most of
these inventions having been copied or stolen by the West and China then
just written out of the world's history by the same people who stole the
inventions and who own all the history book publishers. Here is the story of
Chinese invention: If you don't know about this, it's a real eye-opener. (8)

Also, the Americans and the Jewish US media tried to tarnish China's high-
speed rail system by flooding the presses with untrue accusations of China
stealing all the rail IP. I wrote an article on China's high-speed rail; it's
interesting, and contains no lies: (9) And here is something else you might
really enjoy reading: the story of Nüshu, one of the oldest and most
beautiful, and certainly one of the more intriguing languages in the world,
the only known example of a full-fledged language created by women and
spoken and understood only by women. (10) It is a part of the UNESCO
Heritage. (11)

The Jews of Asia

"The Chinese are not called “the Jews of Asia” without reason." For your
information, the Chinese are not called 'the Jews of Asia' with a reason,
either. In fact, the Chinese are not called 'the Jews of Asia' at all. This
originated with an article, later expanded to some 63 pages, written in 1914
by King Vajiravudh of Siam (Thailand), titled: "The Jews of the
Orient/Wake Up Siam!"A reader styling himself "thotmonger" posted a
comment on Andrew Anglin's article on unz.com "I Don’t Know Who’s Great
Resetting Who Anymore", in which he stated: "In it, Vajiravudh makes a
very informed and dispassionate cultural and behavior comparison between
Jews and ethnic Chinese. It holds up and has been borne out." (12)

Well, not quite. Researchgate wrote of this paper: "the infamous and highly
polemical article penned by King Vajiravudh Rama VI of Siam and first
published . . . in 1914 has long been employed as the fundamental evidence
of the innate anti-Chinese nature of Siam's particular brand of royalist
nationalism". (13) In fact, rather than being "very informed and
dispassionate", it was an astonishingly vitriolic piece of venomous trash that
has since 1914 been sitting the historical dustbin where it belongs. This is a
warning to not believe everything you find on the internet about China, and
an even more useful warning to question the motives of those who so highly
recommend this brand of rubbish. And please, forget that you ever heard
this expression. It’s offensive.

The US Transferred its Manufacturing Base to China;

China Stole Our jobs

Well, not exactly. What happened was that the Jewish bankers and
industrialists who more or less control the US, forced an agreement with the
US government that all profits earned offshore would be tax-free (so long as
So Levi's, making blue jeans in the US for $20 and selling them for $40,
could now go to China and make the jeans for $5 and still sell for $40. As
soon as Levi's did this, the other manufacturers could see their future was in
the dustbin because Levi's could sell blue jeans for much less than the other
firms' cost of production. They had no choice but to follow.So they fired all
their employees, closed their factories, and moved to China. When Mattel
moved, everyone had to move, this process duplicated throughout the entire
manufacturing sector. Many didn't even have to build their own factories;
they could find a Chinese factory to make their products OEM, and just
collect the money. That is why Apple has something like $300 billion sitting
offshore. Now, all those same firms are pressing the US government
to repatriate those profits tax-free on the grounds they will use the
money to "create jobs".

We read so many different stories on this topic, assessing the blame on

America's misguided industrial policies, or how the Jews are transferring the
West's riches to China, or how the Chinese are somehow in cahoots with
someone in the planned destruction of America. But this is unrelated to
industrial policy; it was simply due to the Jews' greed and their
contempt of America, their willingness to bleed the nation dry so long
as they profit from it. "Once we have squeezed everything we want
from the US, it can dry up and blow away."

China Stole all our IP

Yeah, sure. Send me the list. For those of you who don't know, the US and
the Khazarian Jews are the greatest thieves of IP in history. You might care
to read about Operation Paperclip (14) and the US' vast IP theft
network (15), and some of the truth about 'How the US Became Rich':
(16) (16A) (17)

IP theft and Technology Transfer

Despite US accusations of China copying foreign technology, China’s high-

technology achievements were entirely home-grown because the US has
been so determined to hinder China’s rise that by 1950 it engineered an
international embargo on all scientific knowledge and on almost all useful
products and processes to China, including legislation that Chinese scientists
cannot be invited to, or participate in, American scientific forums, while
bullying other Western nations into doing the same. In October of 2019,
all Chinese scientists and space technology companies were denied
visas to attend the weeklong International Astronautical Congress in
Washington, far from the first time such has occurred. We hear much in
the Western media about China demanding technology transfers as a
condition of corporate residence in China, but this is mostly propaganda. No
doubt expectations for technology and knowhow transfer do occur, since
China doesn’t want to spend the rest of its life making toasters and running
shoes but, since entry to the Chinese market is a gift of billions in profits, it
is perfectly sensible to attach a price to it. However, one must keep in mind
that no foreign company is conducting cutting-edge commercial or sensitive
military research, or manufacturing quantum computers and hypersonic
missiles in China. Any technology actually available for transfer would be
almost entirely in consumer goods, and hardly constitute great value or
threats to US ‘national security’. And, in virtually all of the cutting-edge fields
and industries such as quantum computing, 5-G telecom or solar
energy, China has already surpassed the US. (18)

If it Weren't for us . . .

This has been floating around for years, the claim however it's made, that
the US deserves all the credit for China's resurgence.
AmCham (the American Chamber of Commerce) in China even made the
flat claim that it - AmCham - was directly responsible for the lifting of 600
million people out of poverty. "We gave you the technology, we got you into
the WTO, we did it all for you." James Fallows in China Airborne even
claimed the Chinese were dimly aware their airplanes were crashing but had
no idea what to do about it, so the Americans came and taught the magic
word of 'maintenance', thus rescuing Chinese aviation. Of all the sick jokes,
that one is probably the sickest.

After doing everything possible for 70 years to bankrupt and

partition China, to derail, to isolate, to rob, to starve to death, to
collapse the government, to cause revolutions in, and having failed
to prevent China's rise, now the Americans and their Jewish masters
are taking credit for it. The specific claims are so ridiculous I won't bother
listing and refuting them.

The South China Sea Islands

China discovered and claimed all these islands many many hundreds of years
ago, long before the Vietnamese and Philipinos even learned to swim. If the
US can claim Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas and the Virgin Islands and
the UK can claim the Falklands which are only about 50,000 miles from their
shores, why can't China have a few islands that are near home?

They did have, until a few years ago when the Americans and their
masters, always looking for a chance to create instability and launch
another war, began prodding Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, to
"occupy" those islands.

"After all, they are also near your shores, so why should you let the Chinese
have them? And don't worry; we have military bases here in your country.
The Chinese won't dare do anything."

So three countries stupidly did just that; they 'occupied' (and militarised) the
three best, largest, and most strategic of these islands. China wasn't about
to start a war with its neighbors over this, but the government wasn't blind
to what was happening, either, so the Chinese military grabbed the three
next most useful islands and did indeed fortify them with military
installations.

This was done in self-defense since China doesn't need US nuclear

warheads a few hundred miles from its shores, without having some
kind of early-warning defense. But the only noise you hear in the
Jewish media and from the White House is about "China's
militarisation of the South China Seas".

The Diaoyu Islands

One commenter here wrote, "A decade ago, China started "an aggressive
military challenge" to Japan concerning some islands. China "did not have a
legal leg to stand on" but it led to "State-induced mob attacks" on Japanese
businesses in China."

"Rubbish" is much too kind a word to waste on bullshit like this. The
Diaoyu Islands have belonged to China since before there was a
China. Japan occupied them. The US conquered Japan in WWII and the
UN left it to the US military to put things back as they were in the
Pacific, in this case to return the Diaoyu Islands to China. But the
Americans, taking counsel one more time from their Jewish masters who
always seem to know how to set the stage for future wars, ignored the UN
mandate and instead turned the islands over to Japan for "administration
purposes". And of course, the Americans and Jews (you may not know
this, but Japan is a Jewish-American colony with no will or foreign
policy of its own) push the Japanese to either populate these little islands
or do something equally provocative to see if they can start another war
between China and Japan. And, for the record, the Chinese government
strongly discouraged the attacks on Japanese businesses in China, but
resentment toward Japan does run deep in China, and for very good reason.

The Trouble With Taiwan

If you want to start a war with China, this is the place to do it. The
Americans know it, their Jewish masters know it, and both are doing their
best to make it happen. All we hear in the Western media is that China, for
no good reason, considers Taiwan "a renegade province" which it resolves to
bring home again one day - by force, if necessary. But this is bad because,
as the BBC solemnly tells us, Taiwan is ". . . a sovereign state. It has its own
constitution, democratically-corrupt leaders (although not quite as
democratically-corrupt as in the US), a standing military", to say nothing of
billions of dollars of US arms and missiles, and military provocations by the
score.But how did Taiwan become a 'renegade' province? Simple. China
underwent a civil war, with Mao on one side and the Jews and Americans on
the other side, protecting their puppet Zhang Jie Shi. Mao won.

Zhang's last act, under American military support, was to totally loot China's
central bank and all other banks within reach, and flee to Taiwan. That
wouldn't have helped him much, but the US filled the Taiwan Strait with all
the naval military muscle it could gather, to prevent Mao from tidying up this
loose end. China didn't have the naval power to Challenge the US fleet, and
could do no more than fire occasional artillery shells at Taipei. Once again,
the Jews and the Americans were setting up a lovely future war.The
Jewish media tell us that Taiwan "has never even been under the control of
China's Communist Party", a statement that is factually true but irrelevant.
Taiwan had always been part of China until the Japanese occupied it
and then the Americans took it over and prevented its unification
with the Mainland. China's Communist Party is a relative newcomer to
government, and it was only because of the formation of that government
that the reunification was prevented. Lies and more lies.

The Trouble With Tibet

Tibet was a part of China long before George Washington cut down his
fictious cherry tree, long before Benjamin Franklin conducted his fictitious
Kite Experiment, and even long before Christopher Columbus opened his first
aboriginal brothel in the New World. (19)

The Western media have imposed on our imaginations an image of a fabled

theocracy where a reincarnated god rules over a peaceful people spinning
prayer wheels in a pastoral idyll.

The West’s fascination with Tibet has turned it into a mythic place upon which
we project our dreams and our own spiritual fantasies. The result is what I
call the Shangri-La syndrome (20), millions of Westerners choosing to
believe in an attractive but wholly mythological, romantic fantasy which has
never existed.

Emancipated serfs from Dagze County throwing title deeds and debt
contracts into fire. Source
Tibet was generally self-managed, though experiencing much British and
American interference and slaughter until the middle of the last century. The
Western press refer euphemistically to Tibet’s pre-1950 social structure as a
benign ‘feudal system’, but it was no such thing. When Mao went in to
clean it up, Tibet was a slave colony. Virtually all the people were literally
owned by the Dalai and other lamas, the people forbidden to own land, and
worked their entire lives without pay. The highest monks each owned 35,000
to 40,000 slaves.

Source

The level of poverty in Tibet (outside the monasteries) until the

1950s could not be imagined by Westerners; it would have to be seen
to be believed. Tibetans couldn’t afford fabric clothing, still wearing
sheepskins as they did centuries earlier. Life was brutal, harsh, and corrupt.
Life expectancy was barely 30. The prettiest girls and boys were
confiscated to the monasteries for sex. Education was forbidden to all
but the monks because education was expensive and educated peasants
were considered dangerous to the system. The Dalai Lama prohibited any
development of industry because wealth of the population brought
independence from the religion. The Lamas, however, sent their children to
British schools in India, and freely transferred the Province’s financial assets
to British banks. (21) (22)

After Mao decided that enough was enough, the situation in Tibet has
soared in every way imaginable.

In China, 99.9% of Those Charged With a Crime, are Convicted

We are today treated by the Western media to ‘the fact’ of the Chinese justice
system having a conviction rate of “at least 99.9%”, if not higher,
accompanied by harrowing tales of criminals confessing under duress –
surely the reason for the apparently high conviction rate.

First, the percentage above is a foolish and exaggerated guess, one more
way to smear China. There is no agency in China that collects and collates
such statistics from all levels of the courts and from all cities, towns,
provinces, counties. Thus, even the legal authorities couldn't tell you the
average conviction rates. It might be possible for a particular level of
court in a single city or town, but not nationwide.

Nevertheless, for comparison, the equivalent number for conviction rates in

the West (at least the US and Canada) is about 60%, the number
presented as an indication of ‘fairness’ or ‘justice’ in the Western system, but
what does that 60% Western conviction rate mean? It means that nearly half
of all people in the West who are charged with a crime, were in fact innocent,
but needed the expense and trauma of a criminal trial to prove their
innocence. Or, if you want to be stubborn, we can argue the other side –
that 100% of those charged with a crime were in fact guilty, but that
a clever and expensive lawyer let them walk free. Is that better? If you
want to know the truth about China's system, you can read this: (23)

Why do Criminals in China Confess to Their Crimes?

According to millennia of culture and tradition, if you are caught in a crime,

you take it like a man; you confess, you express your regret, and you throw
yourself on the mercy of the court. It helps immensely if your expression of
regret is sincere. But if you try to lie your way out of it, if you refuse to admit
to your crime and obstruct the investigation, the police will hold you until
they eventually acquire the proof they need, after which the courts will show
you no mercy.

This is the Chinese system, just as it is at home with our children, where
confessing is the only smart move and trying to lie your way out is cowardly
and despicable. Westerners cannot understand this, the media repeatedly
referring to a “purported confession” or a “possibly coerced confession”,
unable to fathom a culture where people traditionally confess to crimes when
they are caught. Thus, the conclusion that any confession in China must have
been forced or obtained by torture. In the West, with the legal system as
created, confessing to a crime is probably stupid; in China, refusing to
confess to a crime certainly is stupid. (24)

China's "50-cent Army"

All of you must know of this, a story fabricated by David Bandurski, another
Jew, this one at Hong Kong University's 'China Media Project' financed by
George Soros. The tale weaved by Bandurski was that the Chinese
government had 288,000 people engaged full-time looking for opportunities
to make posts anywhere on the internet favorable to China, with a reward of
US$0.50 for each and every such post. These claims were seen by the
hundreds all over the internet, on any platform permitting comments, with
any comment favorable to China accused of being part of China's 50-cent
army.

But then suddenly - on one day - this died, because on that day someone
posted on Facebook a screenshot of a long-existing program where
the government of Israel had been (and still was) offering to all
Jewish university students in America, a payment of US$0.50 for
every post favorable to Israel or the Jews. Bandurski went silent and
we can hope he remains in that condition. There never actually was a Chinese
50-cent army but there was indeed a Jewish 50-cent army, which still exists
today and which we can see on unz.com and many other places.

China's Fall

Michael Kadoorie (second from left) with David Li, CEO of the Bank of East
Asia (fourth from left), and other guests at the opening of the Peninsula
Shanghai Hotel in 2010. Source
"For me, the surprise is how China managed to fall so badly 200 years ago.
Studying that would bring the biggest lessons we can all learn." It was the
Jews who destroyed China, as they are destroying the US and Europe
today. China succeeded by expelling all the Jews and ensuring that
any whoever returned would have no access to the makers of public
policy.

That is the biggest lesson you can learn, but no Western country today has
the independence for such expulsions. The only result of such an attempt to
reclaim control of the throne would be hundreds of mortally-disgraced
politicians, and many dead ones.

Notes

(1) https://www.moonofshanghai.com/2021/07/en-larry-romanoff-
understanding-china.html

Understanding China

(2) https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/strong-anna-
louise/1963/letters_china/forward.htm

How "Letter from China" Grew

(3) https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/news-wires-white-papers-and-
books/strong-anna-louise

Anna Louise Strong

(4) https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/en-larry-romanoff-
citibank-the-great-gold-robbery-july-07-2021/

Citibank- The Great Gold Robbery

(5) https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/us-silver-purchase-act-of-1934/

US Silver Purchase Act of 1934

(6) https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/a-few-historical-frauds/

A few Historical Frauds, by Larry Romanoff - The Unz Review

(7) https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/3234/

China’s 1959 Famine

(8) https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/history-of-chinese-inventions-the-
present-and-the-future-recent-chinese-state-of-the-art-innovations/

History of Chinese Inventions. The Present and the Future

(9) https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/3442/

China’s High-Speed Trains

(10) https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/2143/

Nüshu (女书) - The Language of Women

(11) https://en.unesco.org/courier/2018-1/nushu-tears-sunshine

Nüshu: from tears to sunshine

(12) https://www.unz.com/aanglin/i-dont-know-whos-great-resetting-who-
anymore/

I Don’t Know Who’s Great Resetting Who Anymore; See comment

#159

(13)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301666099_Beyond_Jews_of_th
e_Orient_A_New_Interpretation_of_the_Problematic_Relationship_between
_the_Thai_State_and_Its_Ethnic_Chinese_Community

(14) https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/the-greatest-
intellectual-property-theft-in-history-operation-paperclip-november-16-
2019/

The Greatest Intellectual Property Theft in History: Operation

Paperclip

(15) https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/3761/

Patents, Theft of Intellectual Property (IP), Product Piracy and US-

China Relations

(16) https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/4646/

Nations Built on Lies; Volume 1 – How the US Became Rich

(16A) https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/books/

Books

(17) https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/4950/
Nations Built on Lies; Volume 1 – How the US Became Rich; Part 4 --
IP theft and copying

(18) https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/history-of-chinese-inventions-the-
present-and-the-future-recent-chinese-state-of-the-art-innovations/

History of Chinese Inventions. The Present and the Future

(19) https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/3781/

A Brief Introduction to Tibet

(20) Shangri-la was originally thrust upon the world in the 1933 novel ‘Lost
Horizon’ by British author James Hilton https://www.amazon.com/Lost-
Horizon-Novel-James-Hilton/dp/0062113720 who described it as a
mystical, harmonious valley, gently guided by devoted lamas, the name since
becoming synonymous with a mythical earthly but isolated paradise whose
inhabitants are virtually immortal. However, Shangri-la really does exist, a
charming town in the remote NorthWest of China’s Yunnan Province.

(21) Anna Louise Strong; Tibetan Interviews, 1959;

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/strong-anna-
louise/1959/tibet/index.htm

(22) T. D. Allman; A Myth Foisted on the Western World, The Nation

Magazine; https://shugdensociety.wordpress.com/2010/07/03/a-myth-
foisted-on-the-western-world/

(23) https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/2847/

Chinese Criminal Confessions

(24) ibid.
Chapter 11
Chinese Criminal Confessions

The first Emperor Qin Shi Huang ruled from 231-219 BC, dominated and
unified all of China. He created the Great Wall of China and the Terracotta
Warriors.

We are today treated by the Western media to 'the fact' of the Chinese
justice system having a conviction rate of "at least 99.9%", if not higher,
accompanied by harrowing tales of criminals confessing under duress - surely
the reason for the apparently high conviction rate.

But once again, not everything is as it seems.

Westerners live in an illusionary black and white world framed for them by
the programming from their Zionist media and are mostly incapable of
escaping their ideological indoctrination. They tend to view virtually
everything about other nations and peoples through a series of political-
religious ideological lenses that cast a rather severe chromatic aberration on
anything seen through those lenses.

Certainly this includes the judicial system, leaving Americans and

Canadians particularly, unable to comprehend traditions and
outlooks very different from their own. I will explain.

One day many years ago, I arrived home from the office to find a window
broken in my house. The children had been playing ball in the house - which
they knew they weren't supposed to do, and accidentally broke a window.
One of my sons confessed. But what do you suppose my response would
have been if he had said, "I refuse to testify on the grounds that I may
incriminate myself"? Or, worse, if he had said, "I don't think you can prove I
did it, so I plead Not Guilty. Give it your best shot." I am by nature a gentle
person, but any kid of mine giving me an answer like that would receive a
slap on the head he wouldn't soon forget.

This is what we teach our children:

Don't be cowardly if you do something wrong and are caught. Be a

man and admit your wrongdoing. Recognise that what you did was
wrong, express your regret, and hope for mercy from your father.
Whatever else you do, you don't add to your crime by lying about it.

This is precisely the Chinese system.

According to millennia of culture and tradition, if you are caught in a crime,

you confess, you express your regret, and you throw yourself on the mercy
of the court. It helps immensely if your expression of regret is sincere.
But if you try to lie your way out of it, if you refuse to admit to your
crime and obstruct the investigation, the police will hold you until
they eventually acquire the proof they need, after which the courts
will show you no mercy.

This is the Chinese system, just as it is at home with our children,

where confessing is the only smart move. Westerners cannot
understand this, the media repeatedly referring to a "purported confession"
or a "possibly coerced confession", unable to fathom a culture where people
traditionally confess to crimes when they are caught. Thus the conclusion
that any confession in China must have been forced or obtained by torture.

The Western system is very different because it stems from a different

culture - or a lack of culture. The existence of the many so-called 'rights'
of criminals today is now presented as evidence of the chastity of America's
courtsystem, but those rights were introduced because the system was so
corrupt it could no longer function. In the West, with the prosecution and
court systems as they are, only a fool would confess to a crime because
(1) it eliminates the possibility of a smooth lawyer convincing a judge to
exonerate you, and

(2) only in unusual circumstances would "mercy" plays any part in a

Western courtroom.

In the West, especially in the black-and-white, authoritarian, English-

speaking countries, a guilty plea forecloses the crime investigation, with
automatic conviction and punishment mandatory; thus the only hope in
the West for a 'fair' hearing is a refusal to confess.

In the same context, the Western media make repeated references to China's
conviction rate of 99.9%, suggesting that anyone charged with a crime is
automatically sentenced to prison, this being proof that China's judicial
system is corrupt. But these claims are based on deliberate
misinformation and willful ignorance.

First, the Chinese government does not collect statistics on conviction rates
for every level of court in every city, town, county and province, so even the
authorities in China don't know the overall conviction rate. The number of
99.9% is yet one more statistic fabricated by Western columnists to
demean China in the eyes of the world.

For comparison, the equivalent number for conviction rates in the West (at
least the US and Canada) is about 60%, the number presented as an
indication of 'fairness' or 'justice' in the Western system, but what does that
60% Western conviction rate mean? It means that nearly half of all people
in the West who are charged with a crime, were in fact innocent, but needed
the expense and trauma of a criminal trial to prove their innocence.
Or, if we want to be stubborn, we can argue the other side - that 100% of
those charged with a crime were in fact guilty, but that a clever and
expensive lawyer let them walk free. Is that better?

The truth is that China's police perform what are probably the most
thorough criminal investigations in the world today.
The Chinese police will not lay a criminal charge unless and until they are
100% certain the accused is guilty of the crime, and they will take as long
as necessary to obtain that evidence. Not only that, they generally make
sincere efforts to obtain all the circumstantial evidence surrounding a crime,
in order to assist the courts in arriving at the most appropriate conclusion
and punishment.

This process ensures a conviction rate higher than in the West, not because
China's system is corrupt but because it functions as a judicial system
should.

In the US especially, but in other Western nations as well, police and

prosecutors will lay charges on a whim, on the smallest suspicion of guilt,
then leave it to the courts to sort out guilt or innocence. Moreover, it has
become increasingly true that police and prosecutors use criminal charges or
the threat of them as negotiating tools to force compliance in other areas.

American police commonly use criminal charges or threats of them as a tool

to intimidate individuals, and the FBI is famous for employing this
method to bankrupt political and other dissidents with legal fees.

China does not have the foolish tradition of permitting an accused to plead
"not guilty", which is in fact telling the police and the courts "I don't think
you can really prove I did it, so I deny everything and dare you to try". That
can be done in China too, but punishments are more harsh in this event, as
they should be.

And which way is better? Why should the legal system be different from what
we do at home in our private lives and which is clearly the right way? In
China's system; the guilty party, when caught, is expected by culture and
tradition to confess his sins and tell "the whole truth" of his crimes. If he
does this, the courts, by all accounts, are almost always much more merciful
than when dealing with a criminal who lied to the end, refused to
admit his guilt and displayed no remorse.
In what way is the American system better, where a plea of 'not guilty'
requires extensive and costly courtroom and other processes, and produces
delays that often extend to years? And why would anybody be proud of a
system where police are careless, slipshod, reckless, and often malicious,
laying criminal charges on the flimsiest of evidence and leaving it to the
courts to eventually sort out which accused are part of the innocent 40%?

It is the same with the process of plea-bargaining that the Americans are
desperately attempting to push onto China as a superior method of dealing
with crime. But it is not superior; it is instead an enormous fraud being
perpetrated. The problem is that Chinese judges have proven almost
impermeable to bribery and Chinese lawyers have not been trained
to lie in a courtroom.

So what to do when Americans are charged with crimes in China, as they

increasingly are and increasingly will be? The benefit of plea-bargaining is
that it removes judicial decisions and sentencing from the judges and the
courts and turns this discretion over to two sets of lawyers on the hopeful
theory that lawyers can be bribed more easily than can judges. Again, in this
respect the Chinese system is perfect while it is the Western (American)
justice system that is so badly flawed.

We need think only of the recent events in the US where Jeffrey

Epstein avoided 200 years in prison for his international underage
sex trafficking ring, accomplished only by removing decisions as to
guilt and punishment from the courts and placing it entirely into the
hands of lawyers and money, all done without the benefit of sunlight.
Chapter 12
Dealing With Demons

The Lockdown

At the outbreak of the epidemic, China implemented the most comprehensive

and rigorous measures ever taken. Wuhan was locked down on Jan. 23, with
several other cities in Hubei Province quickly thereafter, then the entire
province. (1) All public transportation was suspended. Airports, train
stations, bus depots, boat and ferry docks were closed, all toll highways shut
down and most roads blocked. All the subways and buses stopped
running, and all people were to remain in their homes. The initial
lockdown in late January involved about 20 million people, extending to
about 60 million within a month, this at a time when China had only about
500 infections. The move, unprecedented in modern times and undoubtedly
a difficult decision, spoke volumes about the gravity of the situation and
the seriousness with which the government viewed the public health threat.

China's President Xi issued a rather stern warning at the time, that

"Governments of all levels are obliged to resolutely take all preemptive
measures to rein in the fast spread of the virus and be completely
transparent about their local situation so that the country can unite to fight
the pandemic together, and ensure that the world has a true picture of the
situation. As Xi made clear, the mistakes of the past must not be
repeated." All the evidence suggests the Chinese authorities acted
effectively as soon as they realised the danger they might be facing.

Remembering the SARS troubles, they did much more. In most large centers
in the country, all sports venues, theaters, museums, tourist attractions, all
locations that attract crowds, were closed, as were all schools. All group tours
were cancelled. Not only the city of Wuhan but virtually the entire province
of Hubei was locked down, with all trains, aircraft, buses, subways, ferries,
grounded and all major highways and toll booths closed. Thousands of flights
and train trips were cancelled until further notice.

Some cities like Shanghai and Beijing were conducting

temperature tests on all roadways leading into the cities. In
 addition, Wuhan was building two portable hospitals of 25,000
square meters each to handle infected patients. As well, Wuhan
has asked citizens to neither leave nor enter the city without a
compelling reason, and all were wearing face masks.

The scale of the challenge of implementing such a blockade was immense,

comparable to closing down all transport links for a city 5 times the size of
Toronto or Chicago, two days before Christmas. These decisions were
unprecedented, but testified to the determination of the authorities to limit
the spread and damage of this new pathogen. They not only addressed the
gravity of the situation but also the seriousness of consideration for the public
health, unfortunate and difficult decisions since the holiday was destroyed
for hundreds of millions of people. Most public entertainment was cancelled,
as were tours, and many weddings as well.

The damage to the economy during this most festive of all periods,
was enormous. Hong Kong will suffer severely in addition to all its other
troubles, since visits from Mainland Chinese typically support much of its
retail economy during this period. And already the Western media were in
full China-bashing mode, (2) some claiming that lockdowns and quarantines
were "a violation of human rights" and were in any case ineffective, with
Mr. Pompeo of the US State Department already lamenting the "lack
of transparency" in the Chinese government, and London's Imperial
College claiming infections in China were understated by a factor of
ten. .(3)

McLean Virginia. 1991 Aerial view of the C.I.A. buildings in McLean Va. Its
employees operate from U.S. embassies and many other locations around
the world.

And of course China's friends in Langley, Virginia, were busy making posts
on Weibo claiming this was "the end of the world" with everyone "on the
verge of tears", while the UK Guardian claimed "panic was spreading" in
China. (4) Within a week of Wuhan being locked down, virtually all rail and
air traffic in China had been suspended, to deny the virus a means of travel.
This was of course, the most awkward of times, with much of the
population on the verge of traveling home for the Chinese New Year
holiday. All mass-gathering areas were closed. Restaurants, shopping malls,
cinemas, museums, markets, tourist resorts and many similar places were
shut down to prevent gatherings, and many factories were seriously
challenged by unexpected difficulties in operation due to the quarantines.
The strong measures, effective though they were, inevitably inflicted pain
on some parts of the Chinese economy and certainly caused
inconvenience and some hardship in people's daily lives, but the
unprecedented moves yielded positive results, with new infections quickly
dropping.

Using Shanghai as an example, by the end of February the city subjected all
travelers from severely-affected countries to medical examination at the
city's airports to prevent imported infections. All incoming passengers
who had lived or traveled in the hardest-hit countries were automatically
subjected to a 14-day quarantine at home or at designated hotels. (5) (6)
These passengers were not permitted to take taxis or public transport but
instead were driven to designated quarantine locations by customs
authorities, where community workers would be waiting for them with a team
of neighborhood officials, and a doctor and a police officer would guide them
to home quarantine. This large group consisted of volunteers who lived
temporarily in nearby hotels, avoiding their own homes due to the risk of
spreading the virus. (7)

Travelers at Beijing Daxing International Airport in Beijing in May

2021 | REUTERS

Foreign nationals were considered in advance, and offered necessary

assistance from the communities where they lived to solve their difficulties
after entering the city. (8) By early March China put major restrictions
on inbound air travel and effectively closed off the borders. Those
without a place of residence and a permanent job in Shanghai were not
permitted to enter the city by road, except for medical reasons. (9) The
Central Government temporarily suspended entry into the country of foreign
passport holders even with valid visas or residence permits, which was an
unprecedented but necessary step to prevent imported infections. (10) (11)

Residential areas in most Chinese cities are comprised of communities that

are largely self-contained, similar in some ways to gated communities in the
West, making isolation and quarantine certainly easier and more effective
than in the sprawling suburbs of North America. In my community in
Shanghai as an example, the road leading to the community was blocked,
meaning no one left and no one entered. Special permits were available for
some kinds of official travel or medical needs, but in practice these were few.
All businesses in the community were temporarily shuttered as were schools
and gathering places. Everyone mostly remained in their homes and, when
brief excursions were necessary, masks were always worn and proximity to
other persons avoided.

But there was much more leadership and planning that were not
visible. Immediately upon executing the community quarantine, local
officials contracted with a major food supplier to continue provisions.
An online mobile phone APP was designed overnight, which was used to place
orders for all foods, fresh vegetables and meat. Every two or three days a
delivery truck would clear the barriers and enter the community, the drivers
prohibited from human contact. Each order was bagged and sealed
separately and set out at the community center office where residents could
collect them and pay online after delivery. A similar system was arranged for
the regular supply of medications. Courier deliveries were deposited at the
road barrier where residents could come one by one to collect their packages.
Nothing was overlooked, and dutiful participation was more or less total. It
was seen as a civic duty for community residents to remain at home, protect
each other, and prevent any spreading of the virus. The local security guards
proved extremely helpful. They were well-informed on all procedures,
competent to take temperatures and able to make decisions. We had not a
single infection.

With most residents remaining secluded in their homes, online ordering and
delivery demands surged by a factor of perhaps ten, Shanghai's
supermarkets and e-commerce platforms working intensely to ensure
adequate food supplies during the lockdown. (12) The surge in demand
posed challenges because many food suppliers and logistics firms had
already halted work during the Spring Festival, but China's domestic
supply chains are exceptional, far beyond that existing in any other
nation. Each of the large suppliers quickly arranged distribution of between
five and ten times their normal daily amounts, each bringing in hundreds of
tonnes of food and organising community distributions. At the same time,
many e-commerce platforms quickly arranged programs with manufacturers
to source urgent medical supplies including masks, disinfectant and
protective clothing. Most created special areas on their mobile phone APPs
to enable residents to easily purchase all necessary items.

Leadership

One reason the Chinese were able to deal with the epidemic while the UK
and USA stumbled in the dark is that the Chinese think, with considerable
justification, that they have been under biological attack, on and off since
c.1950, and were therefore prepared with well-laid plans and competent
organisers to respond to such an event. As soon as the central government
learned the specific nature of the outbreak, it responded massively and to a
very large extent the population understood the necessity of what was
asked of them and cooperated.

Chinese President Xi Jinping said "The Coronavirus is a Demon, and we

cannot let this demon hide." (13) He said China was "faced with the grave
situation of an accelerating spread" of the virus, that "The Chinese people
are engaging in a serious battle against the outbreak of the new coronavirus
pneumonia. People’s lives and health are always the first priority for
the Chinese government, and the prevention and control of the
epidemic is the most important task at present, so I have been
directing and deploying the works myself."

Mr. Xi gave this battle the highest priority, personally chairing a meeting of
the Standing Committee where he listened to all the reports and decided
immediately to set up a CPC Central Committee group to oversee the national
effort, and also to send a high-level planning group to Hubei to direct the
work on the ground. (14) Soon after the outbreak occurred and the pathogen
identified, a Central Guiding Group appeared in Wuhan to oversee all COVID-
19 efforts, to free the medical staff from administration and planning
responsibilities and to ensure they were provided with all necessities. (15)

From this leadership, Wuhan's available hospital beds increased

from 5,000 to about 25,000 within ten days. It was from this that
hundreds of medical teams and about 50,000 physicians were dispatched
from all across China to Hubei Province. It was from this leadership that the
lockdowns and quarantines emerged, and it was from this leadership
that China's fatalities were limited to little more than 4,000, most of
those in Wuhan with the entire rest of the nation of 1.4 billion people
being spared.

How did China do it? It wasn't "China". It was the Chinese people, their
civilisation and culture. All of Chinese society was mobilised, not only the
Central Government or the medical officials in Hubei, but all citizens,
corporations, SOEs, foundations, instantly assessed their abilities to assist,
and then acted. (16) Wuhan received timely full-scale support from the
entire nation, not only to fight the battle but to recover from the effects of
the war. It wasn't only lockdowns and quarantines to cut off channels of
escape for the virus. Hundreds of millions of Chinese sacrificed something of
their normal lives to contain the spread of the virus, acting in unison and
working together in a collective response. Westerners will never understand
this.

The US media were busily trashing China for a "sluggish response" to the
virus (while conveniently ignoring the three wasted months in their own
country), but Americans understand only dimly (if at all) the Chinese ability
for rapid execution which, to the chagrin of all Americans everywhere, is due
primarily to two things - China's political system and the socialism
embedded in Chinese cultural DNA. While the English-speaking West is
very much an "every man for himself" culture, the Chinese are a civilisation
and act in unison as such, with the result that virtually everyone is onside in
things of importance to the nation. Thus, in the absence of competing private
and selfish interests, a nationwide plan can be conceived, examined,
discussed, approved, and executed in a much shorter time than in a country
like the US - and with full public cooperation and approval.

China's political system is much more unified than in the West, making local
governments accountable to the central government whereas in Western
nations the local authorities are largely autonomous, making cooperation
almost impossible. Thus, in times of emergency, bureaucratic blockage
simply evaporates, and the country's massive labor force makes speed of
execution possible with no sacrifice in quality. And, with the general
population widely sharing the nation's objectives, courses of action which
might be resisted in the West, are widely approved in China. Due to China's
excellent organisation, the central government has the ability to rapidly
mobilise any resources it needs. Building a new hospital in ten days or a new
high-speed railway in one or two years is a government-led mobilisation of
Chinese society. Because China has only one political party and a
complete absence of partisan infighting, the government acts as a
unit with the population and, once a clear and resolute course of action is
determined, virtually the entire Chinese civilisation is not only eager to
participate but willing to sacrifice in order to do so, something very difficult
for Westerners to imagine. Many workers interviewed on CGTN were proud
to say they slept only two hours in three days on construction of the new
hospitals. (17)

Martin Jacques said: "The capacity of China to deal with emergencies of this
kind is far more developed and far more capable than could be achieved by
any Western government. The Chinese system, the Chinese government, is
superior to other governments in handling big challenges like this. And there
are two reasons:

First of all, the Chinese state is a very effective institution, able to

think strategically and mobilise society.

And the other reason is that the Chinese expect the government to
take leadership on these kinds of questions and they will follow that
leadership." (18)
As the numbers of infections rose beyond the capacity of local hospitals,
reaching 15,000 new patients per day at the peak, the planning group
directed their attention first to the provision of additional hospital capacity,
(19) so they planned, designed, and built two large new hospitals. These
were not "flimsy bare-bones barracks" as described in the Western media;
viewed from the interior, their appearance was identical to any fully-equipped
modern hospitals. (20) (21)

They were modular concrete units designed for rapid assembly, in a manner
similar to setting shipping containers side by side, with full accommodation
for A/C, heating, ventilation, negative pressure, abundant electricity, and
more. Once assembled, these units function as a whole, and are a regular
hospital with all the equipment and facilities one would normally see in any
hospital.

The first was built in ten days by 16,000 men, the shifts working 24
hours a day.

The second hospital was larger, and completed in only 6 days. (22) To clear
and level the site and lay the substructure, there were 240 pieces of
construction equipment working on the same site at the same time – also 24
hours per day. The Chinese media posted time-lapse videos of the
construction process, which were astonishing to watch. Such hospitals were
built in several cities in Hubei Province.

Immediately upon completion of the first hospital, more than 3,000 doctors
and nurses from about 300 hospitals around the country were sent to staff
it. The group did much more than build hospitals. A total of 16 temporary
hospitals were created by converting public venues, several existing hospitals
were renovated to cater exclusively to COVID-19 patients, and more than
500 hotels, training centers and sanitaria were converted into quarantine
sites. (23)

One makeshift hospital in Wuhan was transformed from a sports center into
a TCM treatment clinic, while many exhibition centers and gymnasiums were
converted into temporary hospitals for those with mild symptoms but still
requiring quarantine. (24) This Central Guiding Group played an
irreplaceable role in Wuhan's anti-virus battle.

What the world apparently fails to notice is that of China's total

deaths of 4,600, 4,500 of those (98%) were in Hubei Province.
If China's leaders had not immediately locked down the city of Wuhan and
then quarantined the entire province, the death toll might well have been in
the hundreds of thousands. According to a paper published in late March in
the journal Science, (1) co-author Christopher Dye said, "Our analysis
suggests that without the Wuhan travel ban and the national emergency
response there would have been more than 700,000 confirmed COVID-19
cases outside of Wuhan by [February]. (25) China's control measures
appear to have worked by successfully breaking the chain of
transmission."

Most Asian countries followed China's example, with similar results. The US
refused to do so, permitting the virus to spread freely by avoiding lockdowns
and quarantines and, at the time of writing appears headed for at least
100,000 (mostly) unnecessary deaths.

The American way of dealing with the epidemic was to do nothing,

and throw stones at China. (26)

Canada was the same: Shanghai is only two hours from Wuhan and had
no time to prepare or plan, yet it had only a few hundred infections and only
7 deaths.

Canada, with a population similar to Shanghai, 10,000 kms from

Wuhan and with months to prepare, had more infections and
fatalities than all of China combined.

Of course, it wasn't perfect. Let's accept that a few local officials in Wuhan
were reluctant to face the possibility of a major epidemic at such a crucial
time and were hesitant to publicise the fact that deaths were already
occurring. While that was indeed an embarrassment for China, it can be
easily demonstrated that the net effect was zero because the medical
detective work continued unabated and, as soon as the new pathogen was
discovered, that information was made public to China and to the world. The
reluctance of a few local officials to publicise a new illness caused no delay
of any kind either in China or internationally, because until that point there
was no information to communicate other than the fact that a few dozen
people had become ill with an unusual respiratory infection.
All the accusations toward China of causing the US to lose two or
three months of preparation time were merely juvenile political
smoke, because the Chinese authorities communicated everything
they knew as soon as they knew it.

For the West, this brief hesitation was a great positive because it provided
unlimited (and apparently interminable) opportunities for gleeful China-
bashing, political opportunism at its finest. By contrast, the displeasure inside
China was real, for both the public and the central government - who
immediately fired or replaced those same local officials.

As a country, China faces its mistakes openly with the public and takes
immediate action. Compare this to the discovery in the US of the CIA
operating the largest network of torture prisons in the history of the world.
What happened?

Much media whining, a fraudulent Congressional hearing, most information

classified and suppressed, and the entire matter swept under the rug,
removed from the media radar, and quickly forgotten. The torture prisons
are still open today and only one minor person paid a trivial penalty. All
involved still retained their positions, and nothing changed.To a foreigner
watching from the inside, the Chinese government and the Chinese people
were courageous as they took on this formidable task. From the very
beginning they put people's lives and health first.

The Central Government mobilised the entire nation, organised

massive control and treatment mechanisms, and acted with
openness and transparency, with most of the population making
significant sacrifices without complaint. National cohesion and
coordination were admirable.

All of the 50,000 front-line medical staff and many others who went to Wuhan
were volunteers, 90% of them Party members who had sworn to "bear the
people’s burden first and enjoy their pleasures last". To a Western ear, that
sounds suspiciously like idle propaganda, but many of these front-line staff
died in that battle. It wasn't propaganda to them.

Zhang Wenhong, a prominent Party member and Director of the

Department of Infectious Diseases at Shanghai’s Huashan Hospital, said,
"When we joined the Party, we vowed that we would always prioritise
people’s interests and press forward in the face of difficulties. This is the
moment we live up to the pledge. All CPC members must rush to the front
line. I don’t care what you were actually thinking when you joined the party.
Now it's time to live up to what you promised. I don't care if you
personally agree or not: it's non-negotiable." (1)

That may sound harshly authoritarian to a Westerner, but there was much
compassion behind the words. Zhang said later, "The first-aid team put
themselves in great danger. They are tired and need to rest. We shouldn’t
take advantage of good people." At that point, he replaced almost all the
front-line medics with members from different sectors.

We Westerners cannot understand that China's society and culture are much
more compassionate than ours. The Chinese place a much higher value
on the elderly than do we. In China (as in Italy), grandparents and the
elderly live with the family, never tossed out into nursing homes to live and
die more or less alone. When it was realised that the elderly primarily were
threatened with premature and painful deaths, the Chinese put their
entire economy on hold to save these people.

Dr Bruce Aylward, head of the WHO International Mission said: "In the
face of a previously unknown disease, China has taken one of the
most ancient approaches for infectious disease control and rolled out
probably the most ambitious, and I would say, agile and aggressive
disease containment effort in history.

China took old-fashioned measures like the national approach to hand-

washing, the mask-wearing, the social distancing, the universal temperature
monitoring. But then very quickly, as it started to evolve, the response
started to change . . . So they refined the strategy as they moved forward,
and this is an important aspect as we look to how we might use this going
forward. WHO has been here from the start of this crisis, an epidemic,
working every single day with the government of China… WHO was here
from the beginning and never left." He said further: "What struck me
most was that every Chinese had a strong sense of responsibility and
dedication to contribute to the fight against the epidemic."

WHO Director-General Tan Desai commented, "China's speed and

scale of action is rare ... This is the advantage of China's system, and
the relevant experience is worthy of other countries to learn from.

The Global Times published an editorial titled: "China’s miracles are

beyond biased Western understanding", from which I will quote
here:"The rhetoric accusing China of hiding the truth has already
become a cliché.

These so-called experts in the US always presume that China is wrong or

unreliable, and then try hard to prove the presupposed conclusion with
ambiguous evidence and perverted logic. They are used to pinning their eyes
on fictional stories about China, but few are willing to learn about what is
really happening in the country.
For a country which has let the epidemic spin out of control despite clear
warnings sent by China, China's anti-virus fight is indeed a miracle. But for
China itself, the outcome appears absolutely normal and deserved in view of
the government's strong sense of responsibility for people's lives, the
governing system's great ability of mobilization and the Chinese people's firm
willingness to support all containment measures. Nowhere could this work as
it works in China and so applying any country's models to China makes no
sense.

China has been working miracles over the past decades thanks to the
tremendous efforts of both the government and the people. Since
reform and opening-up, China has grown to become the world's second
largest economy rapidly and lifted hundreds of millions of people out
of extreme poverty. (27)

Workers dismantle decorations after the temple fair for the Chinese Lunar
New Year in Ditan Park was cancelled in Beijing. [Carlos Garcia
Rawlins/Reuters]
The Lancet published an article stating that "China deserves gratitude,
not criticism over its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic".

Lancet's editor, Richard Horton, said Chinese researchers were providing

crucial information but no one in the West was listening, and they failed to
prepare. In January, The Lancet published five papers that "tell the story of
what has unfolded in the Western world in the recent months. They showed
a deadly virus had emerged that had no treatment and could be
passed between people. We knew all of this in the last week of January
but most Western countries and the United States of America wasted
the whole of February and early March before they acted. That is the
human tragedy of COVID-19.

Thanks to the work of Chinese doctors and scientists working in international

collaborations, all of this info was known in January but for reasons that are
difficult to understand, the world did not pay attention.

Thousands died unnecessarily as a result." (28) Horton said further that the
attacks on China made by [American] politicians were unwarranted. "I want
to be on the record and thank my friends and colleagues who work in
medicine and medical science in China for what they have done. As I have
said, I think we owe them a great deal... they do not deserve criticism,
they deserve our gratitude."

And there was more: On May 15, 2020, the Lancet published a scathing
assessment of the Trump administration's handling of the virus epidemic in
which it urged all Americans to vote President Trump out of office [for his
incompetence]. “Americans must put a president in the White House
come January, 2021, who will understand that public health should
not be guided by partisan politics”. (29)

The main objective of China's Government is the rejuvenation of

China, in part demonstrably evidenced by the determined efforts made for
the betterment and the well-being of its population, which is reflected in the
credibility and high level of trust the Chinese people place in their
government. These concepts don't exist in the West. In the US, the "world's
model for everything", a virus epidemic is seen through lenses of
profiteering by large corporations, sick people not being humans in need of
assistance but merely a new lucrative "market" - for those with money to
pay. An American hospital is not a place for healing the sick but a kind of
barnyard filled with cash cows to milk. This is one fundamental reason
underlying America's chaotic and hopeless approach to dealing with the
epidemic.

The Trump administration failed to help itself and refused to help

even its friends, on the one hand ignoring the suffering and extreme
difficulties in China and wasting its time scoring cheap political
points on the world stage, happy with the loss of life and the
economic damage China was suffering.

Socialism at its Finest

On April 4, China held a three-minute nationwide moment of reflection to

honor those who died in the coronavirus outbreak, especially the medical
staff now seen as "martyrs" who fell while fighting what has become a global
pandemic. (30) Commemorations took place in all major cities, but were
particularly poignant in Wuhan, and occurring on the traditional Qingming
festival, when Chinese visit the graves of their ancestors. China’s State
Council ordered that national flags be flown at half-staff around the country
and at Chinese embassies and consulates abroad.

It was heartwarming that during the epidemic, privately-owned Chinese

hotels in Wuhan voluntarily provided free rooms for medical staff needing
rest. Xiao Yaxing, the private owner of a four-star hotel in the city, opened
a discussion group on WeChat where he appealed to his peers from more
than 40 hotels to offer rooms for doctors and nurses who were working day
and night to save lives. He said that since nearly all transportation had
ceased in the large city, it was difficult for the medical staff to get to hospitals
from home and needed rest places and, as he said, "Many hotels in Wuhan
are shut down for travelers, leaving a lot of empty rooms that we can offer
for free." (31) Yi Qingyan, a regional manager of Feizhu's hotel business in
Central China's Hubei province, said when she heard about Xiao's group, she
asked hotel managers she knew to provide rooms for medical staff. (32)

In March, the Communist Party of China donated 5.3 billion RMB (US$750
million) to be used to "extend solicitude" to the frontline medics, those
serving the worst-hit Hubei Province to be favored. (33) The money was
delivered to the Ministry of Finance which was entrusted with distribution,
with a stipulation that families of medical workers who died on the front line
would be eligible recipients, and also that some grassroots-level officials,
public security officers, community workers, volunteers and frontline
journalists could have access to the funds. Further, nearly 80 million
Communist Party of China members across the country donated more than
8 billion RMB for the coronavirus effort, and donations were still arriving at
the time of writing.

Wouldn't it have been nice if the Republican or Democrat parties and

party members had done that for New York?

Being a socially-oriented society, China also has charities but these are very
different animals than those existing in the West, most especially those in
North America. Chinese charities don't spend 80% of collected funds on
operating expenses and executive perquisites. In fact they normally don't
collect money at all, but instead real goods that are distributed to the
beneficiaries.
As one example, when Wuhan hospitals put out a call for help, the Hubei
Charity Federation received more than 1 million masks and other medical
supplies which were immediately distributed to the hospitals. (34) In
this case, they also raised 30 million RMB in cash from the community and
from citizens in other provinces, which money was immediately spent on the
purchase of more supplies. Moreover, in China the public can supervise the
distribution and usage of donated materials and, in the case of COVID-19,
the provincial medical headquarters was available to unify the organisation
and allocation of the materials to hospitals and medical treatment centers,
as well as guaranteeing speedy transportation and delivery.

All of China, in many ways we would never expect, strove to express their
gratitude to the medical workers whom they feel saved their nation from
catastrophe.

As one example, more than 500 tourist areas in China announced free
admission for all medical workers during the remainder of 2020, as a way to
express local citizens' sincere gratitude to medical workers' commitment
during the outbreak. (35) Given that the virus epidemic severely damaged
China's internal tourism industry, at least for the short term, the Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences conducted a poll asking citizens about their travel
intentions for the remainder of 2020. According to their report, Wuhan was
at the top of the list for Chinese travelers, all of whom said they wanted to
contribute to the economic recovery of Wuhan and Hubei following
the epidemic. (36)

From late January until April, the streets of Wuhan were deserted with the
entire Province of Hubei not much better, but by late May the story was very
different, with people around the country emptying supermarket shelves of
everything Hubei had to offer - local delicacies, noodles, ducks, crayfish,
fruits, manufactured goods of every kind - all with the intention of lifting
Hubei's economy to its former level. "Buying Hubei" became a nationwide
campaign with participation from ordinary citizens, officials, celebrities and
corporations. (37)

Hundreds of companies began live-streaming online broadcasts of Hubei

products and hundreds of millions of Chinese were spending money, "not for
self-indulgence, but to extend a helping hand to their fellow countrymen in
hardship. The result: Tens of millions of dollars were added to the local
economy; tens of thousands of businesses and jobs were saved."

In one instance, a popular live-streaming hostess sold 150,000 lipstick sets

within five minutes. In another, two TV celebrities attracted 122 million
viewers and sold more than 40 million RMB of Hubei products in a two-hour
program. In another session, two celebrities drew 127 million viewers and
sold 61 million RMB of Hubei goods, the province's entire supply of popular
duck snacks emptied within seconds. In another livestreaming instance,
6,000 tons of crayfish, worth 220 million yuan, disappeared within minutes,
and one company manager said his daily production of 20,000 packages of
crayfish snacks cleared out within seconds every day.

He said, "The orders just exploded", adding that he'd never seen anything
like it. (38) Alibaba sold 20 million Kgs of Hubei agricultural products to date
and reportedly procured 1 billion yuan worth of crayfish and 50 million yuan
worth of local oranges to sell on its platforms. (39) JD.com sold 1,400 tonnes
in the first week of April alone and vowed to sell 6 billion yuan worth of Hubei
products. Boosting consumption became a primary cure to resurrect
the virus-hit economy in Hubei.
Many Chinese citizens said they hadn't any medical skills to help Wuhan
during the epidemic, but they could at least show their support by placing
orders. That sentiment resonated so broadly across China that millions
promised to "gain three jin (1.5 Kg.) of weight" for Hubei. (40)

One online hostess said, "Many have described our cooperation as a show of
our moral principles and sense of duty. But that is over the top. I am just
doing what I'm good at to help Wuhan, to help local companies open the
market with livestreaming promotion and to help them resume work quickly."

A local Party Chief in Hubei said, "I was completely moved and warmed by
the active response from consumers all over the country in placing orders for
Hubei products to support us, which fully reflects our valued Chinese
tradition: When one falls into difficulty, all other parties come to
help." Unfortunately, no other country could replicate this economic model
since they haven't the infrastructure or the market for something of this
magnitude, and few nations have the sense of civilisation and the deep social
and cultural cohesion which is the enabling force.

As well, many of China's state-owned enterprises (SOEs) mobilised to

combat the epidemic, from emergency communications installations to
providing funds to the hardest-hit areas. (41) These massive Chinese
corporations are exemplary in their sense of social responsibility, some
constructing low-cost housing apartment communities which they sell at cost
or below, many building and supporting local schools and universities, and
some providing cash to help eliminate the last traces of poverty in the
country. In 2020, these firms are providing more than 3 billion RMB (about
$500 million) to the poorest places and many have donated massive medical
supplies and funds to these same areas. (42)

Medical Supply

When China experiences a serious public health or similar emergency, the

framework exists for immediate supply for all necessities that include
personnel, goods and materials, transport vehicles, to be delivered to the
site. The Ministry of Transport arranged an absolute prioritisation of the
transport of emergency supplies and medical staff to Wuhan, while national
medical authorities coordinated the efforts of all medical supply
manufacturers to identify and increase the supply of the most urgent and
necessary items. (43)
When Wuhan appealed to the central government for assistance and
supplies, hundreds of tonnes of medical supplies were delivered each
week, as were tens of thousands of additional medical staff during the
crisis. (44)

Well before the end of January, extensive planning had been done to greatly
increase the number of hospital beds for patients with either mild or severe
symptoms and for those requiring quarantine and intensive care. The local
medical authorities requisitioned and transformed 24 local hospitals into
COVID-19 units. Seven hospitals were designated exclusively for COVID-19
patients with fevers higher than 37°C. The National Health Commission said,
"Wuhan is actually a city with rich medical resources, having many public
hospitals each with more than 3,000 beds. When we requisitioned those
hospitals, they complied unconditionally." (45) Also, the Chinese
government requisitioned exhibition centers and stadiums and quickly turned
them into temporary hospitals for COVID-19 patients with light symptoms,
quarantining them separately from patients in more severe condition. At the
same time, the planning and oversight group prepared and released a
medical guide to help physicians quickly diagnose conditions and design
treatments, this designed specifically to contain the virus locally and prevent
spreading to other parts of China or overseas. (46)

At the same time, the Ministry of Commerce was occupied in coordinating

the production and supply of all other daily necessities for the residents of
Wuhan and Hubei. Many food items like eggs, fish, beef and pork, were
released from national reserves and arrangements were made for the
increased production and distribution of fresh vegetables specifically for
Wuhan, along with oversight to ensure prices remained stable or dropping
rather than increasing. (47) Profiteering was virtually absent in China,
with the notable exception of a few foreign firms. The MOC also
ensured top priority for all vehicles carrying supplies to Wuhan, and all supply
firms including even restaurants were encouraged to provide home delivery
to help maintain the quarantine with a minimum of inconvenience.

The latter part of January was the most difficult time for the hospitals and
medical staff in Wuhan, receiving some 15,000 new fever patients per day,
with all resources stretched to the limit and overworked medical staff
struggling to save patients' lives when the mortality rate was initially around
10%, truly a dark moment.

"It was only when the entire country mobilised all possible medical
resources to aid Wuhan that the grim situation was turned and the
mortality rate began to drop." (48)

But, unlike most other nations, China “has unique institutional

advantages when it comes to social mobilization".

One of these advantages enabled the national health authorities to

organise, collect, and send altogether nearly 50,000 medical staff
from all over the country to Wuhan, while other medical officials oversaw
the organisational tasks of converting public hospitals into designated
COVID-19 units to greatly expand the availability of necessary hospital beds.
(49)

China’s health system remains under pressure as Covid infections sweep

the country. Photograph: China Daily/Reuters

The pressure for urgent treatment was such that it was only on February 15
that the world's first autopsy on a COVID-19 patient was conducted, six
weeks after the pathogen was first identified. It was then that the doctors
discovered that the virus attacked not only the lungs, but also other organs
such as the heart and kidneys as well as the circulatory system, thus altering
the treatment methods but also inflicting even more pressure on the
overworked medical staff.

Still, it was then that Chinese physicians began the use of blood
plasma from recovered patients as well as the nearly universal
application of Traditional Chinese Medicine. It was these discoveries
and treatments that almost instantly halved the mortality rate,
especially from the more severe infections, and speeded up the
recovery time.

The Western media completely ignored this aspect, but it was widely proven
that TCM was perhaps the primary factor in reducing the mortality rate by
boosting the patients' immune systems.

By the end of March, the crisis in Wuhan was abating while the demand for
medical supplies was increasing exponentially worldwide, with most relevant
factories in China running 24 hours a day while simultaneously trying to
maintain quality and source raw materials internationally. There was a great
deal of organisation behind the scenes to coordinate the manufacture as well
as to expand domestic and international transport channels which were
greatly suffering due to the collapse of the airline transport industry and the
resultant lack of cargo space.

The logistical hurdles were enormous in all categories, and a great part of
China's commercial society leaped into the fray in a sincere effort to assist
what was now a worldwide pandemic. Chinese auto manufacturers, idle
due to the pandemic, retooled within a week and began
manufacturing masks, hazmat suits and other supplies by the
billions.

The international demand was such that more than 12,000 companies in
China began producing masks and ventilators, bringing the total to well over
50,000 such firms with about one-third of them being certified exporters.
(50)
Thanks to their media who were too busy bashing China to understand the
events unfolding, Westerners hadn't a clue about either the overwhelming
demand for medical supplies nor the urgency of those demands. One
company alone, Beijing Aeonmed, which makes ventilators, were kept
running 24\7 but were overwhelmed by tens of thousands of simultaneous
overseas orders from nearly 50 countries. (51) And they weren't alone,
which accounts for the large number of other manufacturers retooling in an
attempt to assist other nations then living Wuhan's experience, in many
cases, such as the US, with little or no central government support.

Guglielmo Gianotti (left), pictured here with colleagues at Cremona Hospital

in Italy's north, was one of many frontline doctors to get coronavirus.
Source

The situation was so dire that many countries, notably Italy, and
many cities, notably New York, were so lacking in supplies they were
openly stating their medical staff were every day being forced to
decide who would live and who would die.

It was in this context that Chinese firms, entirely on their own initiative,
absorbed the expense of retooling, of arranging specially-chartered aircraft
and trains to bring back their staff, of sourcing raw materials, then diving
head-first into a new industry to help combat a worldwide pandemic the
extent and mortality of which were still largely unknown.

And it was in this context that the US media spent all their time denigrating
"China" for "sluggish and insufficient" effort, for the usual "lack of
transparency", and blowing out of all proportion the few complaints of
unsatisfactory quality. In this context where auto manufacturers and
packagers of canned salmon are suddenly manufacturing surgical masks and
hazmat suits, we can be genuinely astonished the quality was as good as it
was.

While China was still not out of the woods, the Chinese government was
doing its best to donate supplies to needy countries all around the world, but
local demand was still high and commercial export demand was rising
exponentially, far more than China's combined potential supply.

As an example, on one weekend alone, France ordered one billion masks

which required 56 cargo flights to transport them, to say nothing of the
manufacturing logistics. Part of the problem was that the majority of air
cargo is carried in scheduled flights on passenger planes but, with the
collapse of the airline industry, there were no passenger planes. In order to
accommodate the dire international need, China Eastern Airlines stripped
overnight all the seats from their passenger aircraft and loaded them with
N95 masks for France - as they did for other nations.

This kind of adjustment to circumstances, to my best knowledge, occurs in

no other country on earth. The Chinese, being faced with apparently
impossible demands, simply rise to the challenge, find a solution, and
immediately execute it. "Just like the response to the epidemic itself,
China is really making a nationwide effort to ensure medical supplies to
support in the global battle against the coronavirus pandemic." SF Express,
one of China's prominent express firms, opened new routes including to New
York, and delivered nearly 1,000 tonnes of medical supplies to more than 50
countries, with many other Chinese airlines and express firms doing about
the same. (52)

There was yet more to the leadership, planning and organising that were not
apparent to anyone in the West. The Chinese government, while dealing with
all other domestic and international pressures from the pandemic, also
remembered its students who were studying abroad and distributed over 11
million face masks and 500,000 health kits with disinfection supplies and
health protection manuals, to Chinese students studying abroad. (53) These
shipments bypassed the local governments, being delivered to the Chinese
embassies and consulates for distribution directly to the students. It wasn't
only medical supplies but also medical staff transfers that were arranged by
China's central government, to help the country deal with the epidemic. One
of the government's first acts was to select about 500 of the top experts from
the military's medical universities, those with prior experience with SARS and
MERS, and with Ebola, and send them to Wuhan to help lead the battle. There
were many other such teams, composed of experts in respiratory health,
infectious diseases, hospital infection control and the establishing and
managing of intensive care units, who were dispatched to the Wuhan
hospitals with large numbers of virus-related pneumonia patients.

Zhou Xianzhi, President of Air Force Medical University, said "We sent our
best staff in various clinical departments. They have rich experience in
battling contagious diseases. Some of them took part in major missions such
as the battle against SARS and the fight against Ebola in Africa, as well as
earthquake rescues." These were volunteers who canceled their plan to
spend the Chinese Lunar New Year with their families, most saying they felt
"extremely honored" to join this national mission. (54) As well, immediately
upon the discovery of the effectiveness of TCM's ability to moderate serious
infections, a team of 122 TCM specialists was sent to Wuhan from Shanghai
with treatment plans already prepared for the combined application of
Western and Chinese medicines. (55)

Quality Concerns
"As China mounted a nationwide effort to produce desperately needed
medical supplies, concerns over the quality of some Chinese-made
equipment have been raised, and some foreign media outlets and politicians
have even attempted to hype up recent incidents to smear China's
manufacturing sector and its intention to help other countries." (56) The
Financial Times cited examples of the Netherlands, Spain and Turkey
"rejecting" Chinese-made face masks and testing kits, others going so far as
to claim Chinese masks could make people sick and even kill them.There
were a few instances of unsuitable products having been sold but, on
examination of the eventual details, it appears the media reports were
consciously hyped and much overblown, in every case blaming "China" for
the products of one manufacturer and the actions a few incompetent or
unscrupulous agents, most of whom were not Chinese. The overall quality
environment was actually much too complicated to permit understanding
within the scope of brief media sound bytes. While there were risks of quality
issues in manufacturing, the use of improper procurement channels and
fluctuating foreign regulations and standards were responsible for much of
the trouble. A further issue was that in two or three prominent cases the
purchasers had no experience in applying delicate medical tests or even in
the storage and handling of such. To compound the problem even
further, the virus proved to lend itself more readily to testing at later
stages of progression. China's Global Times did a creditable job of
investigating the entire medical supply process, interviewing manufacturers
and distributors, industry insiders and end users, and concluded that the vast
majority of Chinese-made medical equipment was well up to standard, with
most of the noise resulting primarily from the US heavily politicising
China's role in the supply process and secondly from much deliberate
misinformation on the part of the American media.
In one publicised case, Dutch authorities ordered a recall of 600,000 face
masks (57) for lack of ability to filter out a full 95% of airborne particles. An
executive at the Chinese manufacturer stated that the world experienced
such a shortage of appropriate meltblown fabric that it had become
increasingly difficult to exceed 70% (instead of 95%), almost all of this fabric
being imported from Switzerland and Turkey.

The fault, such as it was, was not due to low-quality manufacturing

in China but to degraded production ability of companies in
Switzerland and Turkey who provided the raw materials.
Nevertheless, "China" took the full blame on the chin.The mask quality issue
became even more preposterous since the Netherlands and Belgium had
already made clear that those China-made masks obtained by local agents
were "commercial products made for non-medical use", in other words
sanding or paint-spraying masks and such. (58) Having said that, it is
true Chinese authorities discovered some companies engaged in the illegal
production and sale of masks and other medical products and, though they
did respond with an immediate and aggressive crack-down, some of that
product did indeed reach foreign markets. The government conducted more
than a dozen sweeps throughout the nation and heavily publicised the
product confiscations and fines issued to deter such practices.
But the issues were much wider-ranging than this. China's national
government established lists of companies qualified to manufacture various
medical supplies for use against the coronavirus, and strongly recommended
purchases be made from only those firms and only through officially-
recommended channels. However, from the urgency of need and occasional
panic, many agents, buyers, and foreign end users ignored the Chinese
government with predictable results in quality standards.

As well, the EU generally was so eager for supplies they waived formal
requirements and permitted the importation of products prior to those
gaining regulatory approval. As the Global Times noted in their report, the
Dutch officials in the above example "refused to disclose the source or
channel" of the masks they later deemed unsuitable, many such purchases
having been made through channels unauthorised and unverified by the
Chinese government. But "China" still took the blame.

The Global Times reported, "Though local medical authorities and Chinese
embassies have explained the misunderstanding and misuse of the test kits,
media coverage of life-saving Chinese products has turned a blind eye to
these clarifications, revealing some countries' unfriendly motives. I think the
quality issue reported by some media has been politicized. They can't prove
the reported testing kits have quality issues, because the use and transport
[of the kits] may influence their stability and sensitivity," an employee at test
kit provider Beijing Beier Bioengineering told the Global Times.

Medical workers unfamiliar with the products may have some difficulties,
which could affect the accuracy of their results. The Beier employee added
that Chinese medical staff also had issues when using the test kits in the
early stages of the outbreak and any confusion was resolved after technical
training." (59)There were also instances of testing kits facing claims of
insensitivity or inaccuracy. Spain withdrew about 8,000 such tests, and the
Western media created much noise about claims from the Czech Republic of
inaccurate or insensitive tests. However, in the Czech case, their officials
simply had no understanding of proper methods of application. The
manufacturer finally prepared instruction videos illustrating and explaining
the precise methods of administering the tests, after which the results were
perfectly acceptable.
This occurred more than once, and even test kits manufactured by companies
not yet on the approved list had the same successful result when proper
methods were employed. It occurred surprisingly often in Western countries
that the medical staff eventually admitted they had never administered such
tests and had no clear idea of proper procedure, and in many cases simply
did not follow the instructions. A major part of the overall quality problem
was that foreign companies and governments were too eager to fill their large
and increasing demand for supplies and, rather than wait in a queue at a
recognised factory, would hire their own private agents in attempts to short-
circuit the process, agents who, to satisfy their anxious customers, would
often resort to unapproved manufacturers in the hope their actions would
not later be discovered. The result was that "China" took this blame on
the chin as well, with the great assistance of the politicised Western media.

As one illustrative example of the media presentation of issues with medical

supplies, a UK Telegraph article said "Government seeks refund for millions
of coronavirus antibody tests", (60) stating they were "too unreliable to be
used by the public." According to the Telegraph, the UK government ordered
3.5 million such tests "mainly from Chinese manufacturers", then noting that
an additional 17.5 million had been purchased from firms in the US and UK,
with none being found sufficiently reliable.

But by that time, China's 10% of the purchases had taken the media hit for
the entire lot. But once the media smoke cleared and "China" had sufficiently
been tarred and denigrated yet again, the UK government health officials
admitted that the tests developed in China were created and designed
primarily for use with patients "with a very large viral load", in other words
those more severely infected, and not intended for patients suffering only
mild symptoms from minor infections.

The difficulty with the UK tests was not a quality problem from "China" but
UK physicians hoping for tests with a wider detection range. This was a bit
like purchasing a "vehicle" then being disappointed it was unable to function
as both sports car and dump truck, hardly the fault of the manufacturer.

And finally, in the article's penultimate paragraph, the Telegraph

remembered to report that the UK government was not actually demanding
refunds but was negotiating with the manufacturers to increase the
sensitivity of the tests. In the end, much ado about nothing.

Fox News joined the parade by yelling "CHINA CASHES IN OFF

CORONAVIRUS, SELLING SPAIN $467 MILLION IN SUPPLIES, SOME
OF THEM SUBSTANDARD". Spain purchased 950 ventilators, 5.5 million
test kits, 11 million gloves and 500 million masks. The 'substandard' part
was 9,000 quick-test kits (out of 5.5 million) that lacked the sensitivity
Spain wanted. (61)

White House trade advisor Peter Navarro accused China of shipping "low-
quality and even counterfeit" antibody testing kits to the US and of
"profiteering" from the outbreak. (62) The Chinese Foreign Ministry
responded that Navarro's remarks were "groundless and extremely
irresponsible," stating that China had exported tens of millions of COVID-
19 tests, which had won wide acclaim from the international community, and
the country had not received any feedback from the US purchasers and users
on quality problems. (63) (64)

By the end of April of 2020, Chinese firms had exported tens of millions of
testing kits in addition to billions of masks and thousands of tonnes of other
supplies to nearly 200 countries, all of which were widely praised by the
international community.

Barbara Woodward, British ambassador to China, expressed her deep

appreciation and satisfaction with the products and speed of response, and
many other nations were effuse in their gratitude for both commercial
shipments and donations from China. (65)

Chinese firms shipped enormous volumes of all nature of medical supplies to

the US with not a word of complaint from US purchasers or users regarding
the quality of test kits and other products. But also not a single word of
praise or appreciation from the Americans. Instead, the US hospitals
were silent while the US government and the media were replete with non-
stop smears for months.
The flawed coronavirus test kits went out to public laboratories in February.
An internal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention review obtained by
NPR says the wrong quality control protocols were used.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention via AP

In all the confusion, the US media failed to notice that the US itself
led the world competition for defective medical products. As of the
middle of February, 2020, AFP was reporting that even small countries like
South Korea had performed hundreds of thousands of tests while the US was
below about 8,000, the reason being that all the tests produced by the
CDC and American companies were flawed and useless. (66) (67)
(68) The kits would produce opposite results on the same patient at the
same time, or clearly miss serious infections while declaring infections in
clean patients. The CDC eventually had to instruct all hospitals and clinics to
discard the tests as unusable. (69) Again, in early to mid-April, the US media
were reporting the CDC was still unable to produce usable tests, this time
because the test kits themselves were contaminated with the
coronavirus for which they were to be testing. This was attributed to "a
glaring scientific breakdown" at the CDC's central lab. (70) (71)
 Source

To make matters worse, the CDC shipped those faulty tests not only
across the country but sold them to 34 countries around the world,
and no evidence emerged anywhere to suggest the CDC informed those other
nations of the uselessness of their tests. To my knowledge, the UK was the
only nation to discover this - at their own expense. (72) To say that the
exported CDC tests were unusable would be quite an understatement.

President John Magufuli of Tanzania complained that various fruits,

a goat and a quail tested positive for coronavirus using the American
tests. (73)

It appears the US 'national stockpile' was not an improvement on the CDC.

(74) In early April, the media were reporting that many states received
medical masks that were rotten, with an expiry date in 2010, and that 150
ventilators (at $30,000 each) sent to Los Angeles were broken, defective,
and missing parts (75) (76) (77) But, no problem. ABC News and other US
media including US military channels ran dozens of articles titled, "Have
a clean T-shirt? That's all you need to make this mask." (78)
And in late April, the UK Telegraph was reporting that the UK NHS staff "had
been given flawed coronavirus tests" but, kindly, no mention that the US
CDC had supplied them. (79) And even the criticism was muted: the tests
were described as "less reliable than first thought because of 'degraded'
performance", and that they produced "discordant results", and "have been
found to be flawed and should no longer be relied on". (80)

Health Minister Helen Whately admitted "Some of the early tests were
evaluated and the evaluation was that they weren't effective enough" saying
that all patients would be called in for a second test, and that this was a
"normal process" when testing for a new illness. (81) No slander, no
vitriol, no condemnation.

Instead, the Brits and their media were quick to note that all tests have a
margin of error accuracy which depends on the skill with which they are
administered - among other factors. If only they had been so kind and
understanding to China.

Shanghai Dasheng is one of the world's largest manufacturers (and the

world gold standard) of N95 face masks and one of the few certified to make
US NIOSH-approved N95s. The company deals directly with medical
purchasers only, and states on its website: "We do not have any
distributors, dealers or branch factories. Beware of counterfeits."

But some masks (that were clearly fake since they were models the company
did not export) bearing this company's name appeared in the US, apparently
purchased through unknown third parties. (82) This was interesting.

When someone illegally copies an American product, the culprits (usually

purported to be Chinese) are roundly condemned for violating a chastely
innocent American company and at least six of the Ten Commandments.

But then this is China and things are apparently different here. In the above
news report, the American Press wrote: "AP could not independently verify
if [Dasheng] are making their own counterfeits". Charming.
Let's Look at Death Rates

Medical teams from across China began leaving Wuhan after

infections there have dropped.Credit: STR/AFP/Getty

At the end of the epidemic, China reported 4,645 coronavirus deaths while
the US total of 90,000 fatalities was still climbing rapidly. The death rates
per 100,000 of population were 26.0 for the US and 0.33 for China. We can
legitimately ask why China's numbers appear so much lower than those of
the US and of much of Europe, but we don't need to follow US President
Trump's approach to repeatedly ask on national television, "Does anybody
really believe these figures?", (83) insinuating that China
deliberately underreported its fatalities.

There are many reasons for China's relatively low infection and death rates.
First, if two countries have the same death toll, the death per 100,000 people
for the country with a larger population will be lower; China's population is
nearly four times that of the US. Secondly, due to the immediate lockdown
of Wuhan and Hubei, almost all of China's fatalities were restricted to that
one area: of China's 4,645 deaths, 4512 (97%) were in Hubei with the entire
remainder of the country having little more than 100 deaths. The statistical
result was that Wuhan's rate was 35.2, Hubei's 7.6, and China's 0.33,
comparable to 26 for the US. Further, all provinces and major cities executed
their own version of lockdown and quarantine, literally preventing the virus
from entering even if it should escape Hubei. China's measures broke the
transmission chain and contained the contagion within Hubei
Province. The tough measures in Wuhan bought the rest of China
time to prepare and execute their own restrictions, and China bought
the rest of the world at least two and probably three months in which
to prepare for the epidemic. Looking at the statistics below, you can see
which countries followed China's example and which did not.

Still on the above scale for the US, New York was at 140.0, New Jersey at
107.0, Connecticut at 85 and Massachusetts at 75, while some states were
near zero. (84) Comparably within China, and due to the aggressive
quarantines, Shanghai was at 0.02 and Beijing similar. Turning to Europe (on
the same scale of death rate per 100,000), Belgium was hit very hard with
76, with Spain, Italy, the UK, France, Sweden and the Netherlands ranging
down from around 60.0 to about 35.0. (85)

The TV presentation made by Mr. Trump and Dr. Brix selected a metric that
placed the US well down on the fatality list and displayed a carefully-selected
list of countries that appeared to place China on Mars. A lie of omission is
still a lie, but this disparity requires context for understanding, so let's look
at Asia.

First, here is the original list presented by Trump and Brix, updated to the
date of writing:

COVID-USA Mortality per 100,000 population

Belgium - 76.2

Spain - 59.7

UK - 51.2

Italy - 49.9

France - 42.3
Sweden - 37.7

Netherlands - 32.7

USA - 27.8

Switzerland - 21.9

Canada - 16.1

China - 0.33

Now, let's look at Asia:

Philippines - 0.83

Japan - 0.61

South Korea - 0.52

Indonesia - 0.44

Australia - 0.40

Malaysia - 0.40

Singapore - 0.38

China - 0.33

Hong Kong - 0.06

Taiwan - 0.03

Macao - 0.00

India - 0.23

Bangladesh - 0.21

Thailand - 0.08

Myanmar - 0.01

Vietnam - 0.00

It should be clear from this that there is nothing unusual in China's numbers,
and thus it would seem if China were lying as Mr. Trump suggested, that
would mean all of Asia was lying. In fact, there was no evidence of any sort
to suggest countries were deliberately understating infections or fatalities -
except for the US itself.

Foreign Help

When COVID-19 first erupted in China, several countries immediately came

to China's aid with scarce and badly-needed medical supplies. South Korea
was one example, and in return, as the situation worsened in South Korea,
the Chinese government sent large amounts of medical supplies and more
than 20 local governments in China donated masks, protective clothing,
goggles, test kits, thermometers and other materials.

The situation was similar with Pakistan, who sent aircraft loaded with medical
supplies, the Chinese government later returning the favor with large
volumes of supplies and assistance in building a quarantine hospital. (86)
Many provinces and cities in China independently donated masks to
Islamabad and Karachi.

China was sending supplies and assistance to other countries long before it
fully recovered from its own difficulties. President Xi Jinping stressed on
multiple occasions that public health security was a common challenge faced
by humanity, and all countries should join hands to tackle it. China saw itself
as perhaps the only country in the world able to help smaller nations in
various states of medical emergency. European Commission President
Ursula von der Leyen expressed her gratitude in a videotaped speech
broadcast throughout Europe, and Chinese citizens abroad had sound reason
to be proud of their nation. Zhang Yujie, a Chinese student in France, said,
"The rescue efforts of our motherland make me want to cry". (87)

As soon as circumstances at home permitted, China began shipping its

medical supplies all over the world. This was not so easy as might appear,
since much global air cargo is carried on scheduled passenger flights but,
since the airline industry collapsed due to the virus, these flights all but
disappeared. (88) China Southern Airlines, the country's largest air carrier,
quickly converted hundreds of passenger aircraft to freight usage and, by
late April, was sending nearly 200 international cargo flights weekly to
support the global fight against the coronavirus pandemic. (89)

China also shared hundreds of documents on the prevention and

control of COVID-19 and its diagnosis and treatment, with groups in
more than 100 countries, followed by multiple technical exchanges that
included personal discussions and teleconferencing. (90) In a short space of
time, China released seven different editions of a guideline on
diagnosis and treatment of the disease and six editions of a
prevention and control plan for the disease, both of which have been
translated into dozens of languages.

China's telecom giant Huawei donated countless millions of masks and other
items to most countries where it has staff and does business. When the US
cancelled all medical supply exports to Canada in April, the country's supply
shortage became desperate so Huawei quietly shipped millions of masks,
plus goggles, gloves, and other protective equipment to Canada to help
front-line medical workers to cope. (91) But Canada refused to publicly
acknowledge the gifts.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau merely told the media that Canada
would be receiving a shipment of millions of masks from "unnamed countries
and companies", and the British Columbia government who were the
prime beneficiary of the supplies were so mean-spirited as to tell the
Canadian media, "The province has many supply sources . . . We don't share
details about our suppliers." Others in Canada went so far as to accuse
Huawei of "political generosity", and Trudeau even made a point of
saying that donations of medical supplies from foreign companies "will not
change how the government views those companies going forward".
Touching.

China's Fosun Group donated a large batch of medical supplies to Portugal,

including 1 million face masks and 200,000 test kits, as did many other
Chinese companies. The Fosun Foundation in Shanghai donated large
batches of face masks hospitals in Italy, and coordinated with other
companies and foundations in more than 10 shipments of medical supplies
to countries that included Italy, Japan, Britain and France. (92) The Chinese
automaker Geely donated large amounts of medical supplies to 14
countries including Sweden, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belarus and Britain.
Chinese privately-owned firms and SOEs built and supplied complete COVID-
19 testing labs, constructed or renovated hospitals in many countries.
China's BGI Group built two testing labs in Serbia - in 12 days, and donated
all the core equipment and instruments. (93) China State Construction
Engineering offered free renovation service for a hospital in Ethiopia,
transforming regular wards into virus facilities. (94) (95)

Many Chinese foundations donated medical supplies to support smaller

countries. The Jack Ma Foundation and the Alibaba Foundation donated
7.5 million face masks, 485,000 test kits and 100,000 sets of protective
clothing, as well as ventilators and thermometers to 23 countries that
included Azerbaijan, Bhutan, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and
Vietnam. (96)

The Jack Ma Foundation also donated a large amount of medical supplies to

54 African countries. (97) China's northwest Gansu Province, probably
China's poorest province, donated two consignments including tens of
thousands of face masks and protective suits to Zimbabwe, added to large
donations of medical supplies from other Chinese foundations. (98)

Various entities in China, including corporations, social agencies and the

Chinese government, donated many air shipments of supplies to Iran,
including test kits and respirators, these being especially important since
US economic sanctions prevented Iran from possessing the foreign currency
to purchase medical supplies abroad. (99)

China also sent several teams of medical experts to Iran, to help

assess the situation and provide guidance and assistance.

Even small Chinese associations were active in their assistance. Chinese

Community Groups in the UK raised money and collected medical supplies
from more than 100 local Chinese communities and Chinese people in the
UK, donating tens of thousands of medical gowns, surgical masks, and other
items. The China Chamber of Commerce in the UK and the Bank of China
donated 20 ventilators and nearly 2 million pieces of PPE to local English
hospitals. (100) (101)

Medical experts to Italy prepare to board a plane in Fuzhou, southeast

China's Fujian Province, March 25, 2020. (Xinhua/Wei Peiquan)

In March, when the virus was abating in China but increasing in Italy, China
sent large teams of medical experts from many provinces and hospitals as
well as China's CDC on specially-chartered flights, with specialists in
respiratory, intensive care, infectious disease, hospital infection control,
traditional Chinese medicine and nursing. (102)

Donated medical supplies included test kits, masks, protective clothing and
ventilators. Chinese medical specialists shared China's diagnosis and
treatment plans with countries around the world, held video conferences with
health experts from many countries and international organisations, and
dispatched medical expert groups to Iran, Iraq, and Italy. (103)

By early April, China had already sent more than 300 charter flights carrying
medical professionals and emergency supplies to support global anti-
epidemic efforts, the flights carrying more than 110 medical specialists, and
nearly 5,000 tonnes of medical supplies to about 50 countries, as well as a
special flight to Ghana carrying nearly 40 tonnes of medical supplies for
Africa. (104)

These supplies include ventilators, N95 face masks, protective clothing,

gloves and other medical devices and protective equipment. Altogether, the
Chinese government and various states, local governments, corporations and
foundations made many hundreds of chartered mercy flights.

Several dozen countries after declaring a state of emergency, contacted

China with urgent requests for medical supplies, testing equipment and
protective gear, China responding in each case even when it was still under
immense pressure to contain the epidemic at home and medical materials
were still in short supply.

These nations included the Philippines, (105) Greece, (106) (107) (108)
Serbia, Iran, Kuwait and Cambodia, Japan, South Korea, Italy, (109) the
Philippines, Serbia, France, Spain (110), Greece, Peru, Ethiopia, Cambodia,
Bosnian Serb Republic, Iran, Spain, Britain, Hungary, Zimbabwe, Czech
Republic. (111)

The EU President and their European Commissioner for Crisis Management

said, The EU and China have been working together since the beginning of
the coronavirus outbreak. We are grateful for China's support and we
need each other's support in times of need." In many cases, smaller
nations had no idea of the procurement process for medical supplies, and the
Chinese national government lent assistance to assure proper purchase and
timely delivery.

China also provided an enormous amount of assistance to the US, all of which
also went unnoticed by the America press. Zhong Nanshan, China's top
respiratory scientist, held multiple video-link teaching sessions with intensive
care specialists from Harvard's Medical School, explaining the clinical
manifestations and difficulties involved in treating severe and critical novel
coronavirus patients. (112)

As well, the nation's leading Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) experts

shared with US counterparts their diagnosis and treatment experience that
proved effective in Wuhan. (113) The Johns Hopkins University School of
Medicine said Chinese experts "spared no effort to share their experience".
In response to a US government cry for assistance in March, China
airlifted a massive amount of vital medical supplies from Shanghai
to the US, including 12 million gloves, 130,000 N-95 masks, 1.7 million
surgical masks, 50,000 gowns, 130,000 hand sanitizer units and 36,000
thermometers. (114) The assistance increased rapidly.

In one week of April alone, there were 75 cargo flights from Shanghai, Beijing
and Shenzhen to New York and Los Angeles, each carrying around 80 tonnes
of supplies. By the middle of April, China had provided the US with more than
2.5 billion masks plus nearly 5,000 ventilators and many other needed items.
While the US government and media were busy stigmatising China
with unreasonable and unjustified accusations, Beijing was taking
practical steps to help the US fight its epidemic. (115)

There were also a great many private donations made directly to US hospitals
or states by various Chinese companies, foundations, provinces, and social
groups. The Wanxiang Group, a Chinese multinational manufacturer in
Hangzhou, donated 1.1 million face masks and 50,000 protective masks to
12 US states. (116)
China’s Fujian Province, which was Oregon’s sister state, donated 50,000
medical face masks for distribution to frontline workers, in addition to 12,000
masks provided personally by Ambassador Wang Donghua, Consul General
of the People’s Republic of China in San Francisco, as a gift to the people of
Oregon. (117)

Zhao Lijian: Some people in the US talk about "facts", when what is really
on their mind is political manipulation. Source

However, the treatment of China in the US Media was nothing short of

reprehensible, the press and airwaves filled for months with a ceaseless flood
of denigrating rubbish with the result that Pew polls showed that more than
two-thirds of Americans held a negative or strongly negative view of
China - which was unquestionably the intent of the media assault.

Martin Jacques said in a live interview in Beijing that the American behavior
was "Absolutely disgraceful." He said, "Too many Western politicians and
the Western media responded to what was a grave medical health crisis in
China in a way that was completely lacking in compassion and simply used
as a stick to beat China.
And in doing so also explicitly or implicitly, they encouraged a certain
kind of racism against the Chinese, not just the Chinese in China, but
Chinese everywhere." (118)

Some in the West, led by the US, heavily politicised China's assistance to
other nations, claiming China's acts were done with murky motives and
sinister geopolitical intent. The efforts of the Chinese government to help
others were categorised as attempts to vie for global influence by vacuuming
up America's allies with bribes. And, since the global pandemic was "all
China's fault", those donations were merely gestures of atonement
camouflaged as charity, and thus should be taken "without appreciation or
even acknowledgement" - which is what the US and Canada managed to do.

"Unfortunately, even as COVID-19 accelerates inside our country, the

Trump administration seems to view diplomacy as a bludgeon to
score points against adversaries and alienate friends rather than an
essential tool for helping to protect Americans," wrote Brett McGurk, a senior
diplomat. (119)

The Chinese people generally were not very sympathetic to the US, many
comparing America's confused and corrupted efforts with China's leadership.
One post that received hundreds of millions of views said, "It took China
two months to defeat the coronavirus, while it took the coronavirus
two months to defeat the US." Another comment read, "US President
Donald Trump said the number will go down to zero. Trump is right. The
number will go down to zero when all people die." (120) Similar topics
equally drew 250 or 300 million views. One Weibo post received 150
million views almost immediately when suggesting President Trump
responded only after 1 million citizens became infected.

Today's urban Chinese are much less naive about international affairs, and
were quite aware of the Zionist-American hate propaganda that was filling
Western airwaves and sheets of print, and of the resulting racism and hatred
being generated toward China and the Chinese people, many of them having
been victims of abuse in the US. They were also aware of the vast efforts
made by their own nation to not only protect the lives of Chinese citizens but
of the truly enormous contributions their government, corporations and
societies had made to helping other nations while the US helped no one and
even denied vital supplies to other countries. (121)See below.
From this, Chinese public sentiment toward the US was by no means as light-
hearted or gentle as the comments above might suggest. The enormity of
anti-China hate literature during the past decade was producing sentiments
suggesting, "Send the supplies to Iran, Venezuela and Cuba, and let
the Americans learn a lesson."

I had a long conversation with a senior Chinese executive who told me of

operating his factory 24/7 and pushing his staff to work 12-hour days
to produce vital medical supplies for the US while partially sacrificing
his commitments to China. After being exposed to the outrageous
denigration of China in the US media, he said he would never again take any
action to assist Americans. His final comment to me: "After this, I wouldn't
cross the road to piss on the US if it were on fire."
Notes

(1) https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202001/24/WS5e2a0374a310128217273141.html

(2)https://guardian.ng/news/china-locks-down-two-cities-to-curb-virus-outbreak/

(3) https://news.yahoo.com/china-warns-virus-could-mutate-spread-death-toll-
030352863.html

(4) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/23/coronavirus-panic-spreads-in-china-
with-three-cities-in-lockdown

(5) https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202003/10/WS5e66fd23a31012821727dcaf.html

(6) https://www.shine.cn/news/nation/2003043372/

(7) https://www.shine.cn/news/metro/2001260649/

(8) https://www.shine.cn/news/metro/2003124131/

(9) https://www.shine.cn/news/metro/2002192363/

(10) http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202003/28/WS5e7e9310a310128217282a28.html

(11) https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1183923.shtml

(12) https://www.shine.cn/biz/economy/2001300922/

(13) https://www.rt.com/news/479403-china-xi-coronavirus-demon/

(14) http://www.qstheory.cn/zhuanqu/bkjx/2020-04/28/c_1125917119.htm

(15) https://www.shine.cn/news/nation/2004297248/

(16) http://en.people.cn/n3/2020/0420/c90000-9681452.html

(17) https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-01-23/Wuhan-to-build-special-hospital-in-six-
days-to-receive-patients-NuQ9ulvAo8/index.html

(18) http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202003/19/WS5e72d148a31012821728052b.html

(19) https://www.chinadailyhk.com/article/129477#Medical-leader-calls-makeshift-
hospitals-a-success

(20) https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jan/24/chinese-city-wuhan-plans-to-
build-coronavirus-hospital-in-six-days

(21) https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-s-coronavirus-hospital-built-10-days-
opens-its-doors-n1128531

(22)https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-china-can-build-a-coronavirus-hospital-in-10-days-
11580397751

(23) https://www.shine.cn/news/nation/2004287119/

(24) http://en.people.cn/n3/2020/0311/c90000-9666866.html

(25) http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-04/25/c_139005866.htm
(26) http://en.people.cn/n3/2020/0428/c90000-9684857.html

(27) https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1185403.shtml

(28) https://newseu.cgtn.com/news/2020-05-02/West-suffering-because-it-failed-to-
listen-to-China-Lancet-editor-Q9g3yHGFfq/index.html

(29) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/15/medical-journal-lancet-urges-
americans-vote-trump-coronavirus/

(30) https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/china-honors-virus-victims-minutes-
reflection-69972806

(31) http://en.people.cn/n3/2020/0125/c90000-9651777.html

(32) http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202001/25/WS5e2bb430a310128217273341.html

(33) https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1184030.shtml

(34) https://www.chinadailyhk.com/article/119530

(35) http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202002/17/WS5e4a3f38a3101282172781a9.html

(36) https://www.chinadailyhk.com/article/129138#Wuhan-tops-travelers'-wish-lists-in-
2020

(37) https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1185879.shtml

(38) https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1185879.shtml

(39) http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1185533.shtml

(40) https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1185879.shtml

(41)
http://english.www.gov.cn/news/topnews/202003/07/content_WS5e6338a8c6d0c201c2cb
dbce.html

(42) http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202001/25/WS5e2b76faa3101282172732ab.html

(43) http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-01/26/c_138733811.htm

(44) https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1177867.shtml

(45) http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-01/26/c_138734351.htm

(46) https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202001/24/WS5e2a0374a310128217273141.html

(47) https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202001/25/WS5e2b8102a3101282172732c0.html

(48) http://en.people.cn/n3/2020/0506/c90000-9687191.html

(49) http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-02/16/c_138789227.htm

(50) https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1184127.shtml

(51) https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1184127.shtml

(52) https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1184127.shtml

(53) http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-04/02/c_138941573.htm
(54) https://www.shine.cn/news/nation/2001250569/

(55)https://www.shine.cn/news/metro/2002152114/

(56) http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1184245.shtml

(57) http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1184245.shtml

(58) https://www.chinadailyhk.com/article/126796#China-bashing-syndrome-makes-
coronavirus-pandemic-deadlier

(59) https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1184530.shtml

(60) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/06/government-seeks-refund-millions-
coronavirus-antibody-tests/

(61) https://www.foxnews.com/world/netherlands-becomes-latest-country-to-reject-
china-made-coronavirus-test-kits-gear

(62) http://www.china.org.cn/china/Off_the_Wire/2020-04/29/content_75987996.htm

(63) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-china-idUSKCN2292S8

(64) https://www.chinadailyhk.com/article/129146

(65) https://peoplesdaily.pdnews.cn/2020/04/30/world/washington-rebuked-for-smear-
over-testing-kits-148227.html

(66) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/health/coronavirus-test-kits-cdc.html

(67) https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/coronavirus-tests-new-york-
us-cases-kits-trump-cdc-results-a9365921.html

(68) https://news.yahoo.com/us-health-authority-shipped-faulty-coronavirus-test-kits-
205948746.html

(69) https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-health-authority-shipped-faulty-coronavirus-test-
kits-across-country-official/5703909

(70) https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/18/coronavirus-tests-delayed-by-covid-19-
contamination-at-cdc-lab.html

(71) https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/contamination-at-cdc-lab-delayed-
rollout-of-coronavirus-tests/2020/04/18/fd7d3824-7139-11ea-aa80-
c2470c6b2034_story.html

(72) https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/world/covid19-coronavirus-united-states-
faulty-test-kits-12429566

(73) https://www.msn.com/en-za/news/africa/covid-19-pawpaw-and-goat-test-positive-
for-virus-president-magufuli/ar-BB13AJWO

(74) https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/governors-plead-for-medical-equipment-
from-federal-stockpile-plagued-by-shortages-and-confusion/2020/03/31/18aadda0-728d-
11ea-87da-77a8136c1a6d_story.html

(75) https://nypost.com/2020/04/04/states-receive-masks-with-dry-rot-broken-
ventilators/
(76) https://apnews.com/2b1c7d508dbee187aba31b675f8c5685

(77) https://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-received-broken-ventilators-from-federal-
government-governor-gavin-newsom-says/

(78) https://abcnews.go.com/

(79) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/21/public-health-england-admits-
coronavirus-tests-used-send-nhs/

(80) https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/coronavirus/nhs-staff-offered-new-covid-19-tests-
after-initial-checks-found-to-be-flawed/ar-BB131rbF

(81) https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/breaking-coronavirus-nhs-staff-called-
21905571

(82) https://apnews.com/850d9e6834fc71967af6d3dda65ad874

(83) http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-04/25/c_139005866.htm

(84) https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covid19-death-rates-us-by-
state/

(85) https://www.shine.cn/news/world/2003124144/

(86) https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-03-20/China-announces-to-help-82-countries-
fight-COVID-19-P1hcQcQKe4/index.html

(87) http://en.people.cn/n3/2020/0325/c90000-9672307.html

(88) https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/update-china-southern-sends-185-cargo-
flights-weekly-to-support-global-covid-19-fight/ar-BB13df1B

(89) https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1186745.shtml

(90) http://en.people.cn/n3/2020/0325/c90000-9672307.html

(91) http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202004/09/WS5e8e772ba310e232631a4e08.html

(92) http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202005/08/WS5eb4d906a310a8b24115437d.html

(93) https://www.globalsecurity.org/security/library/news/2020/04/sec-200422-
pdo07.htm

(94) http://en.people.cn/n3/2020/0428/c90000-9684957.html

(95) https://newsghana.com.gh/chinese-enterprises-lend-a-big-hand-to-africa-to-combat-
covid-19/

(96) https://www.shine.cn/news/world/2003295304/

(97) http://en.people.cn/n3/2020/0325/c90000-9672307.html

(98) http://en.people.cn/n3/2020/0507/c90000-9687490.html

(99) http://en.people.cn/n3/2020/0321/c90000-9670897.html

(100) http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1186348.shtml

(101) https://times-publications.com/2020/04/22/2333/uk-trade-and-business/
(102) https://www.shine.cn/news/nation/2003255022/

(103) https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-03-20/China-announces-to-help-82-countries-
fight-COVID-19-P1hcQcQKe4/index.html

(104) http://www.china.org.cn/china/Off_the_Wire/2020-04/07/content_75903130.htm

(105) http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-03/21/c_138901763.htm

(106) http://china.org.cn/world/2020-03/22/content_75844594.htm

(107) http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-03/22/c_138904576.htm

(108) https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1183326.shtml

(109) http://www.ecns.cn/news/society/2020-04-07/detail-ifzvcazm8251455.shtml

(110) http://en.people.cn/n3/2020/0504/c90000-9686744.html

(111) http://en.people.cn/n3/2020/0325/c90000-9672307.html

(112) http://en.people.cn/n3/2020/0325/c90000-9672307.html

(113) http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202003/20/WS5e740a2ca31012821728094e.html

(114) https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-03-30/First-aircraft-carrying-medical-supplies-
from-China-arrives-in-U-S--Ph2wcnA0Ok/index.html

(115) https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1186786.shtml

(116) http://www.china.org.cn/world/2020-05/06/content_76010588.htm

(117) http://en.people.cn/n3/2020/0429/c90000-9685576.html

(118) http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202003/19/WS5e72d148a31012821728052b.html

(119) https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/calls-global-cooperation-us-china-fight-leading-
coronavirus/story?id=69898820

(120) https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1187121.shtml

(121) The US government (primarily FEMA and/or the CIA, in conjunction

with Israel's Mossad) were widely accused by France, Germany, and other
nations of repeatedly hijacking - on airport tarmacs - shipments of medical
supplies destined for other countries. These actions were simultaneous with
FEMA's seizures of medical supplies from hospitals and importers all across
the US, and there appeared to be substantial evidence much of these
supplies were sent to Israel - while US hospitals were bleeding. There isn't
space to follow the story here, but you can follow this set of links below to
research the subject.
(1) https://www.rt.com/news/484743-cuba-covid19-us-blockade/

(2) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/opinion/cuba-coronavirus-trump.html

(3) https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/cuba-u-s-embargo-blocks-coronavirus-
aid-shipment-from-asia-1.4881479
(4) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/02/global-battle-coronavirus-
equipment-masks-tests

(5) https://germany.timesofnews.com/breaking-news/us-accused-of-seizing-face-mask-
shipments-bound-for-europe-canada

(6) https://dnyuz.com/2020/04/03/us-accused-of-seizing-face-mask-shipments-bound-
for-europe-canada/

(7) https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-works-assure-allies-deny-allegations-seizing-
supplies/story?id=70019576

(8) https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/04/europe/coronavirus-masks-war-intl/index.html

(9) https://www.rtl.fr/actu/debats-societe/masques-detournes-les-americains-sortent-le-
cash-il-faut-se-battre-dit-jean-rottner-sur-rtl-7800346680

(10) https://www.lefigaro.fr/international/coronavirus-l-amerique-relance-la-guerre-des-
masques-20200402

(11) https://www.huffingtonpost.fr/entry/coronavirus-des-masques-commandes-par-la-
france-detournes-par-des-americains-des-masques-commandes-par-la-france-detournes-
par-des-americains_fr_5e84eb13c5b6f55ebf47271a

(12)https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/coronavirus-medical-supplies-
countries_in_5e873034c5b63e06281ccebd

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-works-assure-allies-deny-allegations-seizing-
supplies/story?id=70019576

(13) https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/04/europe/coronavirus-masks-war-intl/index.html

(14) https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1185063.shtml

(15) https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1186406.shtml

(16) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-huawei-tech-fedex-exclusive-idUSKCN1SX1RZ

(17) https://www.journaldemontreal.com/2020/04/03/des-masques-pour-le-quebec-
detournes

(18) https://nationalpost.com/news/what-happened-when-five-million-medical-masks-for-
canadas-covid-19-fight-were-hijacked-at-an-airport-in-china?video_autoplay=true

(19)https://dnyuz.com/2020/04/03/us-accused-of-seizing-face-mask-shipments-bound-
for-europe-canada/

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-works-assure-allies-deny-allegations-seizing-
supplies/story?id=70019576

(20) https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/04/europe/coronavirus-masks-war-intl/index.html

(21) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/19/flight-carrying-vital-ppe-supplies-
nhs-delayed-turkey/

(22) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/04/18/ministers-plead-overseas-
counterparts-allow-shipments-ppe-shortage/
(23) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/06/exclusive-gowns-delayed-ppe-
shipment-turkey-impounded-failing/

(24) https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2020/04/turkey-aid-covid19-
coronavirus-erdogan-satterfield-sweden.html

(25) https://apnews.com/b940aca2ab2d0c31af2826da9c30d222

(26) https://www.opednews.com/articles/Are-the-Face-Masks-Stolen-by-Meryl-Ann-Butler-
Corona-Virus-Coronavirus-Covid-19-200410-528.html

(27) https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/not-an-ideal-solution-maryland-national-
guard-members-advised-to-make-their-own-cloth-masks/ar-BB12eKEL

(28) https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2020/04/24/army-researchers-say-
this-is-the-best-material-for-a-homemade-face-mask-theyve-found-so-far/

(29) https://twitter.com/TsahiDabush/status/1247601103006502914

(30) https://urmedium.com/c/presstv/12226

(31) While American health workers beg for PPE, Trump just shipped a million masks to the
Israeli army. https://t.co/2sVFLMteo9 — Ali Abunimah (@AliAbunimah) April 8, 2020

(32) https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/US-Department-of-Defense-give-1-million-
masks-to-IDF-for-coronavirus-use-623976

(33) https://www.globalsecurity.org/security/library/news/2020/04/sec-200408-
presstv01.htm

(34) https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Mossad-bought-10-million-coronavirus-masks-
last-week-622890

(35) https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fema-relied-inexperienced-volunteers-find-
coronavirus-protective-equipment/story?id=70519484

(36) https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/kushner-coronavirus-effort-said-to-be-
hampered-by-inexperienced-volunteers/2020/05/05/6166ef0c-8e1c-11ea-9e23-
6914ee410a5f_story.html

(37) https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fema-relied-inexperienced-volunteers-find-
coronavirus-protective-equipment/story?id=70519484

(38) https://abcnews.go.com/Health/us-short-ppe/story?id=70093430

(39) https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/kushner-backed-program-charters-flights-medical-
supplies-behalf/story?id=70291872

(40) https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/white-house-wind-coronavirus-task-force-trump-
shifts/story?id=70518706

(41)https://apnews.com/8cd84c260cb6d951ac57a6248542a44f
No part of this book, covered by the copyright hereon, may be reproduced
or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical—
without prior permission of the publisher, except for excerpts in a review.
Any request for photocopying of any part of this book shall be directed in
writing to Larry Romanoff, email: [email protected]

Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Blue Moon of Shanghai, Moon of Shanghai,

2023

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