I demand an apology from Dalai

Thursday was a National Day of Mourning in Canada for the tragic plane crash that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others last weekend. I share the grief felt by so many Polish-Canadians across the country. Even though President Kaczynski's political persuasion is a bit too ideological for my tastes, I felt I had to speak out on the real cause of his death. After all, my long journey of almost six years is first and foremost about truth and justice. Indeed, as shall become clear later in the blog, people should mourn the recent loss of innocent or unsuspecting lives in the street violence in Thailand and Kyrgyzstan as well.

Based on my observations, the Chinese delegation to the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington earlier this week had a plan to bring me out as the No. 5, similar to what they had planned to do during last December's Copenhagen Climate Summit. President Hu Jintao, who headed the delegation this time, made 5 points in his bilateral talk with the U.S. president Barack Obama only, while in his other bilateral talks, he made 4 points. Also, in his main speech on nuclear security, he made 5 proposals while mentioned 4 accomplishments. As for the Obama administration, they appeared to know in advance of China's plan, too. They implemented a unprecedented press control over the coverage of the conference proceedings - as can be seen in a report by the Washington Post - in an apparent effort to minimize the potential fallout. Mr. Obama even sent his wife to Haiti - a surprise visit for a lot of people - on Tuesday to minimize the potential fallout from there. (Here in Canada, it appeared prime minister Stephen Harper also knew in advance of China's plan. -- I believe the sudden and dramatic firing of his cabinet minister Henela Guergis last Friday was meant to divert the attention away from my story in case it broke during the nuclear summit.)

I am probably the last person to have realized China's plan, frankly speaking. Asides from my political obtuseness, a major reason is that I had stopped visiting the official website of the People's Daily, where I had gotten most of my messages from the Chinese government, since last November. Perhaps it was my way to show my desire and determination to stay away from politics.

I only realized China's plan on Monday evening, after I had read press reports of the meeting between Hu and Obama. My initial reaction was a bit of disbelief, in that President Hu Jintao himself would attempt to bring me out on international stage. I got the feeling that he had firmly came around to my ideas of democratization. The reason? The urgency of economic structural reform in China. As I have argued, without serious political reform, economic transformation can not be truly successful in China. How can you develop a balanced economy sustainably and unleash the potential of domestic demand when the system continue to tilt towards those closest to the government?

Of course, the Obama administration knows where Chinese economy is and where it wants to go. Obviously, they could not be happy about my long-standing advocacy for the direction of China's economic development. Just a year ago, they had hoped that they could still hold China more or less captive through President Hu. This was another reason for their recent confrontations with China, i.e., arms sale to Taiwan, meeting Dalai, using Google as part of their information strategy, making an issue about China's currency, etc.

However, my initial surprise about President Hu soon gave away to the curiosity about some current events, especially during the past week. I had noticed, for some time, many of China's neighbouring countries were experiencing various kinds of instability, similar to about a year ago. It's easy to trace most of the instability back to the Obama administration. While most of Obama's direct confrontations were largely foiled by my blogs, the Obama administration could always create turmoil in China's neighbouring countries from behind scenes. Noticeably during the weekend, the standoff between "Red Shirt" demonstrators and Thai government finally erupted into the worse violence in 18 years in Thailand's history, where 21 people died and hundreds more were injured.

Another country suddenly becoming hot in the past week was Kyrgyzstan, also bordering China. I believe Russia was largely behind the street riots in this case, which saw close to a hundred deaths. Note Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin was the first to "recognize" the interim government. I had written about my experience with the Russians before. And they have continually played a spoiler or exploiter role in Sino-U.S. relations/frictions. For example, their exploitation could be seen in the process that led to recently concluded Russia-U.S. nuclear treaty. In the current Kyrgyzstan situation, I believe these two governments have some sort of understanding, either implicit or explicit.

Of course, the biggest breaking news over the weekend was the plane crash that killed Polish President. After reading that President Kaczynski had been a thorn in Putin's side, I could not help but feel my heart sunk. This was too callous. And their calculation? As I quoted before in describing one of Obama's motivations to seek a military confrontation with China, "truth is the first casualty of a war". Likewise, the Russians, knowing that there would be real confrontation - directly or indirectly - between China and the United States after the nuclear summit, apparently thought that they could get away with the murders of Polish President and dozens of other prominent Poles just a couple of days before the summit.

That night I struggled quite a bit. If I were a professional politician, I would have acted "boldly" - as Mr. Obama suggested in his closing news conference - and declared my candidacy for the No.5. Then, President Hu would still have a chance to bring me out on the second day of the Washington conference. But I am really just a simply guy trying to seek justice. The truth and justice of the President Kaczynski's death weighed heavily in my mind. So were those of the murders of 9-year-old Cecilia Zhang and 5-year-old Tamra Keepness.

Of course, the White House knew that my getting on the news on the second day was a undesirable possibility. In anticipation of this possibility, senior White House official spun the Hu-Obama meeting, especially with respect to the Iranian nuclear issue. The New York Times proved once again that it is immersed in Obama's China strategy every step of the way. Simply compare its headline, "China Agrees to Push Sanctions Against Iran", with that of the Wall Street Journal, "U.S. Pushes Iran Sanctions, But China Holds Back" on the same story. (I remember that right after President Obama's meeting with Dalai, the Times published an article on its website on China's Internet security. It is only because I had started my current hunger strike and wrote about Obama's information campaign, among other things, that the Times stopped this track of pursuit on behalf of the White House. -- I should note that the White House never stopped its information warfare, mostly through Radio Free Asia, the Voice of America and other sponsored entities. As for the most egregious example of White House spin itself, I would suggest people look into a telephone conversation between Hu and Obama on climate change last year. Particularly note how deliberately ambiguous/confusing the White House statement on the call was, especially when compared with a report by Xinhua. It is, frankly, unbecoming of a superpower like the United States to have to resort to using weasel language on such a high level communication in order to gain advantage of others.) The idea was, of course, if I had acted that night and President Hu brought me out the next day, I would get all the blame for the collapsing of China-U.S. "agreement" on Iran sanctions.

For me, it's just sad to see dozens of world leaders gathered in the U.S. capital as if the murder of a president never happened. While not everyone at the summit knew the truth of President Kaczynski's death, I figured at least half of dozen of them did. Especially Mr. Obama. He was apparently in an unusually good mood, knowing that his Nobel bubble could last a bit longer. Hearing these political leaders call each other "colleague" made me wonder if that word meant anything to them.

Apparently, my political inaction was viewed as a major hiccup by some. For example, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times downgraded me from "fat lady" to "baby" right after the conference. While these names have no bearings on me whatsoever, I suggest Mr. Friedman telling that to the Poles who are mourning the loss of their beloved leaders; or to those Kyrgyz and Thai people who lost loved ones in the recent street violence.

Other people took notice, too. Right after the summit, a official newspaper of the North Korea government ran an editorial calling for better relations with the United States. As I wrote before, the Kim regime is just exploiting the frictions and potential confrontations between U.S. and China. Note the tension in the Korean peninsula has been high for some time, especially after the sinking of a South Korea navy ship. Also right after the Washington summit, the real intent of the Kyrgyz turmoil became clearer: The interim government refused the deposed president to leave the country. It was because I started writing this blog on Wednesday - which must have been known to the U.S. and Russian governments - that the situation in Kyrgyzstan started to calm down from what President Medvedev boldly declared "at the brink of a civil war" on Tuesday night.

I said in my previous blog that Sino-U.S. relations appeared to have largely avoided an immediate confrontation. I guess I was too naïve. Besides, if President Hu had been willing to personally bring me out as the No.5, there must be a strong consensus among top Chinese leadership for political reform based on my ideas. And I have to applaud them for essentially sacrificing their grip on power for the good of the country. As such, I am willing to be the No. 5 in China. Yes, I will still be a nice guy. But I think the world might just need a nice guy.

Update (20100419):

Since I published the above blog early Friday morning, I have not had the longing to look at it myself. Not even once. I knew it was very badly written.

Writing is hard. Writing has always been hard for me. But this one was especially hard because of my fast.

Indeed as I said, fasting this time around felt a lot harder than five years ago. The stress on my body was so much that I did not even have the desire to write about it - not even short blogs. I knew this was stupid because in this world of ours, you are often what you are written or portrayed to be, not how you actually live your life. And in the case of my journey, I knew a lot of people would be just glad to turn a blind eye.

What’s more, this blog was particular hard because I needed to tell a long, complicated story for which even a PowerPoint presentation was not adequate or appropriate.

I started writing it last Wednesday. I had planned to published it on Thursday because I figured the sooner I got this story out, the better chance I would have to be brought out. (That’s why in the originally-planned draft, I started with: “Today is the National Day of Mourning in Canada …”) I tried. But I was just too tired and overwhelmed by the amount of research that would have to be done. And I felt dizzy at times. Early Thursday morning, I tried my old trick of sleeping for a hour or so with the help of my alarm clock, determined to come back to finish it that morning. But after I woke up, I found the trick did not work this time. I had to lie down.

I got up around 8:30AM Thursday morning. The rest of Thursday and Friday, however, just became more and more of a struggle for me as my energy level went down and down. (I knew that. That’s why I was determined to finish it Thursday morning.) If my work could be called writing for those two days at all, it would be best described as haltingly slow. Most of the writing was actually done late Friday night and early Saturday morning, with the anticipation of food and the actual intake of food. (I normally start cooking around 11:30PM Fridays and as soon as the clock turn midnight, I start eating. Oh, sometimes I even find myself preparing my food for weekend cooking on Thursdays or even on Wednesdays.) I knew the blog was badly written. But I wanted to get it out as soon as possible even though I felt I probably had already missed my best chance to be brought out.

So as you see, my agreeing to the Chinese government to be the No. 5 was largely motivated to end my own misery. I might have tried to sound like a politician. But I am not a politician. I can never be a politician. Indeed, all those political stuff make my head spin. As a matter of fact, if this episode revealed anything, it’s that I could not be a politician.

Yes, I have political ideas. And I still firmly believe my ideas are the right ones for China and for the world at large. But having political ideas does not mean I am a politician. I think many people, including the Chinese government, badly misjudged me.

Please let me out.

Update (20100426):

I love weekends. Not just that I won’t go hungry on the weekends. It’s that my whole life feels more normal, even just for a short period of 48 hours. And as I told you before, my normal daily activities, such as cooking or taking a walk around my neighbourhood, are quite meditating. Which is important for me.

So I did some editing of the above blog on Sunday. Most of the changes I made were minor or grammatical in nature because I felt I had to respond to some of the attacks that I saw.

Two days after I posted the above blog, former president Bill Clinton published a column on the New York Times, titled “What We Learned in Oklahoma City”. When I first read it on the Times’ website, the Internet page title was “Violence Is Unacceptable in a Democracy”. Since I had been called “baby Democracy” by Thomas Friedman just days before - as I mentioned in the above blog - Mr. Clinton’s piece caught my attention. What’s more curious, hours later when I accessed the article online again, the Internet page title had been changed to “Lessons Learned From Oklahoma City”. Wall Street Journal also picked up Clinton’s piece and published an editorial called “The Violence Card” two days later.

It appeared that’s what Mr. Clinton was doing - calling on people to play the violence card on me by insinuating that I was for violence. Indeed, for someone who are new to my file and only read the above blog, he or she could be excused for getting such an impression: Seeing there is a likely confrontation between China and U.S., I agreed to join the game to be the No. 5.

But Mr. Clinton certainly is not new to my file. And just a few weeks ago, I had already encountered a similar situation and explained my willingness to be the No. 5 in my blog, Dalai’s Political Loyalty. The Obama administration had been waging a massive disinformation campaign at this critical and potentially destabilizing time of China’s beginning political reform based on my ideas. My willingness to be the No. 5 was not only to help China’s stability, but also to tell the truth to the world so as to reduce the tension between China and the U.S. before it might get out of hand. And as I mentioned in the above blog, the Obama administration had never stopped its information warfare against China, especially in the Chinese language media controlled or sponsored by them. Even the reduced tension between U.S. and China as (un)manifested in western main stream media in recent weeks, whether it was from the Taiwan arms sale issue, the Dalai issue or the Google/Internet access issue, was, I believe, largely a result of my writing about them.

Indeed, while truth might be the first casualty of a war, it can also serve the cause of peace because when people want to instigate violence they often have to resort to manufacturing lies. Just look back into earlier years of my journey. Didn’t my telling the truth on the Bush administration’s attempt in 2005/2006 to instigate violence across Taiwan Strait help avoid a conflict and contribute to guarding the peace there in subsequent years? Didn’t my analysis of the 15 captured British sailors incident help prevent a war in the Persian Gulf in 2007? And there are many more such examples you can find in my blogs.

In these blogs, you can also find that, to guard peace, not only did I force myself to write despite the difficulties I had in writing, I also took deliberate consideration in my (in)actions, and usually at great personal costs. Take the current situation at the Nuclear Security Summit, for example. It was precisely because of my inaction in the middle of the summit that a potential confrontation between the U.S. and China did not materialize. And all the while I was and still am fasting.

Indeed, the single biggest contributing factor to my current misery was Obama’s decision to ram through his health care agenda through the U.S. congress, a decision made just hours after I started my current hunger strike. His decision was made to essentially kill any chance I might have of becoming public before the final outcome of his health care push because, given the highly polarized nature of the legislation, I would surely get blamed for either outcome and for the subsequent China blaming if I unwittingly - due to the observations I made on this topic last fall - injected myself into the debate by becoming public. In other words, his decision to un-shelve his health care agenda on February 19 was designed to deter me from trying to get on the news, similar to the White House spin on Hu-Obama meeting with respect to the Iran sanction issue during the nuclear summit.

As such, it is really unseemly for a person with President Clinton stature to attack me based on the slightest imperfection of my writing, considering that it was my fasting that made my writing that more difficult. If I had to guess, Mr. Clinton was probably alarmed by my mentioning the Haiti earthquake in the above blog, because he knew that I knew that Mr. Obama’s recruitment of him and President George W. Bush for the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund was largely a political theatre, despite his own interest in Haiti, to divert attention away from my story. I remember watching the three presidents making the announcement live on TV on January 16. Toward the end of their appearance, Mr. Obama winked - yes, winked! - at the gathering media when he warned them not to drift their attention away to “other things”, which were, to those media people “in the loop”, an obvious reference to my story. (The wink had been edited out of the White House video. Similarly, I found CNN had edited out Dalai’s “awkward smile” in its repeat broadcast of the interview I mentioned.)

What’s more, of all the possible attacks that Mr. Clinton or anybody else could have launched at me, the insinuation of violence was the most insulting. Not only did it contradict my words and my actions over this many years, it offended the core values of my political ideas. Unlike many western-style democracies, which are often highly confrontational and polarizing in nature, the democratic model I propose for China is more conciliatory and collaborative. And unlike the U.S. government, who really uses two sets of values in domestic and international governance, my political ideas use the same set of values inside and outside China. That’s why we see while there is much peace and stability inside the United States, there is also the dangerous tendency on the part of the U.S. government to use violence against other countries. That’s also why the Obama administration felt threatened by my ideas because they essentially call for a more collaborative and democratic world order.

Yes, the danger of a U.S.-China confrontation remains real primarily because the United States does not want to give up its sole superpower status. The Obama administration can create any number of “issues” with China at any time it wants to, especially when the U.S. and western media dominate the world. But I believe a confrontation between U.S. and China is not inevitable if enough people strive for an approach of genuine dialogue and cooperation. As the author of the political ideas China is poised to adopt, I feel I have a special responsibility to do so. I just need to fight my own instinct to stay away from politics because the best way for me to defuse potential tensions between China and the U.S. is to remain in this game, even though I am not good at it.

Next weekend, I will probably say a few words on the “issue” of Chinese currency, which, I figure, is bound to surface again sooner or later.

Update (20100617):

By now, you all know I am not that bright. Actually, stupid is the word I often use on myself, especially when it comes to politics. And stupidity was exactly the reason for my obtuse understanding of the “issue” of the Chinese currency as made by the Obama administration until around March 15. It was after I had read Paul Krugman’s column that day that I began to see through the real motive behind Obama administration’s repeated attempts to pressure renminbi appreciation, which was to write down the huge U.S. dollar assets held by China, of which the vast U.S. government debt also happened to be the most important card China had on the U.S. -- Intuitively, letting the renminbi appreciate against the dollar is equivalent to letting the dollar depreciate against the renminbi. Such a dollar depreciation would only cause China’s vast dollar assets, including its holdings of U.S. government debt, to suffer huge losses. (In economics parlance, apparently, such foreign reserve losses are called “losses in local or domestic currency terms.”)

I had always felt that the currency exchange rate between U.S. dollar and Chinese renminbi can not be the real cause of the trade imbalance between these two countries. I do not claim to be economist. I took an interest in economics at universities but never felt I learned much. However, I feel trade between countries, ultimately, is about supply and demand of many, many different products. The fundamental problem in Sino-U.S. trade imbalance is a structural one.

As I said before, overall, U.S. and China have a mutually-beneficial economic relationship and we should strive to preserve it. Indeed, the development of Sino-U.S. economic relations over the past decades is a testimony to the benefit of globalization for people around the world. Since China started opening itself up to the world in the late 1970s, it has lifted millions upon millions of people out of abject poverty. For the United States, globalization brought bigger profits for its corporations and shareholders and cheaper products for its consumers when many of its industries were relocated to China and other low-cost locales. Supposedly, the U.S. as a developed economy would occupy the high-end of the value chain and endeavour to move up even higher, i.e., to innovate. Innovation is what the United States is good at. Unfortunately, too many innovations in the U.S. in recent years took place on Wall Street in the form of exotic derivatives, a.k.a. financial weapons of mass destruction. The best and the brightest were attracted there by high wages and huge bonus to build up what was essentially a financial casino. As a result, there are just not many real products that America can sell to the rest of the world, including China. What’s worse in the case of its trade relations with China, the U.S. continues to maintain artificial restrictions on the export of its high-tech products, a relic of the Cold War era. To his credit, President Obama partially recognized America’s economic structural problem. Still, it appears unlikely at this time that he would want to move many industries such as apparels, shoes, toys or even some of the heavier ones, back to American soil. What he has been making efforts was in the area of clean energy technologies, widely regarded as the next big thing. But it’s going to take some time for such investments to bear fruits in the form of actual products. In the mean time, Mr. Obama would be well-advised to lift more restrictions on export of high-tech products to China, as his predecessor George W. Bush did near the end of his term. (An earlier version of this paragraph was written on or before May 3. About two weeks later, I noticed that U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke led a trade delegation to China to promote clean energy technologies. If Mr. Locke’s trip was prompted by my writing as my computer keystrokes were monitored by the Obama administration, people should watch carefully to see whether the trip was more of a political theatre than a serious attempt to heed my advice.)

In short, to single out the dollar-renminbi exchange rate as the scapegoat of U.S. economic woes is just too simplistic an explanation for the complex problem of trade imbalance that such a finger-pointing borders on demagoguery. Pressuring China to appreciate its currency with the threat of trade sanctions could not possibly solve the problem in any lasting way. Indeed, America’s historical experience with its trade partners, especially Germany and Japan, already demonstrated as such. So did its experience with China from 2005 to 2007, when the renminbi appreciated about 20 percent against the dollar. That’s why I felt that making loud complaints about the Chinese currency was just an excuse on the part of the Obama administration to confront China for the sake of a confrontation. That the “issue” of Chinese currency surfaced together with Obama’s other China cards, e.g., Taiwan arms sale, Dalai meeting, Google/Internet access, only made me even more convinced that it was merely a political ploy by Mr. Obama. Still, I was puzzled and indeed, worried, because it’s obvious that a trade war amid a fragile global economic recovery would hurt both countries badly as they both are important trading nations. And an escalating trade war would risk plunging the whole world back into a double dip recession or even down the path of a depression, especially since China is currently the engine of growth for the global economy. This initial feeling of mine was reflected in my writings from last fall to lately on February 24 when I mentioned “escalating trade dispute” between U.S. and China in my blog. In other words, I was clearly blinded by Mr. Obama’s politically convenient smoke screen.

What got me out of my blind was reading Mr. Krugman’s March 15 column. He caught my attention with his attempt to dispel what he called “a common misunderstanding: the view that the Chinese have us over a barrel, because we don’t dare provoke China into dumping its dollar assets.” Those words and their surrounding lengthy paragraphs flatly contradicted everything I personally experienced. And what an experience it was. I could still remember how shocked I was to realize in early January 2009 that I possessed something I could never have imagined possessing, i.e., influence over the stock markets. Indeed, as everyone can see, my shock was reflected in the uncharacteristically smug writings of my blog, Global Financial Crisis and the Fate of Two Nations.

I hate to repeat myself, especially when I am fasting. I urge people read that blog to see for themselves how my actions during the height of global financial crisis from mid-September to early October 2008 had routinely led to hundreds of point swings in the stock markets, even without myself being consciously aware of it at the time. And it was largely from that experience that I came to the conclusion that the U.S. economy was extremely venerable to its heavy indebtedness to China. This blog also provided other useful information to those who are interested in Sino-U.S. economic relations. For example, in his written testimony to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in February, Cornell professor Eswar Prasad wondered why there was a marked increase in China’s purchase of U.S. debt in 2008. If you read my blog, you will know that during the financial crisis, there was an internal power struggle within the top Chinese leadership between supporters of President Hu Jintao and me. The then Bush administration exploited the Chinese internal political strife and obtained a commitment from the Chinese government to buy a large chunk of new U.S. debt. (A Hong Kong newspaper put it at $200 billion. Although I have not seen any other reports on this matter, this figure appeared to be consistent with Professor Prasad’s estimate of $276.8 billion net purchase of U.S. debt for that whole year.) It was only after they had secured such a commitment from the Chinese government that they were able to start devising a plan with the U.S. Congress to bailout their troubled financial institutions. That’s probably why there was a joke later that in 2008, it was the Chinese who saved (American) capitalism.

Not long after I posted the above-mentioned blog, I had a close encounter with an agent of either the Canadian or the U.S. government in a park near my home. (To me, it makes no difference whether he is a Canadian or an American as these two governments work hand in hand on my file. As I revealed before (in court?), a “patient” in the mental hospital where I was incarcerated and tortured appeared to be an American spy. His presence at the hospital had to have the knowledge and cooperation of the Canadian authorities, of course.) Disguised as a friendly park user, he struck a conversation with me that lasted for about 10 to 15 minutes. I only realized that he was a spy afterwards.

He had a camera with long lens prominently hung around his neck. I later realized that the camera was meant to send me a bullying message that the governments were watching me as they knew I was there to hopefully meet up with a member of opposite sex.
He spent quite some time telling me about a Chinese businessman who made a lot of money in Canada. Later I realized that he was making me an “offer” of some obscene amount on behalf of the government(s), similar in manner to the many “offers” I received as described in my first report. (When I wrote my first report, I probably thought those “offers” were coming from those private individuals named in my civil lawsuit.)
Towards the end of the conversation, he turned the topic to China’s huge foreign reserves. Perhaps thinking that I should have realized his identity, he asked me directly: “What are you gonna do with them?” -- I had told him that I was a Canadian immigrant from China as he had told me that he was originally from an Eastern European country - I forget which one. As such, I thought he was just asking for my personal opinion on the reserves. Still, I felt his question too strange. I told him that I did not know and promptly ended our conversation.

I remember that when he mentioned the amount of China’s foreign reserves, he used an expletive for emphasis and/or displeasure. And there was clearly a sense of anxiety in his tone when he asked me: “What are you gonna do with them?” Looking back, I think it’s obvious that the U.S. government was trying to bribe me so that I would keep buying up the U.S. debt if and when I am in a position to do so on behalf of China.

My personal experience was also complemented by On the Brink, a recent book by former Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulson. As widely reported, Mr. Paulson learned around the start of Beijing Olympics in 2008 a “disruptive scheme” that Russia had urged China to dump their Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds in concert. As I had already disclosed, it was my letter to the Russian Embassy in Ottawa that led to the plan to bring me out during the Olympic opening ceremony. The then Bush administration foiled the plan by ordering Georgian president to start a war with Russia. Apparently, even the holdings of U.S. government agency debts by other countries could become handy in times of potential conflict. Reading the book, you will find how worried Mr. Paulson was: “The report was deeply troubling -- heavy selling could create a sudden loss of confidence in the GSEs and shake the capital markets”. The situation was considered so serious that he had to wait until he was back home to inform President Bush for security reasons.

As such, for Mr. Krugman to say that the United States has “no reason to fear China” is just factually wrong. Indeed, not only did governments around the world know the leverage China had over U.S. with its vast holdings of U.S. debt, many prominent economists had long ago warned the U.S. about its debt situation. For example, President Obama’s economic adviser, Larry Summers, famously used the phrase “a balance of financial terror” many years ago to characterize the economic relationship between U.S. and China. Indeed, while the nuclear analogy of “mutually assured destruction” tends to make a catchy headline, more careful examinations of U.S. indebtedness to China reveal that such a characterization is in fact a little too charitable to the U.S. side, as can be seen in the testimony by Professor Prasad, who concluded that “any Chinese threat to move aggressively out of Treasuries is a reasonably credible threat” and that “the direct costs could in fact be rather modest from the Chinese perspective”.

China’s venerability is evidently in what some pundits called the “Dollar Trap”, a phenomenon originated from the dollar’s role as the predominant reserve currency. It basically says that as long as China runs a trade surplus, it does not have much choice but to put the surplus in dollar assets and in particular, U.S. Treasuries. I will probably try to explore the phenomenon in more detail a bit latter. For now, let me just say that China has been for some time poised to start economic structural reform and to reorient economic development towards nurturing and meeting domestic demands, and to start the necessary accompanying political reforms as well. The problem is that the U.S. government does not really want to see that happen in China, despite their hypocritical claims to the contrary. And that problem is at the centre of much of the current Sino-U.S. tensions.

What would be the consequences for the U.S. if China decides to move out of U.S. Treasuries? Again, unless you listen to demagogues like Paul Krugman, any student of international finance will tell you that U.S. interest rates would soar, increasing the overall costs of running the U.S. economy, and the U.S. dollar would tumble, making it less attractive as a reserve currency.

Why is the dollar as the dominant reserve currency important to the United States? Well-known New York University professor Nouriel Roubini listed a few benefits in an article published last year: “[The strong market for the dollar allows Americans to borrow at better rates. … We [can] issue debts in our own currency rather than in a foreign one, thus shifting the losses of a fall in the value of a dollar to our creditors. Having commodities priced in dollars has also meant that a fall in the dollar’s value doesn’t lead to a rise in the price of imports.”

Again, you will not see such clear and straightforward statements in Paul Krugman’s columns. In fact, you would not even know that helping to preserve dollar’s role as the world’s dominant reserve currency is one of the most important hidden motives in Krugman’s columns, if you don’t read carefully to find clues such as his constant ridicule of the euro, the dollar’s nearest competitor as a reserve currency. Claiming to be a conscientious liberal, Mr. Krugman is in fact a self-interested empirist.

That’s why, immediately after I announced that I would write about the “issue” of Chinese currency, we saw the Obama administration triggered the European sovereign debt crisis. They knew I would be getting to the real problem, i.e., the huge U.S. debt and its negative impact on the dollar. How did they deal with their problem? By attacking the euro. Because the dollar had a so-called “safe heaven” status, triggering a crisis in Europe essentially shored up the dollar at the expense of the euro. Of course, an important reason that the U.S. government was able to trigger such a crisis at a moment’s notice was its implicit control over the rating agencies, one of which pulled the trigger by downgrading Greece’s debt straight to junk status on April 27 -- on order of the Obama administration, I believe. This indecent act by the Obama administration was not that much different from those with respect to Google or Twitter. Given the power those rating agencies have over the international financial markets and their complicity in the recent sub-prime mortgage crisis, reform of this critically important industry is urgently needed to make it more accountable to global investing public rather than to a particular government. Unfortunately, I have not seen any actions on that front.

There were, of course, other considerations behind Obama administration’s triggering the European debt crisis. An obvious one was to exacerbate China’s venerability to the Dollar Trap. When the euro is weakened, China would face greater risk in investing in the euro assets, its major alternative to investing in the dollar assets. And I will discuss later a third calculation behind Mr. Obama’s move - to increase inflationary pressure on China and other parts of the world.

By the way, I believe the attempted Times Square car bombing in New York city on Saturday night, May 1, was also manufactured by the Obama administration. (In my previous blogs, I detailed instances where the U.S. and Canadian governments tried to frame me in staged terrorist acts in Ottawa in 2007. So it did not surprise me a bit that Mr. Obama would be using the same trick as did his predecessor, i.e., fighting with himself so as to cause fear in American people in connection to my becoming public.) Besides the suspect’s many bizarre behaviours, such as his unfathomable clumsiness in carrying out this supposed terrorist act or his puzzling decision to give up his rights to a lawyer after his arrest, I offer the following observations: (1) As I announced, I originally planned to publish this update on or immediately after that weekend; (2) Coincidentally, that weekend also saw the opening of 2010 Shanghai Expo which put the city of Shanghai under international spotlight; (3) If this update is perceived to be about the “battle” of reserve currencies, renminbi, as Professor Nouriel Roubini and others noted, is the currency most likely to offer a challenge to the dollar in the future. Indeed, the Chinese government does seem to have a plan to “internationalize” renminbi and a cornerstone of their plan is to develop Shanghai into a major international financial center, which would, of course, make it a competitor of New York. Therefore, I think it is highly likely that the Obama administration manufactured that failed car bombing at the heart of New York city at that particular weekend not only to insinuate that China would use terrorist tactics in the competition for financial power with the U.S., but also to produce falsified intelligence out of this “suspect” so as to further pressure and destabilize Pakistan, an important neighbour of China.

If Mr. Krugman’s usually lucid argument on currency exchange rate vis-à-vis trade imbalance was demagoguery, his similarly persuasive dismissal of U.S. debt problem was more like bullshit. As a Nobel prize winner in economics, he could not possibly be ignorant of the difference between a paper loss and an actual loss, among other things. Obviously, the question remained as to why Mr. Krugman seemed to be the only person who dismissed the potentially dire consequences of the massive U.S. indebtedness. To find the answer, I went back to his October 23, 2009 column because I remembered that that was the first time he called for pressuring renminbi appreciation, at least since I have followed him.

When I first read his October 23, 2009 column, I noticed he started his column with a nut-cracking of my blog posted the day before. As usual, I did not think too much of it as too many people cracked nuts of my writings all the time. When I re-read it this time, I noticed that his nut-cracking was not so much on the main idea of my blog about Mr. Obama’s winning the Nobel Bubble Prize, but on the observations I made at the beginning of that blog, mostly on the historic nature of America’s indebtedness.

At the time of my writing that blog, I only knew what I learned from reading Warren Buffett: That the U.S. government would most likely solve its huge debt problem by deliberate devaluation of the dollar, a.k.a., inflation or “theft by stealth”, in the future. And judging by the “coded” words and actions of the U.S. political class, it appeared that they were not only planning to go down that road, they were also very greedy in that they intended to rack up even more debt before the eventual devaluation. I also knew China, as the largest foreign creditor of the U.S. government, would be a major victim of that theft. That’s why I had always been weary about China’s lending money to the U.S. Of course, knowing Mr. Obama’s confrontational attitude towards China made me even wearier. In my mind, the U.S. should at least be grateful, especially considering it was China who pulled U.S. back from the abyss at the height of global financial crisis and later helped put U.S. back to the road of economic recovery, and in so doing, really prevented the collapse of the dollar.

Reading my blog and Mr. Krugman’s column again, I realized that Mr. Krugman thought I was implicitly calling on China to dump the U.S. debt and he suggested forcing renminbi appreciation in the name of correcting trade imbalance as a counter measure. Of course, I did not think about dumping the U.S. debt when I wrote my blog and that’s why I did not realize the real motive in Mr. Krugman’s writing when I first read it. Yes, I knew all along that the U.S. was heavily dependent on China’s purchase and continued holding of U.S. debt. But I just do not know how to transform that knowledge into real political power. As I said in my blog in January 2009, I simply did not have “a full grasp of the practical significance of being the leader of China”. And I still don’t. People may criticize me for not learning. But again, it’s hard to learn politics when you are not in that kind of environment. I live a life of a simple guy, not that of a politician.

I do not claim to have the complete information despite the amount of research I have done for this update. But it appears that most of the Obama administration’s public complaints about renminbi exchange rate vis-à-vis trade imbalance took place after Mr. Krugman’s October 23, 2009 column. (I remember in the early days of the Obama administration, Secretary of Treasury Tim Geithner had to backtrack his criticism of the renminbi.) As such, we can conclude that the real objective of the U.S. political class in making an issue out of the Chinese currency was to divert attention away from the problem of U.S. debt and U.S. dollar, and in the highly unlikely event that China caved in to U.S. pressure, to write down U.S. debt and other dollar assets held by China, which would in turn alleviate U.S. debt problem.

Another question in my mind was: Why did the U.S. political class take my writings on this subject so seriously? My mere worry about the U.S. debt seemed to have prompted them to start their campaign against the renminbi last October; and my mere suggestion that I would write about the U.S. debt problem appeared to have prompted them to immediately trigger the European sovereign debt crisis in April. Indeed, a similar question had been in my mind for a long time. As I wrote in my previous blogs, the markets had always seemed to take me seriously as can be seen from the many examples of market jittery in connection to my being potentially brought out into the public, except, it seemed, when I was stupid and blinded by Mr. Obama’s smoke screen more recently.

As the title of my last blog of 2008 asked, these market jittery raised the serious question of financial market corruption in the United States. Essentially, critical information about me - perceived to be a potential leader of China even thought I did not think of myself as one - appeared to have been collected and passed on by the governments to people on Wall Street, sometimes instantaneously. Due to my perceived ability to influence markets, those people were able to make huge profits out of the information about me - at the expense of the little guys on Main Street. (In financial markets, information really is money.) I should add here that the situation under the Obama administration remains the same as that under George W. Bush. In other words, this kind of corruption in the U.S. financial markets appears to be systematic. It is perhaps an indication of the incestuous relationship between Washington and Wall Street in the underbelly of the American system of government. (By the way, I do believe the civil indictment brought against Goldman Sachs by the Obama administration on April 16 was politically motivated. The curious timing aside, I should note that I had mentioned Goldman at the beginning of my October 22, 2009 blog. By going after Goldman, Mr. Obama was trying to create the impression that his administration had kept a distance from the Wall Street. As for the supposed independence of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in its investigation of market irregularities, my own personal experience suggested otherwise, as can be seen from my first report.)

Serious as the question of market corruption is - and I hope people, especially journalists, would look into it - for the purpose of this update, I am more concerned with the question about myself. I wanted to know what was about me that made the markets react so dramatically.

Initially, I thought that it was because of the perception that I was perhaps more hard-line towards the U.S., or to borrow a phrase from Paul Krugman, that I was perhaps more likely to “take on” America. That wrong perception had bothered me quite a bit, as can be seen in my previous blogs. -- Indeed, it was mainly because I wanted to clear my name that I stumbled on the truth of an (asymmetrical) nuclear balance between the U.S. and China. When it comes to Sino-U.S. relations in general, I have consistently advocated for a genuine and enduring cooperative relationship between the two countries. And I mean it. (After all, I am not a politician.)

And if people had any doubts about my words, my actions, especially my actions in February 2009 when I repeatedly ignored Beijing’s many orders to act, should have dispelled them. Given the highly precarious state of American financial system and American economy at the time, if I had so much as lifted a finger - literally I had just needed to take a trip to the library sometimes - they would have collapsed upon the dumping of the U.S. debt by the Chinese government. And so would have the dollar. This extreme high stake was probably the reason why, as I repeatedly described in my previous blogs, Mr. Obama treated that period as a real “battle”.

Only that I did not see any “battle” at all. I never intended to “take on” America and that’s why I did not see the moment of America’s weakness as an opportunity. Indeed, what those (in)actions of mine revealed is that, rather than having a tendency to “take on” America, I am in fact too nice to America. I guess, having lived here for so long, I had grown attached to it. Of course, I love China, too. In being nice to the Americans, I hoped that they would return the favours I did on behalf of China. (As a nice guy, I tend to think others are nice, too.) Unfortunately, that’s not what came out of Washington. Indeed, just the polar opposite of niceness came out of the Obama administration, as can be seen from my previous blogs. That’s why I lamented that “pragmatism works only when both sides take a pragmatic view” and later, became utterly frustrated and irritated by his administration.

Again, I am not going to repeat myself here. Looking back, I think the Mr. Obama never had the intention to genuinely cooperate with China. For a brief period of time after my February 20, 2009 blog, he appeared to be cooperating with China. But I believe he did it out of necessity - he was in desperate need of China’s money to get himself out of the rough patch at the moment. Once he got from China what he wanted, he turned his back on China.

I believe February 2009 was a turning point in people’s perception of me because it was the weakest moment for the United States financially. In an article published on rediff.com on October 6, 2008 - which I first read as part of my research for my January 2009 blog - Indian commentator M R Venkatesh not only pointed out that “in the coming months”, China could succeed in “dynamiting” the U.S., he also warned that “if it doesn’t, from the Chinese perspective it might well rue this moment forever.” Looking back, I don’t think I have any regret for not having acted, even with my frustration and irritation over America’s En Jiang Chou Bao. It is always much easier to dynamite than to construct something. (Of course, if the U.S. government, thinking that they have gotten out of the worst situation, insists on having a confrontational with China, the fundamentals of Sino-U.S. relationship dictate the outcome of that confrontation will remain largely the same, even though China is not in the best situation - relatively speaking - to deal with the U.S. aggression. And I have written in my previous blogs about the dire consequences of a Sino-U.S. confrontation, whether it is military or economic.)

While I did not have the specifics of international financial dynamics in my mind at the time, others must have tried to interpret my (in)actions from a financial angel. Naturally, I wanted to know what others’ interpretation of my (in)action was. If China should not, on its own initiative, use its holding of U.S. debt to “dynamite” the dollar system, people naturally were going to ask: “What are you going to do with them? And what about the prospect of capital loss from the dollar depreciation, which is almost surely going to happen due to the massive U.S. indebtedness?” Again, although I did not specifically provide answers to those questions, people must have tried to find clues in my words and actions. When it comes to the United States, I had always mentioned it in an admiring way. (But not when I described how it deals with other countries, of course.) And just like Warren Buffett, I have a value-investing mentality. I look at things from a fundamentalist point of view and look at the long term.

Sure, given how deep a hole the U.S. is in right now - and they appears to be digging deeper everyday - it is probably reasonable to assume that it will take the U.S. many years to climb out. However, from a long term perspective, the United States still has one of the most dynamic economies in the world. There are many talks of China’s GDP catching up with America’s in so and so many years. Even if it happens one day, U.S. economy will still be stronger than China’s. This is not only due to the poor quality of China’s economic development in the past, but more fundamentally, the dynamism of American economic system - as in the way Warren Buffett often describes it - is not that easy for other countries to emulate. As such, in the long run, the American economy is almost certain to regain its usual strength. And so will be the strength of the dollar. The status of the dollar as a reserve currency in the long run should not be a question.

How can China ensure its vast holding of dollar assets will eventually preserve its value, faced with the near-term prospective of dollar devaluation? Intuitively, maintaining a stable currency exchange rate between the renminbi and the dollar seems to be the key. Reading Professor Prasad’s testimony confirmed my intuition. As he wrote: “A plunge in the value of the dollar against other major currencies would reduce the domestic currency (renminbi) value of China’s dollar-denominated holding. This is indeed accurate. But only if the renminbi appreciated relative to the dollar.” In other words, China will not suffer any loss of its dollar assets if it does not appreciate the renminbi against the dollar. That’s just one of the many reasons why renminbi appreciation against the dollar is not in China’s interest.

Maintaining the renminbi-dollar peg until U.S. economic fully recovers, incidentally, also provides a strategy for China to internationalize the renminbi. Insofar as the U.S. debt to China and Chinese credit to the U.S. are twins, so will be the dollar and the renminbi under stable exchange rate. When China makes the necessary progress in other aspects of the internationalization of its currency, including full convertibility of the renminbi, more and more people around the world will view it as a second dollar and accept it as a form of payment in international transactions as well as a store of value.

At the mean time, China’s holding of U.S. debt can still be useful not only as a “credible threat” in its dealings with the U.S., but also as something that can be put into actual use without having to completely destroy the dollar. Sure, there is a mutually assured destruction in Sino-U.S. economic relations, as posited by Larry Summers and others. But the U.S. debt is fundamentally not a nuclear weapon. There are many ways for China to use it to achieve desired results, whether it is to target a certain area of the U.S. economy, control the duration or severity of the impact, etc, etc. In a sense, China can dictate at least some aspects of U.S. economic policy with the use of the U.S debt. Of course, the U.S. has been able to do that, and indeed, been doing that to China (and many other countries) for some time with its use of the dollar as the de facto world currency. In time, the two governments will realize that genuine dialogue and cooperation is not only desirable, but also necessary. And that would be a good thing.

Finally I am able to answer the above question as to why the U.S. political class took my writings on this matter so seriously. They, and perhaps many other governments as well, must have thought that I was the author of China’s renminbi strategy, especially in its relation with the U.S. dollar, based on the interpretation of my words and actions in February 2009. As such, they hung on to every word I wrote on this subject hoping to perhaps find more clues. At the same time, it’s apparent that I am just a simple guy who is clueless when it comes to real politics. Therefore, it remains uncertain to them whether I will be able to actually affect China’s economic and financial policies in the future. And that uncertainty was passed on to the Wall Street and became a drag on the markets recently.

(To add to the clarity, I’ll just simply say that everyone knows that I am out of politics now, having bungled China’s plan for the Nuclear Summit. I can not be of any use when it comes to real politics, be it domestic or international. Sure, my ideas on economic development, political reform and international relations are the right ones for China. And it looks like that the current leadership is poised to adopt them if and when I am brought out. -- The reason why I have to be brought out is that, as I said, the Obama administration does not really want to see those reforms taking place in China. The many truths I hold have to come out in order to shake off the Obama administration’s hindrance. The pressure on renminbi appreciation is really a pressure against China’s pending reform. -- As such, I applaud them for willing to make a self-sacrifice and starting serious economic as well as the necessary political reforms. The only thing that could disappoint me, from reading President Hu’s recent Internet articles, is that the Chinese government might ignore the underlying values of my political ideas in the process.)

The truth of the matter is, I never thought specifically in terms of financial dynamics in February 2009. When it comes to commanding complex subject, my interest in all things artistic means that I tend to think in global terms rather in minute details. However, I have to say that such a financial strategy as interpreted from my words and actions is consistent with my pragmatic philosophy. This is not surprising, considering that it was because of my nice philosophy, or as I put it, “out of a sympathy for the American people”, that I decided to ignore Beijing’s many orders to act in February 2009. I simply did not want to see a direct confrontation between the United States and China.

Moreover, as a pragmatist, I am glad to see that this renminbi strategy provides an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary transitioning to a new global monetary architecture. Just imagine what could have happened, had China destroyed the dollar system in a direct confrontation with the United States. Major wars could have broke out. Even if China starts to move its foreign reserves from dollar assets to gold, that move would have been interpreted as a vote of non-confidence in the dollar and perhaps a signal towards a gold-anchored monetary regime. Much more drastic turmoil would have been expected in the international financial arena. More importantly, when the renminbi becomes a reserve currency, we will have a truly multi-currency monetary regime. When multiple reserve currencies compete with each other and serve as a check and balance against each other, everyone on this planet benefits from the new monetary regime. In the end, this strategy really contributes to an orderly and peaceful transition to a multi-polar world.

For the U.S. political class, it’s important for them to understand that fundamentally, this renminbi strategy is not a bet against America’s future. It is a bet for America’s long term future. Only that they should give up the obsolete idea of a hegemony and embrace a multi-polar world. Think for a moment. The very idea of preserving the United States’ hegemonic power in today’s world means that they have to “take on” a rising China. China would have no choice but to defend itself with all the means it has. Can the U.S. completely destroy China? I believe they can. But only if they are prepared to suffer losses many, many times that of the 9/11, as my previous writings indicated both analytically and metaphorically.

It would be far better for both peoples and for the whole world if the U.S. government adopts a genuinely cooperative approach with China. Unfortunately, the U.S. political class just does not seem to be capable of shedding their narcissistic focus on “us”, the core of its hegemony mentality. It’s precisely because they did not want to give up its hegemony - not even the future prospect of losing its hegemonic power - that the Obama administration did not reciprocate China’s niceness and cooperate. Instead, the Obama administration tried to undermine China in every which way they can, from the A(H1N1) virus last spring, to flirting with the North Korea regime, to his administration’s role in the Urumqi Riot last July, in which 197 people lost their lives and thousands more were injured, etc.

And I believe it was because the Chinese government had lost hope on the Obama administration’s willingness to cooperate that they started to make their moves on the U.S. debt. Now I am able to provide explanations to some of the other observations mentioned in Professor Prasad's testimony. He noted that “during 2009, there was initially some month-to-month whipsawing from net sales to net purchases of U.S. Treasuries”. I believe that was a reflection of the whipsawing of Mr. Obama’s willingness to cooperate with China. “In the latter half of the year, there was a discernible shift away from short-term Treasury bills to longer-term Treasury notes”, Professor Prasad wrote. And I believe that was a reflection of China’s desire to go along with their financial strategy. It looks like China has been on the offensive financially for quite some time. Of course, the ultimate objective of the Chinese government was to force the Obama administration back to the path of genuine dialogue and cooperation. China does not want to “take on” America. On the other hands, when Mr. Obama played his China cards earlier this year, he was merely playing the defensive and trying to create a tough appearance so as to calm the financial markets. I believe Mr. Krugman’s March 15 column partly served the same purpose. Also, I find the U.S. Treasury’s TIC reports, including those revised editions, are not that reliable because they tend to carry political motives in the context of the ongoing “currency war”, as Harvard professor Niall Ferguson put it in his testimony at the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee in March.

Here I would like to go back the U.S. administration’s decision in March 2009 to print a whopping $1.2 trillion new money as it is related to the currency issue at hand and my own understanding of it has deepened in the aftermath of the European sovereign debt crisis.

At the time when I learned Fed’s decision to print money, I only thought of it as the proof that the U.S. government intended to inflate its debt problem away - immediately after they had gotten what they needed from China. Doing research for this update amid the European sovereign debt crisis made me realize that inflation through the monetary expansion of the dollar was actually a potent economic weapon used by the Obama administration on China and other developing economies.

Knowing that it was the Obama administration who triggered the European sovereign debt crisis in the first place, I was naturally surprised to see that the administration including Mr. Obama himself was so active in persuading its European counterparts to come up with a huge rescue package of nearly $1 trillion, much of which was apparently going to come from printing new money. When I read that “the European bailout plan could be too much medicine for an overheating Asia” on the Wall Street Journal and other similar reports, I started to see the connection between printing new (reserve) currency and inflation in other countries. Apparently, the conduit between economies is the so-called “hot money”.

Take the dollar, for example. Normally when a country print more money, the new money is the source of inflation within that country’s economy. However, since the dollar is a reserve currency, it circulates throughout the world. In fact, since the economic growth in the U.S. is so weak and the U.S. interest rates are near zero, money tends to flow to other countries with better growth potentials. With its current monetary policy the U.S. government is essentially exporting inflation worldwide.

Inflation is the one thing the world can do without. I spoke to my mother quite often. Even she felt it in China. In fact, the group of people who are most affected by inflation are people like her - people who are either savers or on fixed income. Are there people who benefited from all these new money getting into the economy? Yes, but very few. And they tend to be those who are closest to the money - the ones who pass them around. That probably explained the huge bonuses Wall Street bankers got in 2009, despite the poor performance of the overall U.S. economy. They were the first ones to handle the money.

Viewed in this context, the Obama administration’s political pressure on renminbi appreciation looked even more ominous. Since his government is the most powerful one in the world, its message carries enormous weight in the international financial markets. Constant public complaints about renminbi exchange rate only created the expectation that its appreciation against the dollar was inevitable, which in turn encouraged more and more hot money flows to China and China only. Of course, this outcome was exactly what the Obama administration had wanted, considering they are fighting a currency war with China. No wonder even my mother has felt the pain of inflation in China. (To protect people’s livelihoods, I think the Chinese government should take decisive actions to stem the “hot money” flow and teach those speculators a harsh lesson. Of course, fundamentally, the U.S. government has a responsibility not to print money at will.)

As such, I really question the motive behind the U.S. monetary policy. I wonder if the Obama administration was using its hegemonic financial power to make people’s lives in other countries even more miserable during this economic hard time. Indeed, people with academic and business experience have also asked similar questions. For example, according to Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post, former IMF chief economist Raghuram Rajan argued that “[keeping U.S. interest rates] at zero is both dangerous and unnecessary, generating little extra output in the United States while creating hot money flows abroad.” And just the other day, I heard a guest on CNBC question why the U.S. administration needed to print so much money.

Will the U.S. pressure on China succeed? Previously I said it’s a unlikely event that China will cave in to the U.S. political pressure on renminbi appreciation. What I actually meant was “not a chance”. Let me explain.

As Professor Nouriel Roubini said, a fall in the value of a dollar essentially shifts America’s losses to its creditor countries. Note that he was speaking of a fall in the value of a dollar against all other currencies. What the U.S. government is pressuring China to do right now is essentially causing a fall in the value of a dollar against the renminbi and against the renminbi only. America’s losses will be born by China and by China only. Sure it will alleviate America’s debt problem and perhaps give the U.S. government room to pile up even more debt. But why would China just write down America’s debt? Let’s not forget while to the United States, U.S. debts were merely IOUs; to China, they and other assets in China’s foreign reserves are the fruit of 30 year’s hard-earned economic achievement by 1.3 Chinese people. (I previously called China’s holding of the U.S. debt as its most important card on the U.S. I did so for lack of better words, not in any way suggesting any equivalence to any of the China cards held by the U.S. government, whether it’s Taiwan arms sale, Dalai meeting, or Google/Internet access, etc. In fact, many of the China cards held by the U.S. government not only lacked legitimacy, they were also created with minimal or no cost. The U.S. political class are really a lot smarter, after all.) With the gigantic size of China’s holding of dollar assets, even a small appreciation of renminbi against the dollar would mean a huge wealth transfer from China to the U.S. And insofar as China’s holding of the U.S. debt is a strategic weapon, renminbi appreciation amounts to unilateral disarmament. I can not imagine any responsible government do that. -- When I saw Mr. Obama suggesting in his press conference at the end of the Nuclear Summit that it’s in China’s interest to appreciate the renminbi against the dollar, I did not know what he was thinking. Did he actually think that all Chinese are stupid like me? (Also worth noting in that video was his facial expression when he mentioned the pending economic bubble in China. His eyes shied away from the camera. He surely knew where China’s inflationary pressure came from.)

Indeed, I believe my stupidity might have been a factor in the U.S. administration’s aggressiveness on this issue. For example, after I started my current hunger strike, Mr. Obama was really desperate and soon all his China cards became muted. However, when it appeared that I was suggesting in my February 24 blog that the renminbi was a trade issue, Washington immediately started to attack China on this issue. On February 25, 15 U.S. Senator sent a letter to Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, pressuring renminbi appreciation. On March 11, Mr. Obama went out himself to pressure renminbi appreciation in a speech at a bank gathering. (I should note that while technically, Mr. Obama’s language did not specifically call on renminbi appreciation against the dollar, everyone understood that’s what he meant.) On March 15, 130 U.S. lawmakers wrote a letter to Secretary Geithner and Secretary Locke, again pressuring renminbi appreciation. This frenzy lasted until just before the Nuclear Summit on April 12-13. Apparently, the U.S. political class sensed China’s plan for the summit and withdrew their attack. When my inaction bungled China’s plan, the political class immediately resumed their attack again, as can be seen from an editorial by the New York Times right after the summit.

It was after I signaled that I finally got the issue in my April 17 blog that the U.S. political class silenced their guns on renminbi. They did not resume their attacks until just about a week ago. These included some harsh words from Secretary Geithner and a proposed legislation in the U.S. Senate. I believe they were largely connected to the development of the Cheonan incident in the Korea Peninsula.

In his congressional testimony, Professor Ferguson invoked U.S. historical experience with Germany and Japan and suggested the U.S. government find the best way to “persuade the Chinese to follow the German and Japanese example.” While it is always wise to learn from history, people should avoid blindly assuming that history will simply repeat itself. As Thomas Friedman said in a recent column, “This time is different”. (I believe Mr. Friedman and many others have access to pirated copies of my writings, constructed through captured keystrokes or some other means. Obviously I am not going to be responsible for any of such copies. In fact, I condemn the piracy of my ideas in the strongest terms, especially considering the difficulties I am having with writing this long update during my fast. I do maintain, however, that every word I ever put on my websites is true to the best of my knowledge at the time of its publication, unless noted otherwise.)

What’s so different this time? Simply put, China is neither Japan, nor Germany. China will never be held captive by the United States. In the final analysis, Germany and Japan caved in to American pressure to appreciate their respective currencies primarily because of their security arrangements with the United States in a Cold War environment. They relied on America’s protection for their security, so to speak. Without such arrangements their national security would have been compromised by threat from the former Soviet bloc. As a Japanese banker complained to Swiss banker and gold experts Ferdinand Lips at the 1999 Annual Meeting of World Gold Council in Paris, as long as the U.S. Pacific Fleet is in Japan to “protect their security”, they are forbidden to buy gold by the U.S. government lest it undermines the dollar.

That’s probably one reason why, while the Cold War had officially ended a long time ago, successive U.S. administrations exhibited the yearning from time to time to try to bring it back, as can be seen from my blogs. The current tense situation at the Korean Peninsula is a result of the latest desperate attempt by the Obama administration with the help of the North Korea regime to try to bring back the Cold War.

I am not suggesting that the Obama administration ordered Pyongyang to attack the South Korea navy ship Cheonan. In fact, I can not imagine that happen. But these two governments had been flirting with each other for a long, long time, as can be seen from my blogs. Just a couple of months before the sinking of Cheonan, Mr. Obama sent a signal to Pyongyang by keeping the North Korea regime off the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. This was after his Secretary of State Hilary Clinton had strongly hinted just the opposite after the North’s nuclear test about one year ago. (I did some online research on Obama’s February 3 decision on Monday, June 14. The next day, Mr. Obama tried to hide this earlier flirtation of his by announcing a renewal of the unilateral U.S. sanctions on Pyongyang, together with some harsh words from the State department, which surely would make some headlines.) Of course, the administration knew that last year’s nuclear test was aimed at China, as well as the test firing of 7 missiles by North Korea. (I should note that the Obama administration has often played a double game on international stage. Take the recently passed Iranian sanction resolution by the U.N. Security Council, for example. While virtually all opinions said that the resolution fell short of the “crippling” standard set by Mr. Obama himself, his administration is now “pushing in the opposite direction against Congress as it crafts U.S. sanctions”, according to the Los Angles Times. In other words, having pressured countries like China and Russia on U.N. sanctions and presumably caused damages in relations between Iran and those countries, Mr. Obama is now sending a friendly signal to Iran. Another case of the American smartness, I guess.)

As usual, I am probably the last person to have learned the truth of Cheonan sinking. At the time when it happened, I felt it was a serious incident. After all, Cheonan was a war ship and 46 South Korean sailors had needlessly perished. I was even more puzzled that the Obama administration seemed to be playing down the incident, as can be seen from statements made by senior administration officials right after the incident. It was after the Nuclear Summit that I started to piece things together.

First I learned that I was ridiculed for not having learned some kind of “lesson”. This nut apparently came from a column by Jeffery Simpson of the Globe and Mail on the same day when Thomas Friedman downgraded me from a “fat lady” to a “baby” right after the summit. Then, barely within 24 hours of the Yushu earthquake in China, BBC World mounted a fierce attack on China for allegedly not having learned its “lesson” in rescue efforts from last year’s earthquake. (Which was totally groundless and shameful on the part of those armchair warriors at the BBC, especially considering the remoteness and the many other harsh conditions at Yushu. I believe BBC just wanted to stir up some water for the benefit of Dalai, who was still pretending that he did not know my fast.) It was then that I started to wonder if I had missed another opportunity - around the time of the Cheonan sinking - to be brought out. This was logical, considering that China had been frustrated by the North Korea regime for some time. Given the many hard truth I had spelt out in my blogs on North Korea, it’s quite possible that China might have wanted to take some kind of action on its nuclear-armed “ally” in connection to my becoming public. Then North Korea sank the Cheonan in order to disrupt China’s plan. To make clear which side it’s on, a state-run newspaper in Pyongyang published an editorial calling for better relations with the U.S. right after I had bungled China’s plan for the Nuclear Summit.

I believe there was another expectation that I would publish this update on Monday, May 17. When that did not happen, Mr. Obama took the initiative to personally phone his South Korea counterpart on the Cheonan issue. If you paid attention to the media, you would have noticed that it was around that day when the media coverage of the Cheonan incident started to pick up momentum in the United States - almost two months after the fact. Mr. Obama must have thought that finally he had found a straw to strike back at China.

And what a straw the Obama administration has made it to be. This time, Mr. Obama is finally able to launch his offensive is on his favourite front - the military front. Senior administration officials, including Defence Secretary Robert Gates and Mr. Obama’s China advisor in the White House, Jeffrey Bader, all came out to make a news of the Taiwan arms sale. This was after their long silence on the sale since I started my hunger strike in mid February. In fact, just a couple of weeks before South Korea released their report on the Cheonan incident, Mr. Obama’s ambassador to China, Mr. Jon Huntsman, Jr., had acknowledged that the Obama administration had tramped on China’s core national interests in the past few months and suggested both sides to treat it as history and move on. (I could not find the original English report, possibly from a Salt Lake city area media outlet. So I can not be sure of the exact language he used.)

And then, there is Mr. Obama’s decision to send the U.S. aircraft carrier USS George Washington to the Yellow Sea for a joint military exercise with South Korea. Again, I don’t know what he is thinking. For those who don’t know where the Yellow Sea is, just imagine if China sends its warships to the Gulf of Mexico for a military exercise. Only that the U.S. capital and the White House have to be much closer to the coast, given Beijing’s proximity to the Yellow Sea. If Mr. Obama really wants to heed my advice, I’ll simply say: Just don’t do it. It’s just not cool to pick a fight with China with the help of a regime like North Korea.

That development aside, I think Mr. Ferguson or anyone else who secretly espouses the hope that China will one day follow the German and Japanese example to appreciate the renminbi under the U.S. political pressure will be sorely disappointed. Actually, The only slightly better chance the Obama administration has in getting China to appreciate its currency against the dollar is through seedier means that they or their predecessor had tried before. For example, they could try to bribe key Chinese politicians as they did to me last year. But that’s going to be very risky and can backfire big time. He can hope that the top Chinese leadership will have another political infighting so that he can exploit it, as both he and his predecessor had done. But that would be an extremely faint hope, as the balance of power in Beijing in recent months has been rapidly tilting to the side of President Hu, who is now very secure in his position. The reason President Hu was willing to personally bring me out to the public during the Nuclear Summit in Washington was, I believe, that I held the truth on Sino-U.S. nuclear relations. Which was, sadly, just one of the reasons why I had to be brought out before China could start its reform. Note that previously I mentioned the overt militaristic tone and posture in Mr. Obama’s spoken response to my Haiti earthquake blog on January 14. It’s not just empty rhetoric in Mr. Obama’s speech. There was actually a veiled threat as China do have peacekeeping soldiers at the U.N. mission in Haiti. Because of Mr. Obama’s such tendency to escalate conflicts to a military level, China must have felt it important to get the nuclear truth out in order to deter the Obama administration from such escalations.

Two observations further confirmed my reasoning. On Monday May 3 when I was expected to publish this update and be brought out to the public, Secretary Clinton made an announcement at the U.N. on their previously secret number of nuclear warheads. Also, during April’s nuclear events, both Mr. Obama and his Ambassador to the U.N., Dr. Susan Rice, repeatedly boasted that the U.S. and Russia together accounted for 90 percent of world’s total warheads. What they were really implying was that China’s less than 10 percent share would not be a match to the U.S. arsenal, unless, of course, China disclosed its number.

I do not know how many warheads China has. And I do not know what’s the significance of disclosing or not disclosing one’s nuclear arsenal. The nuclear truth that I hold that there is an (asymmetrical) nuclear balance between the U.S. and China is based on political analysis, not military analysis. To me, it’s a testament to human stupidity and human madness that the U.S. and Russia had produced around 10,000 nuclear warheads each, which could apparently destroy the earth many times over. Of course together these two countries could account for 90 percent of the world’s total. But what’s the big deal? As far as I understand it from my research many years ago, you do not need anywhere near 10,000 warheads to have an (asymmetrical) nuclear balance. That’s not to say the 90 percent statistic was so obviously obsolete.

Finally, a few words on rebalancing the global economy. Every country has a responsibility to do its share in the rebalancing. And a lot of countries are indeed doing it right now. It is not an easy task for many of them. Serious, sometimes painful reforms will have to be introduced in some countries. Yet the one country who often lodges the loudest complaints about other country’s problems is the one who is doing the least to correct the global imbalance. And that country is the United States. The unsustainable level of the U.S. debt is the biggest problem in global imbalance.

When I first read Paul Krugman’s October 23, 2009 column, I already knew what the U.S.’s problem was. But I am not a person who points figure at others. Instead, I used Mr. Krugman’s unfair criticism to prod China to carry out necessary reforms and to do its part in the global rebalancing. You all know what happened next. The U.S. political class took my niceness as a weakness and attacked.

The plain truth is that debt and credit are like twins. For every dollar that the U.S. borrows, there is a corresponding dollar saved somewhere on the earth. When the U.S. government keeps raising its debt ceilings, other countries will have no choice but to lend more and more money to the U.S. (That’s the real truth about the so-called “Dollar Trap”. China’s venerability to the Dollar Trap was also exacerbated by the U.S. refusal to sell many other categories of the dollar assets, such as UNOCAL.) And the world as a whole becomes more and more out of balance in the process. What’s worse, the U.S. has no intention to rebalance its economy, even right now. And that’s the real problem.

I had long along recognized that on the Chinese side, unleashing the potential of its domestic demands was the solution to the problem of international trade imbalance. And the best way to do so is to improve the wage and benefit of the Chinese workers, which consist of the vast majority of the Chinese people. Indeed, the first time I pointed to this direction was some four years ago, in May 2006, in a passing observation in my blog on that year’s Canadian General Election.

The current 5-year plan, which emphasizes the development of rural areas, is a smart social-economic policy modification aimed at attacking the greatest inequality in China, i.e., the gap between cities and countryside. This policy also makes sound strategic sense because only when the living standard of the vast majority of Chinese people improves, can domestic demand be truly stimulated and international trade surpluses be fundamentally reduced.

If the successive U.S. administration thought that trade imbalance was such a problem for them, they would have embraced my idea a long time ago. Alas, that’s not what happened. Indeed, I found I appeared to be the only person who advocated the kind of economic and political reform in China to correct the imbalance. Not only that, I found the Western mainstream media seemed to deliberately ignore the plight of Chinese workers in recent years. Knowing how the media worked here, I got the feeling that it was Washington’s will to keep the current imbalance going for as long as possible. When economists like Paul Krugman deliberately ignore factors such as Chinese wage decline (measured against GDP), the accompanying private consumption decline (also measured against GDP), or the huge environmental damage that is not reflected in the price of Chinese exports in his discussion of trade imbalance, I have to ask: Where is their conscience?

Secretary of State Hilary Clinton once described or suggested that American consumers’ contribution to the world economy was a “burden” in a TV interview. But if you watch the video carefully, you’ll see that she herself was apparently not quite convinced by her argument. Let’s face it. Working is a burden, consuming is not. If consuming is such a burden, why not let other people around the world share some of that burden?

As lately as in March 2009, I pointed out that a reorientation towards nurturing domestic consumption in China’s economic development necessitates reforms in China’s political superstructure in the second instalment of my Democratization series. Mr. Obama’s response in his Saturday video address the next day revealed again that, despite their hypocritical claims to the contrary, the U.S. government really did not want to correct the global economic imbalance and in particular, the imbalance between U.S. and China, or to see China becoming democratic. Mr. Obama’s message was also augmented by his economic advisor, Larry Summers, in an interview with the Financial Times around the same time. And you can find other such examples in my blogs.

Instead, out of their own greediness, they wanted to prolong the existing economic arrangement for as long as possible, because in aggregate, all the U.S. government had to do in the current economic arrangement was either issuing more U.S. debt or printing more dollars in exchange for the real wealth created by China and many other countries with real labour. This is a happy state of affair for the United States if they can get away with the problems associated with borrowing too much. And based on their historical experience, Washington probably think that they can indeed do that. After all, since former President Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, the dollar has lost 95 percent of its value and yet is still the hegemonic currency. The political class in Washington probably are looking forward to another 95 percent devaluation in the next 40 years. And then more. After all, the value of a dollar can never come down to zero. Is that what the U.S. political class has in mind for the new “American Century”?

I should note that while China, with its massive holding of dollar assets, is a major victim of that devaluation, the biggest victim of that “theft by stealth” is the future generations of American people. The reckless and immoral borrowing by the current U.S. administrations amounts to a huge wealth transfer from future generations to the current one.

Someone has got to stop the madness.

Update (20100705):

Although very few western media has reported on the tension in and around Korea Peninsula since my last update, I have been able to follow the development mostly from reports coming out from that region.

Repeatedly postponing its exercise in the Yellow Sea, the almighty aircraft carrier USS George Washington looked a bit scared. And I believe my straightforward advice to Mr. Obama might have something to do with it. -- Apparently, I still has some support in the People’s Liberation Army. While initially keeping its silence, PLA announced a navy exercise in the East China Sea - widely interpreted as a response to the U.S. exercise - after my update. A senior PLA leader also stated publicly that PLA very much opposed to the planned U.S. military exercise in the Yellow Sea.

Politically, if that’s the case, I am more than willing to be considered for the 5th generation again. I have no bigger wish than to see China start its democratization process based on my own ideas. The support of an institution as important as the PLA would be highly valuable to that end.

Furthermore, I am making the following suggestions to whatever planning the PLA may already has:

If and when the U.S. military makes an announcement to send USS George Washington or any other U.S. warships to the Yellow Sea (or any other waters considered to be too close to China’s core national interests) for a military exercise, PLA should make an announcement for a long-range missile exercise in a pre-determined area of waters off the U.S. west coast;
If and when U.S. warships proceed with its military exercise, PLA should immediately proceed with its long-range missile exercise;
If and when, with the help of the North Korea regime, the U.S. military exercise turns into a real fight, PLA should attempt to destroy or neutralize all parties involved.

Now, as you all know, I hate wars. Indeed, I have always tried my best to defuse tensions and avoid conflicts ever since I was dragged into politics almost 5 years ago. As a simple guy myself, I believe a lot of Chinese would do the same things if put into my situation. However, not wanting to seek a fight or even actively avoiding conflicts does not mean we are afraid of a fight. Underlying all those niceness and tolerance, Mr. Obama should know, there is a limit. Unfortunately, it looks like Mr. Obama is determined to cross that limit.

It is therefore vitally important for the world to know how Sino-U.S. relations get the point where they are today. For that, and no less importantly, to reveal the successive U.S. administrations’ role in the cover-up of the murders of those two innocent angles and to seek accountability in the torture, savage attack and attempted assassination of me, I shall remain in Canada so that the complete story of the U.S. involvement will be told to the world.

Indeed, an important calculation in Mr. Obama’s tendency to bring my story to a military conclusion was exactly to make the so many truths in my blogs the casualty of a war, as I posited before and indeed, suggested as lately as June 6 by the title of Thomas Friedman’s column, The Ballgame and the Sideshow, days after the Obama administration made a big fanfare of planning to send USS George Washington to the Yellow Sea.

Of course, my story is not just some kind of sideshow, as the Obama administration hopes it to be. It is the real thing because it is true and truth will always prevail in the end. Specifically my story revealed, to borrow a phrase of the last U.S. secretary of state, the “fundamental character” of the U.S. government. Which is that it is a totalitarian democracy, i.e., a democracy at home and a dictatorship aboard. This totalitarian democracy is in stark contrast with the total democracy I proposed for China as China would apply the same set of values both at home and aboard. The unyieldingly hostile attitude of the Obama administration towards China ever since taking office was largely a reflection of its desire to kill that new model of democracy in its embryo.

Mr. Obama may think that he can easily kill that embryonic democracy. After all, the U.S. government has always operated more or less as a dictatorship internationally, backed to a significant extent with its military power. However, Mr. Obama should realize that time has changed. Gunboat diplomacy is just so archaic, especially on China, in the 21st century. While China does not seek a confrontation with the U.S., I am confident it will prove to be a worthy opponent if the U.S. insists on picking a fight. And the United States will prove to be, well, a paper tiger.

P.S. (20100708):

I am embarrassed. I forgot that every one of Chinese leadership had already decided that I am no politician material. Yesterday’s Internet article by Xian Yan (writing for President Hu Jintao) reminded me that performing political theatre is a requirement for politicians, echoing an earlier article by Li Yang (writing for former President Jiang Zemin) who said that every good politician is a good actor.

Just forget about this update.

Update 20100731:

This is ugly. In the aftermath of a huge explosion caused by an apparent industrial accident in the city of Nanjing a couple of days ago, a high-ranking government official was caught stopping a TV reporter: “What’s your name? Give me your phone number. -- Who told you to broadcast live?”

Reading this news, I am reminded of an earlier incident where another official from Hubei province snatched the recorder from a reporter simply because she asked the “wrong” question at the sideline of the annual congress in Beijing.

These two incidents painted a vivid picture of the arrogance of unchecked power exerted by public officials in China. Apparently, such arrogance is prevalent and the injustices it causes take place everyday. Desperate petitioners are labelled mental patients. Local governments build up lavish offices while the people they are supposed to serve live in poverty. Reporters who dare to expose truth risk losing their jobs or worse, being thrown into jail. With huge potential of personal benefit coming from being in such unaccountable governments, no wonder the best and the brightest in China are attracted to “public service”.

Which brings me to an excellent article I read as part of my research into the currency issue. As you probably already know, the article is titled “America’s Head Servant: The PRC’s Dilemma in the Global Crisis”, by Indiana University professor Ho-fung Hung.

Frankly, many of the findings in Professor Hung’s articles were not new to me. Indeed, I have been trying to bring awareness of them in my blogs for years. Still, it’s good to see some serious academic efforts were made to reaffirm the obvious truth. Like I asked in my above update with respect to Chinese wages, the real question is why so many economists choose to ignore this factor in their “studies” of Chinese trade imbalance with the U.S. When one economist ignores it, one can say it is an oversight. When 100 economists ignore it, it has to be a question of conscience.

That Professor Hung’s article was not published in a mainstream academic journal was probably another indication that it did not fit into the prevailing ideology. And that ideology was primarily to serve Washington’s economic interest by holding China and other East Asian countries subservient, as Professor Hung showed in his article. And it is fundamentally an internal political problem for China to break away from Washington’s “hostage” as the vast majority of working men and women do not have a voice in the current political system. That’s why the Obama administration does not want to see political reform in China.

It is high time for Chinese political class to realize this and start political reform so as to steer China’s economic development towards domestic consumption and to alleviate the greatest injustice in China - the economic injustice. Of course, the Chinese political class will have to make a self-sacrifice. But when they make themselves true servants of Chinese people, they will not only bring China’s development towards a more sustainable path, they will also make a significant contribution towards restoring global balance and global aesthetics.

P.S. (20100803):

Suffice it to say, I do not agree with everything in Professor Hung’s article. Strictly speaking, the only thing I completely agree with is my own writing. Specifically in this case, I think Professor Hung’s positive reference to Cheng Li’s characterization of CCP being consisted of a “populist faction” and an “elitist faction” is misinformed.

I haste to point this out after I re-read Professor Hung’s article last night and found out that he thought Xi Jinping - heir apparent to President Hu Jintao, whom he regarded as the leader of the populist faction - was the leading figure of the elitist faction. Considering my praise of President Hu for emphasizing rural economic development in May 2006 - a praise that was a little too generous, I should repeat, in order to shore up his image in the aftermath of his poor visit to the White House - my above strong recommendation of Professor Hung’s article might have created the wrong impression that I wanted to inject myself into Chinese politics again and to perhaps challenge Mr. Xi as the No. 5.

That would have not been further from my intention. In fact, as I said many times before, I would much prefer not to have a career in politics. And I agree with everyone that I am no politician material. It’s just that reminded constantly by all those ugliness in governance both inside and outside China, I grew more and more impatient to see China embark on the path of democratization. In short, all I wanted to say in this update as a simple guy was that there is a urgent need for China to shake off Obama administration’s hindrance and start political reform now.

Update 20100816:

It’s time. Isn’t it?

I started to sense on Sunday that the time had come. Waking up that morning, I heard a report about a bizarre incident near Prime Minister’s residence. The suspect is now under custody and the development of this staged bizarrerie is likely to be utilized by the Harper government as another distraction to what is already billed as a “sideshow” of my story - amid the “ballgame” geared to take place in East Asia this week. -- Note that I have recently mentioned in one of the above updates a couple of similar incidents in Ottawa when writing about the supposed failed terrorist attack at the Times Square in New York on May 1.

Then, taking a look at the weekend edition of the Globe and Mail, I first noticed on its front page a dispatch on the early history of China’s nuclear program. The true purpose of running the piece at this time was revealed, however, by an accompanying illustration titled “The world’s arsenal: estimated nuclear warheads in the countries known to possess atomic weapons”, which was to reinforce Mr. Obama’s recent boast that U.S. and former Soviet Union together accounted for 90 percent of the world total arsenal. Flipping through to the paper’s Comment Section, I saw Mr. Jeffrey Simpson not only perpetuating the myth about the rational behind Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s prorogation etcetera, but also taking a swipe at my criticism of “the incestuous relationship between Washington and Wall Street in the underbelly of the American system of government”.

On television news channels, images of the Obama family happily vacationing at the Gulf were everywhere during the weekend. However, I was reminded, first of all, that not long ago Mr. Obama had to spent his birthday without any of his family members, and secondly, his elder daughter Miss Malia Obama was still reportedly in a summer camp and therefore could not be with the family. I guess she must have read my open letter of last year and formed her independent judgment.

Earlier, I had been struck by the odd fact that on Friday, both Dow Jones and Nasdaq indices had declined by some 16 points. Knowing how political the U.S. financial markets were, I sensed that the time would be starting today, the 16th of the month. (Indeed, not only was the rise and fall of U.S. stock markets connected to my story sometimes, occasionally the exact amount of index’s movement appeared to be calibrated to send out a particular political message, as I observed before. Apparently, the financial markets fear the prospect of an imminent military conflict between U.S. and China.)

The “ballgame” in East Asia aside, to further minimize the fallout of the real thing of my story, Mr. Obama has entered a campaign mode so as to personally mount an offensive with the loudest speaker in the world. After I heard him picking up his old message of “hope”, a profound sense of irony and disbelief engulfed me. It reminded me how I was fooled by his appearance and rhetoric during his presidential campaign and my incarceration in the mental hospital fighting for justice for those two innocent angels. Apparently to him, at this particular point in time, it’s critical that he appears to be for the rights of minorities. That’s also why he injected himself into the ground zero mosque controversy last Friday (and had to backtrack on Saturday), similar to his deliberate “acted stupidly” comments on the Gates-Crawley row last summer, as I wrote about before.

Indeed, the “ballgame” in East Asia is already underway today. U.S. and South Korea started a huge joint military exercise in and around Korea Peninsula, including in the Yellow Sea area considered sensitive by China. With tens of thousands troops participating, it would be ridiculous to suggest that the exercise was only a response to the sinking of Cheonan by North Korea. Even a similar smaller-scale exercise last month was considered excessive.

Moreover, USS George Washington had reportedly sneaked into South China Sea last week, ostensibly at the invitation of Vietnam, which has conflicting territorial claims with China. (This was a continuation of a blatant attempt on the part of the Obama administration to instigate fresh conflict with China, especially considering China has achieved a lot in building up cooperative relations with its ASEAN neighbours in recent years, including a framework agreement with relevant countries on cooperatively and peacefully resolving the conflicts. China’s restraint is particularly evident with respect to Vietnam as - believe this - the disputed area controlled by Vietnam is a whopping 40 times that by China. Of course, most Westerner would not know this, especially given that now the Obama administration has waded into this area and the inherent bias in western media. For example, reading a recent editorial by The Financial Times, one would come away with the impression that Secretary Hilary Clinton’s injection of the United States into the South China Sea on July 23 was in response to a navy exercise by the PLA when in fact it was the other way around.) A joint U.S.-Vietnam navy exercise was probably going to take place this week as well.

Given the highly charged atmosphere in the Korea Peninsula, it seems inevitable that a war will break out. Considering the U.S. military activities in the South China Sea, I think the Obama administration is in fact preparing for an all-out war with China.

I had long warned the world of just such a situation in my blogs, with increasing clarity on the dire consequences, not only for China and the U.S., but also for the world at large. The mere fact is, as I pointed out above, when China is cornered like this, it has no choice but to defend itself with all the means it has. In fact, given the considerable advantage the U.S. has in conventional weaponry, China is much more likely to take the conflict to a nuclear level of a mutually assured destruction. That’s why I had tried my personal best to avoid such a situation, even if it meant I had to go against my personal wish to stay out of politics.

Unfortunately it did not work out. And we see that Mr. Obama is insisting on having a confrontation with China. Why is he doing this? I think first of all, he is making a huge gamble that the confrontation will not rise to a nuclear level. And secondly, he is making a calculation that by sacrificing USS George Washington and perhaps some other U.S. war ships, he can find support in public opinion of an excuse to write off some of the U.S. debt held by China, therefore alleviate the biggest U.S. strategic weakness vis-à-vis China. (Indeed, there had been multiple incidences of chatters out of Washington during the development of my story about writing off U.S. agency debts held by China. And not surprisingly, similar chatter can be heard right now in the U.S. capital.) And lastly but not least, such a confrontation gives him the perfect opportunity to brush aside as much as possible the real thing of my story as it is often said that truth is the first casualty of a war.

May God save the truth, and us all.

Update 20100905:

I don’t know about you, but I have mostly enjoyed my summer. For one thing, I did not have to starve myself and my whole life felt a lot more normal. For another, I do live in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, especially during the summer.

Except for one thing - the Pakistan flood. Many a time I had wanted very much to say a few words. Because of my recent bad experience with the attack by Mr. Obama on my Haiti earthquake blog, I sat out for fear of being dragged into politics again. That’s also why I had kept my writings to a minimum. The few updates I posted in the past couple of months were considered either absolutely necessary (on war and peace) or consistent with my role (encouraging political reform in China). After all, everyone knows I am a 17.

Which brings me to two recent commentaries by Radio Free Asia. Both commentaries are about political reform in China. One declares that the difference between President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao is finally out in the open. The other warns people not to raise their expectations and predicts that President Hu will not announce political reform during the 30th anniversary of Shenzhen Special Economic Zone on Monday.

Now, as you all know, I have mentioned RFA quite a few times in my previous blogs. I did not get into the details because, frankly, I just did not have that amount time and energy to do so. Suffice it to say, RFA has been following my story every step of the way and conducting a disinformation campaign on behalf of its sponsor - the U.S. government.

Here lies a critical distinction between RFA and other western media. While there is an inherent bias against China in much of the western media, they remain accountable to their readers, mostly in the West but increasingly around the globe. As such, one can expect the bias gradually lessens under the watchful eye of their readers over time. On the other hand, almost no one in the West read or listen to RFA propaganda, which target surreptitiously on only a selected few countries, including China. That makes it, frankly, accountable to no one but the U.S. government. Indeed, despite its claim to be a “private”, “non-profit” “media” organization, similar to the Voice of America, RFA is required by law (U.S. International Broadcasting Act of 1994) to advance “the goals of U.S. foreign policy”. Simply put, as a tool of the U.S. government, RFA’s mission is to serve the U.S. interest, its media cover notwithstanding.

Knowing this background, it is then easy to see these two commentaries are really a reflection of “the goals of the U.S. foreign policy” with respect to China’s embryonic democracy. As my previous blogs showed, the Obama administration does not really want to see political reform in China and failing that, they want to create as much confusion and chaos as possible by exploiting and galvanizing whatever difference might exist in Chinese society, or worse, by instigating conflicts among Chinese people.

Frankly, the Obama administration’s fancy that President Hu will not personally announce political reform is a little outdated. The momentum has been with those for political reform in recent months among Chinese leadership. As I pointed out before, “China has been for some time poised to start … political reform”. Remember, the top Chinese political leaders do practise what they call “collective leadership”. Whatever the announcement President Hu makes tomorrow, it should be viewed as a reflection of that collective wisdom, in addition to President Hu’s own critical judgement.

In fact, the main obstacle against China’s moving ahead with political reform in recent months has been the Obama administration, backed largely with its military power. On that front, I should congratulate President Hu for the major diplomatic victory with respect to North Korea last month. This diplomatic success greatly reduced the likelihood of a direct military conflict with the U.S. Even the South Korea President praised Mr. Kim’s visit to China as it looked that the North is finally willing to consider opening itself up for economic reform as well.

Still, I should warn the road to democracy will be a long, treacherous one, perhaps encompassing multiple generations of Chinese leadership. Externally, the Obama administration will continue to put pressure on China, not only by creating and spreading disinformation through RFA and other agents, but also by direct military posturing. China should call on the world’s attention to guard against the danger of the U.S. attempting to solve its economic problems with military means. As George Soros said: “A declining superpower losing both political and economic dominance but still preserving military supremacy is a dangerous mix.” Internally, the biggest challenge will be to educate Chinese people on what it means to be democratic citizens. After all, democracy is an attitude, a culture, a way of life. (If I have time, I will try to write something on forming queues and democracy.)

As such, gradualism in implementing political reform is critical. Fortunately, Chinese government already has valuable experience in successfully implementing economic reform. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Just like Deng Xiaoping’s economic pragmatism started from Shenzhen and other SEZ’s, I have great hope on President Hu and his team to start political reform tomorrow. And I am confident that they will be able to deal with Obama administration’s hindrance effectively and bring gradual and orderly transformation to China’s political system for the benefits of not only China, but also the whole world in terms of more balanced and more sustainable economic development.

P.S. (20100917):

I was disappointed, obviously, at the Shenzhen meeting presided by President Hu on September 6. At first, I thought the absence of an announcement of political reform was a result of timing consideration by the Chinese leadership. Reading the latest Internet article by Xian Yan (writing for President Hu), however, I realized that I underestimated Mr. Hu’s desire to maintain the political status quo in China. In fact, I felt that, once again, I was too naïve when it came to politics.

I believe the best guarantee of a balanced economic development - or any other balanced government policy, for that matter - is a balanced political superstructure. China’s current political system is anything but balanced as the vast majority of Chinese peasants and salaried workers have a very limited capacity to affect government policy. That’s the fundamental reason why China’s economic development is unbalanced. Sure, Chinese government has been very skilful in anticipating and preventing economic problems over the years. But an inherently unbalanced economic system can not be sustainable in the long run. Indeed, the main reason that China’s economic expansion has lasted so long is because of the unique characteristic of Chinese economy, chiefly its large population and vast land area. As such, to be smug about China’s economic success or to suggest that the current Chinese system can serve as a model for other developing countries is just unwarranted.

Of course, I agree with Mr. Xian’s analysis on some of the advantages of China’s current economic system and we should strive to retain as many of them as possible in the gradual reform ahead. But even leaving some of the basic fairness issues aside, the disadvantages of the current system have far outweighed those advantages. Take for example the horrendous problem of rampant corruption and unaccountability inherent in the current system that was not mentioned in his article. How many billions of losses they bring to the Chinese economy every year? This is not to mention the increasingly strong influences on the economy by those Special Interest Groups.

Let’s face it. Using China’s economic success to justify the political status quo is not new. Unwilling to sacrifice CPC’s hold on power is probably the real reason why President Hu did not want to start political reform in China. I can only urge him and perhaps others to make that sacrifice. The sooner, the better.

Update 20100919:

“How low can it go?”

That’s the August 25 headline of BBC America on BBC World News, a program that often tracks and signals the development of my story for “people in the loop”. Ostensibly describing the U.S. economy, I believe the headline was in fact a muffled outrage at the Obama administration for orchestrating the Manila hostage crisis just two days before. Eight innocent Hong Kong tourists, including three with dual Canadian citizenship, were killed in the horrible violence broadcasted on television across Asia.

Some Chinese media reports have speculated that the postponement of the 30th anniversary celebration of Shenzhen S.E.Z., originally scheduled for August 26, was due to the Manila hostage crisis, which plunged the whole neighbouring Hong Kong S.A.R. into grief. Indeed, that was precisely the major motive of the Obama administration, consistent with its “foreign policy goals” with respect to China’s impending democratization as it looked like that President Hu would announce political reform in China.

The Obama administration had other motives as well:

Try to create frictions and strain relations between China and Philippines, an important ASEAN country, by stirring up people’s emotions. Note Philippines foreign minister had said on August 9 that South China Sea area did not need the U.S. to get involved, in an apparent rebuke to Secretary Hilary Clinton’s speech at a regional conference on July 23.
Note that the title of this long-running blog is Truth and Justice, which is in fact also at the very heart of my six year journey. By deliberately creating additional casualties of innocent people in connection to the perhaps final development of my story, the Obama administration not only showed off its capacity to be blasphemous, it also presented me, and indeed, the Chinese government, a difficult challenge on how to handle the aftermath of the bloodshed.

Overall, I think the Chinese government has handled it well. Postponing the Shenzhen celebration showed their respect to the feelings of Hong Kong people. They also emphasized to the Philippines government on the importance of bringing out the truth, which is at the foundation of any justice for the victims of this horrible violence. For me, I was naturally outraged, too. The BBC headline exactly captured my disbelief. But careful examination of the incident made me feel that the highest level of the Philippines government might not necessarily have been involved. What likely might have happened was that the U.S. government, through its “corrupting influence”, pulled the strings on certain sectors of the Philippines authority or the Philippines society to make the massacre happen. As such, I also felt that it was utmost important to get to the truth.

That’s why I have held my anger and kept my silence. If either the Chinese government or me had made the suspicion about the U.S. government’s role - based on political logic - known to the public, it would have only added to the public emotions in the region and very possibly been counterproductive to the efforts to find the truth. Now that the Philippines government has finished their investigation and a copy of the report has been reportedly shared with the Chinese government before its public release next week, I felt it’s time for me to write about it and other international development in the region as well.

The other development is the heightened tension between China and Japan in the past couple of weeks over the Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea. I chose to write about it together with the Manila hostage tragic because they shared a common factor - the “corrupting influence” of the U.S. government. Of course, there is a critical distinction between these two developments in that the Japanese government appeared to be a willing proxy of the U.S. government in its dealings with China. I am especially disheartened to see today that the Japanese government had extended the jailing of the captain of the Chinese fishing boat for another ten day. As a former prisoner, I know how humiliating it must have been for the captain, especially when the circumstances were unjust.

People should know that it was right after my August 16 update that the issue of Diaoyu Islands started to flare up in Japan. My update that day essentially defused a potentially volatile situation in the Korea Peninsula (I should also note that it was also right after my update that the Obama administration suddenly decided to restart the Israel Palestinian peace negotiations) and caught the Obama administration red-handed with its attempt to write off Chinese holdings of U.S. government agency debts by instigating direct military confrontation with China. Perhaps knowing that they could no longer use direct military confrontation to achieve its objective, the Obama administration decided to instead use Japan - its major proxy in the region - to instigate conflicts with China. That’s why we saw on August 18 Japanese media report about a joint U.S.-Japan military exercise near Diaoyu Islands planned for later this year.

At the mean time, Philip Crowley, the spokesperson for the U.S. State department, made some comments that were particularly illustrative. While paying lip service to peacefully resolving the conflict, when pressed by Japanese reporters, Mr. Crowley admitted the U.S.-Japan security treaty would apply to the disputed islands. In other words, the U.S. will be on the Japanese side in a military conflict with China over the islands. With this open military threat against China, no wonder Japan has adopted a much more aggressive stance this time around.

Knowing this background, people would wonder if the whole incident was deliberately staged by the Japanese government. Indeed, how could a small fishing trawler allegedly seek to smash itself into two much larger Japanese Coast Guard patrol vessels? Besides, a cursory look at the Japanese actions in the past couple of decades revealed that they appeared to have a step by step approach to encroach on Chinese sovereignty over these islands. It appears their real goal this time around is to put the Chinese captain on trial in a Japanese court. Of course, the detention of the Chinese fishing boat in Chinese waters is completely illegal, let along any trial.

What is the U.S. government in this for, by providing military threat against China? Alas, the Chinese renminbi has been rising against the dollar like crazy since September 10, three days after the staged incident. Perhaps not coincidentally, by the end of last week, Mr. Crowley seemed to have adopted a softer tone towards China. It appears that the Obama administration is using the old empirist trick to play Japan and China against each other in order to collect rents from both of them. Indeed, on a local Chinese TV talk show last Friday, a guest - who I believe is a U.S. or Canadian government agent - likened the Diayu Islands to a used antiseptic pad left by the U.S. government in the body of Asia.

Sadly, compared with the Manila hostage crisis, I found Chinese government’s handling of the dispute awfully insufficient. It appeared all they were doing was verbal protest. The government even suppressed the rightly-felt anger of its own people over the Japanese aggression. This, together with my dissatisfaction with Chinese government’s handing of the economy, particularly the renminbi issue, made me decide to declare my candidacy for the No. 5 again. The best way to push for political reform and a more balanced and more sustainable economic development in China is from inside the government. (Of course, I still would like to have the opportunity to bring my personal cause to a speedy conclusion.)

The way I see it, the United States has already threatened war with China by committing to apply the U.S.-Japan security treaty with respect to Diaoyu Islands, claimed and used by China centuries ago. As I said before, not wanting to seek a fight or even actively avoiding a conflict does not mean one is afraid of a fight. The current situation calls for an appropriate military posturing. China should adopted a particularly firm stand as these islands bear the scars of earlier Japanese militarism.

As for the wider relations with the United States, I have always advocated for a genuine cooperative relationship. However, that kind of relationship is only possible if the U.S. is also willing to work towards the same goal. The actions of the U.S. government in the past few months demonstrated their intention is to force China to solve its debt problems, one way or another. If the U.S. has no intention to cooperate with China, China does not have any reason to maintain any cooperative relationship with the U.S. Instead of caving in to the manufactured pressure by the U.S. and Japan to appreciate the renminbi, I’ll say let’s start with dumping the U.S. debt now.

P.S. (20100921):

Well, well. So much for putting myself out there to try to affect Chinese government policy. Look at the renminbi exchange rate: one historical high after another. And the Obama administration is still not satisfied. No wonder the expectation now is that it will soon reach 6.5.

I am very, very sad, folks. I wish more people had the opportunity to read my blogs. I am sure they would have agreed with my ideals of the world.

Update 20101006:

So, it looked like that the staged incident near Diaoyu Islands on September 7, which led to the row between Japan and China, was timed to add to the political pressure on China coming from the U.S. Capitol Hill. As soon as the U.S. Congress started its fall session on September 13, the Chinese currency would become the punch bag for U.S. politicians from both side of the aisle, first in a letter signed by 93 of them on September 14, then in the scheduled House hearings on September 15-16. Mr. Obama himself piled on with his campaign speeches the following week. This coordinated offensive on the renminbi culminated in the passage of The Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act (H.R. 2378) by the House last Wednesday, September 29.

I really don’t have much to say about the bill except that it is patently protectionist and illegal under WTO rules. The mere fact that Mr. Obama, through his spokesman, had dodged the question on whether he would sign the bill into law if and when it passed the Senate, already spoke volume about the hollowness of such a bill.

What got my attention from my research is that it appeared election seasons in the U.S. in recent years have always seen the Chinese currency become a campaign issue, used by the American political class to divert attention away from the real problem in the U.S. economy, i.e., the structural imbalance between the manufacturing sector and the financial sector, as I alluded to before.

Why does the American political class tend to make an issue out of the renminbi during elections? Apparently, it is about winning votes by subjecting the public to “very superficial arguments”, to borrow a phrase from Warren Buffett, especially since economic matters are difficult for average person to grapple with. And the demagoguery they are making right now goes like what Secretary Tim Geithner said at the recent House hearings: A supposedly undervalued renminbi “makes it more difficult for goods and services produced by American workers to compete”. In other words, if we only can force China to appreciate its currency, we can sell more goods and services to them and therefore, create more jobs at home.

I can understand the appeal to average Americans of such a superficial argument about job creation in the middle of this tough economic recovery. But if people had read my blogs, they would have known things are not quite so simple. Indeed, implicit in such a simplistic argument is the assumption that Chinese and the U.S. economies are very similar. Yet the reality is just the opposite: Those two economies are anything but similar. Indeed, as I often pointed out, these two economies are quite complementary with each other. As such, the U.S. political elite’s tendency to apply jobs argument during election seasons is probably motivated more by saving their own jobs in Washington than saving real jobs for average Americans.

Simply ask yourself the following questions, for example: Do the Chinese and American economies have similar wages? (The answer is obviously no and indeed, the wage differences are huge between these two countries.) Or do these two economies have similar environmental standards? (The answer is again no. The U.S. has much more stringent environmental standards.) Or, how about the goods these two economies produce? Are they similar? (No again. Indeed, it was primarily because of the above two differences that many U.S. industries had moved to China and other low cost locales in the first place.)

So, next time when you hear Mr. Obama say: “Our trade relationship has to be fair. You [China] can’t just sell to us and we can’t sell to you [China]”, you can challenge him with the following questions: What can we sell to the Chinese people with our hollowed-out industries? Not much, indeed. (Granted, since my first update on the currency issue, I have seen some chatters by the U.S. political class about re-establishing a manufacturing base in the U.S., such as a couple of speeches by Mr. Obama, or the mention of “reindustrialization” in the September 4 column by Thomas Friedman. But apparently these were just talks only.) And for those goods we do produce, why don’t you lift some of the restrictions on exporting them to China? (I am sure China has a strong appetite for American high-tech products and exporting them to China would create many jobs for American people. If Mr. Obama were really serious about creating good-paying American jobs, he would have lifted some of the restrictions. Alas, it turned out his sending his Commerce Secretary to China in May was just a pure political theatre.)

What’s more, as Mr. Thomas Friedman correctly observed: “China is rich nationally but still dirt poor on a per capita basis”. Indeed, according to the United Nations standard, there are still a whopping 150 million people living in poverty in China. Even if China lets its currency appreciate, I doubt many Chinese people would be able to afford goods made in America. Indeed, as is often reported in the media, the vast majority of Chinese workers can not afford the goods they themselves produce for export, how can they afford to buy imports produced with American wages?

To rebalance Sino-U.S. trade relations, as I pointed out before, the fundamental solution on the Chinese side is to start improving the wages and benefits of Chinese workers and placing environmental protection on a higher priority. Perhaps not coincidentally, these measures would also give more U.S. companies the incentive to stay in America and therefore contribute to the re-establishment of a manufacturing base in the U.S. -- if the U.S. government is really serious about it.

Now, as I revealed in my above update, the U.S. political class really does not give a fig for Chinese workers. Indeed, they only started mentioning Chinese workers AFTER I posted that update, as can be seen in the more recent columns by Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman, as well as in a few editorials of The New York Times. Yet at the same time they still demanded renminbi appreciation. All of these just showed that they were merely paying lip services to welfare of Chinese workers, motivated by their selfish desire to hide their true character, i.e., having no conscience for others. The simple truth is that improving Chinese wages and renminbi appreciation are in stark conflict with each other under the current economic conditions in China. -- With the rise of renminbi exchange rate eating into already razor thin profit margins of many, many Chinese exporters, what’s left to improve the wages and benefits of Chinese workers? As I said before, a push for renminbi appreciation by the Obama administration is really a push against China’s impending democratization, which is required for the difficult economic structural reform in China. With their Nobel economic prize and all, I am sure they understood this point. Professor Michael Hudson warned about the Junk Economics propagated by the likes of Paul Krugman. I’ll simply quote Warren Buffett: “In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.”

Integrity is what is sorely lacking among America’s political elites and in their political debates as well. And integrity in political debates starts with ascertaining the facts. When a political debate simply become a shouting match over each other’s head, with neither side interested in seeking the truth, the quality of American political discourse can only deteriorate, contributing to a increasingly polarized and confrontational political culture.

I am often reminded of the Gates-Crawley row of last summer, which Mr. Obama himself piled on. As it turned out, Mr. Obama just wanted to create a particular political image to deal with an immediate political problem of his. He commented on the row without regard to the facts. In fact, facts did not matter to him. Even today, I doubt many people really know, after all those debates, what really happened between these two gentlemen on that day.

If people are not told the basic facts in a relatively simple matter such as this personal row, no wonder they can be easily duped in more complex matters such as the economy, where the facts are much more complicated. Just like correcting trade imbalance was used as a smoke screen by American political class previously in their efforts to pressure China to appreciate the renminbi, as I described in my above update, we see saving American jobs is now being used to achieve the same hidden objective -- to write down the huge U.S. debt and other dollar assets held by China. And just like before when the political class knew forcing renminbi appreciation would not solve America’s trade deficit, they know very well forcing renminbi appreciation would not create American jobs either, despite their seemingly persuasive arguments directed at the voters. What they could in fact accomplish by putting such a pressure on China, however, is to enable their friends on Wall Street to make a killing on renminbi appreciation. But that has nothing to do with creating jobs for average Americans, of course.

Why is Wall Street the beneficiary? As I explained in my above update, the current U.S. monetary policy not only exports inflation worldwide, but also fuels an ever expanding asset bubble in other emerging economies, including China’s. When the Obama administration targets China and China only to appreciate its currency, the so-called “hot money” - speculative capitals run by people like George Soros - would mostly pour into China in anticipation of its currency appreciation, exacerbating China’s inflation and asset bubble and making a killing in the process. Of course, nobody is going to tell you the truth that pressuring renminbi appreciation is good for Wall Street, rather than Main Street. But this is hardly surprising, giving the incestuous relationship between Washington and Wall Street in the underbelly of the American system of government, whether it’s under a Bush administration or an Obama administration. No wonder H.R. 2378 passed the House with strong bipartisan support.

Which brings me to the cooking of the U.S. Republicans. They brought out their dish on September 23, in the form of a document called Pledge to America. Apparently in that document, the G.O.P had other ideas to write off China’s holding of U.S. debts.

As this long-running blog revealed, the Obama administration attempted to write off China’s holding of U.S. government agency debts by deliberately instigating a direct military confrontation with China in mid-August. (Note it is virtually impossible for the U.S. government to default on China’s holding of U.S. Treasury debts, give the depth of such markets.) At China’s doorstep, they staged a huge military exercise and deployed other military assets. At the mean time in Washington, Treasury Department convened a meeting of people all across America to discuss the “reform” of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. If and when a military conflict with China materialized, the U.S. was bound to lose some of its navy vessels, possibly including the U.S.S. George Washington. Which would come as a huge shock to the American people. Taking advantage of American people’s emotions, some attendees at the Treasury conference - at the behest of the Obama administration, of course - would then propose to server the federal guarantee for these two GSEs, or perhaps to default on those agency debts held by China outright. Fortunately, my August 16 update caught the Obama administration red-handed with its plan and as such, stop a deadly and potentially disastrous war between two nuclear powers.

I have written quite extensively about Sino-U.S. relations in these blogs. And I advocate for a genuine and enduring cooperative relationship between those two countries, as everyone knows. Not only because such a relationship is desirable, but also because it is necessary in that the alternative could be disastrous for both peoples. My analysis is based on facts and logic, chief among them are Mutually Assured Destructions between them both in the nuclear arena and in the economic arena. That’s why, following Larry Summers’ lingo, I called China’s holding of U.S. debt a strategic weapon and to the U.S., its biggest strategic weakness vis-à-vis China. Frankly, without either of those two MADs, it would be much easier for the U.S. to “take on” China without itself suffering some fatal wounds. Indeed, it would be too much for China to ask for the U.S.’s genuine cooperation under such a circumstance.

(By genuine cooperation, I mean ideally those two countries should approach their bilateral relationship with a common pragmatic philosophy. This philosophy instructs that each side should treat the other as equal, at the least. Equality is a basic element in a genuinely cooperative relationship. -- In mid-September, when the pressure on China to appreciate its renminbi was at its peak, some media reports invoked Plaza Accord of the 1980’s as the examples for the renminbi to follow because, according to one report, the accord “stands as perhaps the high-water mark of international economic cooperation over the past 40 years”. I had to shake my head reading such self-centered reports. When Japan signed those accords under pressure or threat, there is no cooperation at all.)

So, what was revealed in G.O.P’s Pledge about its idea on China’s holding of U.S. government agency debts, or more broadly, on Sino-U.S. relationship? Not surprisingly, the idea of an American hegemony is even more entrenched in Republican heads. What G.O.P proposed to the American voters was essentially a strategic arms race with China to upset the nuclear balance between those two countries. Then, presumably with the newly re-acquired nuclear advantage, a Republican administration would default on China’s holding of U.S. government agency debts.

(I have to admit I did not read the Pledge myself. I tried, but reading such a long political document is not my cup of tea. I rely on more experienced hands for its interpretations. One came from David Frum, who said that the G.O.P pledged to server the federal guarantee for these two GSEs. The other came from a MSNBC host, who was apparently very puzzled that the Republicans would try to bring back strategic arms race with the Russians, or so as he assumed. These two ingredients, together with the timing of the release and the manner in which the Pledge was released, indicated to me G.O.P’s plan with respect to China.

Why did the G.O.P choose to release their document on September 23? I believe it was because of the possibility that Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who was on his final day of visit to the United Nations, would bring me out on that day in New York. That’s also why, if you compare President Obama’s speeches at the U.N. during those couple of days and my posted blogs around that time, you will find Mr. Obama cracked quite a few nuts, making the impression that he was in support of me. (Which, frankly, just made me sick.)

The way the Pledge was released was also very revealing. Republican leaders chose a home hardware store as their prop, sending an implicit message to American voters that their plan would make it easier for them to keep their houses. They also showed up without their suits on, possibly in an attempt to distinguish themselves from the Democrats and other political elites that I have criticized so much in my blogs.)

How did I feel about G.O.P.’s plan? Quite amused, actually.

First of all, when you owe someone money, you pay him or her back per contract. What’s so hard to understand?

Secondly, insofar as there is an economic M.A.D. between China and the United States, that relationship is largely anchored on China’s holding of U.S. Treasury debts. And U.S. Treasuries, as I said before, are huge markets. As such, it’s virtually impossible for the U.S. government to target China’s holdings for default.

Thirdly, even if there is a strategic arms race between the U.S. and China, I highly doubt the U.S. would achieve its desired result. Simply because the U.S. had won the arms race with the former Soviet Union before does not mean it will automatically win another one with China. (I’m not advocating for an arms race. Indeed, as I said before, I think it’s just crazy and stupid that the U.S. and U.S.S.R had each produced around 10,000 nuclear warheads.) There are a number of reasons:

The U.S. and China would have quite different goals in an “arms race”. While the U.S. goal is clearly to dominate China and the rest of world, China’s goal is simply to maintain a certain level of military balance so that it can inflict enough pain on the U.S. to deter it from “taking on” China, as is the case right now. China does not want to “take on” the U.S. on its own initiative, as I said before. Indeed, China has no desire to seek hegemony, as can be seen from its history. Naturally, an “arms race” with such different goals - if it can be called the usual "arms race" at all - would cost the U.S. much more than it would China.
If you read my previous blogs, you would know how surprised I was when I first realized that I had stumbled on the nuclear truth between China and U.S. Now I know, of course, that the (asymmetrical) nuclear balance between China and U.S. is just one indication of the ever narrowing gap between those two countries in virtually all areas. And the reason is not hard for all to see: Chinese economy has been growing much faster than the U.S. economy. This trend is expected to continue well into the future as these two countries are in fundamentally different stages of economic development. As such, China would be much at ease to handle the “arms race” with the U.S. for quite some time to come.
Have you heard of “the one hundred year’s humiliation” about China? Well, this is important. From the Opium War to the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, China had been bullied, robbed, occupied at the hands of foreign powers. Because of that painful experience, Chinese people know the preciousness of their freedom and independence and would vow to never lose them again. Carrying that indomitable spirit with them, Chinese people can overcome any obstacle to oppose American hegemony - if the U.S. so chooses - and to guard our freedom and independence.

Of course, China’s case would be made much more persuasive if the Chinese government makes its move on political reform so that its people could enjoy even greater freedom at home. That’s another reason why the Obama administration does not want to see China start its democratization. But I am very hopeful at that prospect because the momentum has been with those for political reform in China recently.

What I am more curious to find out is the choice in front of the American people, including their elitist class. Do they want to cling on to their hegemony to continue dominating the world or will they embrace a more democratic multi-polar world? As I said before, the very idea of preserving the United States’ hegemonic power in today’s world means that they have to “take on” a rising China. China would have no choice but to defend itself with all the means it has.

As a typical Chinese, I believe most Chinese people would agree with me in hoping for a genuine cooperative relationship with the U.S. However, I believe China is also fully prepared for the alternative, especially in light of the recent actions by the Obama administration and American political elite.

Update 20101021:

Another disappointment, obviously, over the lack of a move on political reform by CPC during the annual meeting of its Central Committee in Beijing.

I have given many reasons why China needed to start democratization as soon as possible. And here is one more, carried over from my last update:

Without China’s making this move first, there is virtually no chance that the American people would want to have a genuine and enduring cooperative relationship with China. Of course, for the American political class, it is a vastly different story, as my blogs showed. Still, I think it is self-evident that the pressure against China’s democratization by American political class only makes it even more critical for China to move first.

Update 20101104:

After the meeting of CPC Central Committee last month in Beijing, I have been thinking whether I should continue with my writing, now that I was out of politics for sure. Perhaps because I had always wanted to get out of politics, part of me actually felt relieved. Besides, as you all know, writing is not my cup of tea and my current fasting just made it that much harder.

But I can not help but being struck by the ongoing ugliness of the world that I see. Just yesterday, the U.S. Federal Reserve, after months’ market speculation, finally announced its plan to create $600 billion out of thin air over the next 8 months. Much of the newly-printed dollar would then flood into other parts of the world and create chaos worldwide. I will probably have to write a separate update to review the “currency wars” of the past couple of months. For now, let me say a few words on the ugliness in China.

In China, facing immense pressure from the Obama administration to appreciate its currency, the communist party soldiers on, propelled largely by its internal dynamics, as evidenced by the elevation of Mr. Xi Jinping to a key party post at the Beijing gathering, cementing his status as President Hu’s political heir. At the mean time, virtually nothing happened on the democratization front. Of course, this outcome was exactly the one most desired by the Obama administration.

Reading the Party’s proposal for the next five-year economic plan, one might get a sense that they do have a grasp of the many challenges facing the Chinese economy today. It may very well be the case. However, I am not that optimistic about their being able to address these challenges any time soon. Remember my overly-generous praise on the current five-year plan made in 2006? They knew some of the challenges years ago. But those challenges still exist today, some even getting worse.

The root cause of Chinese economic imbalances is the political imbalance, as I pointed out before. China’s political imbalance really started showing its economic consequences when it embarked on economic reform more than 30 years ago. And the economic imbalance has been getting worse over the years. The tension first erupted in 1989 across the country, resulting in the tragic Tiananmen incident, the redress of which is long overdue even for justice and reconciliation reasons. Since then, the Chinese government have attached great importance to managing the symptoms of the economic imbalance, i.e., neutralizing mass incidents at their buds, etc., but have not actually dealt with the economic imbalance itself. That’s fundamentally why we see so many challenges in Chinese economy today.

This is a precarious situation, made even more precarious by the uncertainties facing global economic recovery and the pressure on renminbi appreciation coming from the U.S. government. Without serious political reform to correct the underlying political imbalance, the less advantaged in Chinese society, such as peasants and migrant workers, will likely have to bear even greater burden in the coming economic turmoil. And things can get really ugly in China.

Update 20101126:

Am I being set up as either a lunatic or a fall guy?

I ask this question today because I found out Bob Rae, the Liberal foreign affairs critic, cracked a few nuts, including one in my portable disc that I wrote on Wednesday, in the Afghanistan debate yesterday (Thursday) in the House.

Normally, this sort of nut-cracking is not surprising for me. But I have moved last Monday. And God knows the thing that bothered me the most in my previous apartment was the constant close surveillance. As such, I deliberately tested it out last Thursday morning by munching several cookies together with my usual two pieces of bread. And nobody seemed to have cared. (I remember when I started my sub-journey in February, the governments and the media kept a very watchful eye on my diet. In a telephone conversation with a social worker one evening, I volunteered that I had just finished “doing my dishes”. And apparently, that little white lie had caused quite a brouhaha, although I do not remember the details of it now. Of course, the governments certainly knew I was on my diet strictly. They made the innuendo in order to discredit my fast and therefore, look not as bad politically on their parts in the aftermath of Dalai’s visit to the White House. -- Oh yeah, I lie all the time in the mental health system that the governments have put me in. But that particular lie about “doing my dishes” was probably out of the fear that I might be taken back to a mental hospital again if I was found to have started a fast. And the irony is, of course, it was precisely because of my pursuit of truth and justice that had landed me in the mental health system in the first place.)

As such, until this morning I had thought the governments had no surveillance in my new apartment. And it was a plausible thought because everyone knew I was out of politics now. If the Chinese government won’t bring me out, who else is going to do that? I would be just a lunatic with a little blog that can be easily hidden away from the public.

The one unpublished nut (“monopoly”) in Mr. Rae’s House speech yesterday came from an unfinished update I have been trying to write in an attempt to rebut the latest Internet article by Mr. Xian Yan, who argued for President Hu Jintao that the current Chinese political system is a suitable one for China and there is no need to consider democratization right now. It turned out to be a taxing job. First of all, Mr. Xian’s article is extremely well-written. In fact, if his main conclusions had not directly contradicted my long-held belief on the urgent need for political reform in China, I would have bought his article wholesale on first reading.

I found that I had to print out the article. Here comes a lesson for the Internet age: Besides browsing, deep reading is still required. In fact, leaving aside the constant bias and sometimes outright lies in the mainstream media, people can be easily taken in by the skilful writings of some of the elitist propagandists, such as Xian Yan or Paul Krugman, without deep and critical reading. For me, I had to read Mr. Xian’s article numerous times to find out what was really wrong with it. Then I found I still had difficulties in writing my rebuttal. It’s not just because I am a poor writer. A more important reason, I figure, is that I do not speak their language.

So, here I used our everyday language to describe the debate between President Hu and me, just in case you were also taken in by his article.

Yours Truly: As you know, I have been calling for quite some time that there is an urgent need for democratization in China.

President Hu: I’ll say there is no need to consider it right now. China is a developing country and we need to catch up with more developed ones. Our current political system has the efficiency and effectiveness that enable us to do that. With the phenomenal GDP growth we got year after year, I am even thinking of exporting our model to other developing countries. Besides, as a convenient excuse, democratization could lead to confusion and chaos. And you know that is exactly part of the foreign policy goals of the Obama administration with respect to China if we start political reform.

Yours Truly: But since the Chinese government commands so many resources and wields by far the most potent power in Chinese society and you are the No. 1 guy in this powerful government, if you bring the public service along to the idea of democratization for the good of all people, that risk surely can be minimized.

President Hu: Don’t you know already that I am not willing to do that? (Then in a hypocritical tone) It’s not that I don’t want to sacrifice my hold on power and the benefits it brings, I really think our political system is a suitable one for China.

Yours Truly: But you seem to have recognized that the policies from such a political system tend to go from one extreme to another. We all know the Chinese economy was at the brink of collapse after the first 30 years of extreme left policy. Aren’t you going to risk another collapse by continuing with the single-minded policy of GDP growth of the past 30 years?

President Hu: We have not imploded. Not yet.

Yours Truly: But can’t you see there are many problems in China already?

President Hu: Yeah, but there are many problems in developed countries too. The reason ours look uglier is because we are still a poor country. Besides, with the blindness I got from eating lavishly out of public purse, I believe these problems got nothing to do with our political system.

Yours Truly: But isn’t the overall human rights condition in China just too unacceptable?

President Hu: Yes, I agree. But that’s part of China’s economic advantage.

Yours Truly: Don’t you think it should be improved?

President Hu: Sure, maybe in the future. Just not under my watch.

Yours Truly: What about restricting people’s access to information?

President Hu: Well, that’s a necessary measure that enables us to reduce societal frictions and minimize governance costs.

Yours Truly: Isn’t that a policy of deliberately fooling the people?

President Hu: Sssssh. We don’t want the peasants or migrant workers to know they have this right or that right. The growing awareness of the city folks about their rights has already caused us too many headaches. That’s why we have been busy trying to keep our intellectuals happy.

Yours Truly: (Speechless)

President Hu: Any more questions? By the way, I think you worried too much about all those mass incidents in China in your previous update. The way I see it, as long as they are put under control, who cares about the injustices people feel, however prevailing that feeling is?

Now, back to Mr. Rae’s nut-cracking and why I think I am being set up as the fall guy.

This has something to do with the current tense situation in and around the Korea Peninsula. Like everyone else, I was shocked to learn the shelling between the North and South Korea earlier this week. However, just like I warned in April 2009, I believe it is still a phoney war there despite the fact that it looked more real than last time, in order to give cover to the real war that is going to happen between China and India.

The U.S. is willing to participate in this phoney war mostly because it is on the ropes now financially, as everyone can see. That’s why when it announced that it would send U.S.S. George Washington into the Yellow Sea in response to the shelling, the protest from China this time has been noticeably more muted. That’s also why we saw today China has conducted some diplomacy with relevant countries, including North Korea, to create the appearance that it did not have a complete control over the situation when in fact China has regained its influence over North Korea since Mr. Kim’s last visit to China in late August. (And here is another thing about the mainstream media: They like to portrait countries in stereotypical terms. When it comes to North Korea, it is always this “communist”, “hermit kingdom”. And they explain everything else from these stereotypes. The reality is that international relations - not just those involving North Korea, but between many, many other countries - change constantly, especially during this time of global economic turmoil. -- Not always big changes, but changes nevertheless constantly. There is a saying that a week in politics is long time. I guess a week in international politics is a long, long time.)

Why am I being set up as the fall guy for the coming war between China and India? Conveniently, there had been an earlier perception that I was the person who advocated a war between China and India. And I just realized that some of my recent writings to urge political reform in China might have given those over-zealous people the excuse to accuse me again for advocating the war. But I believe I have already said that the war would be wrong even if it was in China’s interest. Besides, if I had really wanted the war to go ahead, I would not have blown the whistle last April. In any case, I believe the real reason that I am being set up for the fall is that I am the guy who knows too much about the inner workings of the global political class and won’t shut up.

So here is a challenge for Bob Rae and all you elitists out there: Now that I have blown the whistle again, if you really want to stop the war between China and India, why don’t you make my story public right now? Afraid that the people might find my philosophy and ideas for the world more appealing and more likely to yield lasting peace?

P.S. (20101127):

I should have mentioned that I devoured several cookies on my moving day, too. It was a hectic and tiring day for me, as you can imagine. Indeed, I did not have time to buy my bread until it was dark on that day. Still, this was a sinner and I should have disclosed it. -- I was afraid that I would be diverging too far away from the main ideas of this update.

When I did not get any “feedback” after straying away from my bread and water diet on my moving day, I did not know what to make of it: Did it mean the governments did not intend to put surveillance in my new apartment? Or was it because the governments had yet to set it up? Or maybe the governments, with the surveillance already in place, clearly saw my situation of that day and decided not to make a fuss about it? Or, maybe they just did not care about my fasting any more?

In fact, it was because of this inconclusiveness of my "accidental experiment" that made me think that I should perhaps test it out formally. Which I eventually did on Thursday November 18. That’s also why, when I updated my spreadsheet on Tuesday or Wednesday of that week, I did not disclose it.

So now you have it. And I am going to add this sinner to my spreadsheet right now.

Update 20101203:

Is the WikiLeaks story of leaked diplomatic cables in the past few days a U.S. government job designed to take public attention away from my story?

I noticed Thomas Friedman linked WikiLeaks story to China in his column and David Brooks cracked numerous nuts in his about the WikiLeaks founder. These were in addition to Secretary Hillary Clinton’s remarks on Monday, in which she not only insinuated that my last update was an attack on the “international community”, but also mentioned “common security”, a key concept, ironically, in my philosophy as applied to international politics. (I have always wanted to write about this concept in my blog. But because of my poor writing skills, I have not been able to address enough of it specifically. However, people can get a feel about it from my words and actions over the years if they read my story thoroughly. The key is to be able to look at a situation from others’ point of view. Or they can read the Epilogue of the excellent book as I mentioned in my previous blogs, John Dewey, Confucius, and Global Philosophy, by Professor Joseph Grange. However, if you subscribe to the philosophy of a U.S. Senator, which tells you that you are at the top of the “food chain”, as he suggested on TV recently - in response to my above update, I believe - and that presumably others are simply some lowly life form, then you don’t need to read Professor Grange’s book.) Another irony in her remarks was about the supposed “peaceful relations between nations” when in fact the U.S. and China was at the brink of (nuclear) war in the summer.

Apparently, what has been reported was only a tiny portion of the hundreds of thousands of documents - all of which were supposedly to be leaked. And according to the New York Times, timing was the only condition for it, and presumably other news organizations, to publish these material. Therefore, it looks like the anonymous source behind the leak can effectively control global media agenda for quite some time to come. I can not believe the Obama administration was not behind such enormous power. All these point to a cover-up of my story on a massive scale, which is exactly what the Obama administration has always wanted.

However, resorting to the control of media space just proved my point in my last update, i.e., the Obama administration is very fearful of my story’s becoming public. The reason is not only because my story exposed their political skulduggery, but also because, I firmly believe, the public would find my philosophy and ideas more appealing and more likely to yield last peace. Because if the U.S. and China can build a genuine and enduring cooperative relationship based on a common philosophy, the world will be a much more peaceful place.

The only thing is, as I pointed out before, the Chinese government should start political reform first.

Update 20101208:

I hate it when I am being taken advantage of.

I am referring to the latest nut-cracking by the U.S. political class in their attempts to put the blame of the Korea Peninsula tension on China. First, it was the New York Times in the title of an editorial, China, the Enabler, on December 2. A few days later, a senior Obama administration official hiding behind anonymity spun the Washington Post: “The Chinese embrace of North Korea in the last eight months has served to convince North Korea that China has its back and had encouraged it to behave with impunity…. We think the Chinese have been enabling North Korea.”

As you probably noticed, the key word in both of these two instances, “enable”, came from my November 26 update, in which I sharply criticized President Hu Jintao for delaying political reform in China. By cracking nut of this word, the U.S. political class was attempting to steal my credence to their spin of the Korea situation.

Of course, if you read my previous blogs, you will find that this is not the first time the U.S. political class has taken advantage of my criticism of the Chinese government. Only that this time, it’s much more absurd and much more malicious. Indeed, I feel the major reason for their brazenness was because they knew the extraordinary difficulties I am having in writing and in rebuking.

After all, they knew they have gotten away with the massive bias in their public communication before. Whether it was about the currency war between the U.S. and China, or about the row between China and Japan over disputed territories, they knew I did not have the energy or capacity to correct their records. Indeed, I feel they certainly knew my “not-so-appropriate analogy” that I had typed into my computer in describing my quandary, i.e., “I feel like a kid in a candy store without a good appetite”, in seeing so many biased reporting.

For the currency war, it was clearly the rumour out of the Fed in August about the second round of quantitative easing that had been driving down the dollar and therefore putting pressure on pretty much very other currencies. Simply check any dollar index chart for a confirmation. Yet in virtually all of the media reports, China was singled out for not appreciating its currency. It was only after the Fed formally announced QE2 in early November that mainstream media suddenly “realized” the U.S. was the real currency manipulator. But the damage to the renminbi had already been done, with added pressure on China manufactured by the Obama administration in other areas.

As for the development in East Asia, I will simply use a commentary by Fareed Zakaria in his GPS program on CNN as an example. I single out Mr. Zakaria precisely because he is what I consider one of the most objective and thoughtful journalists in America. Yet even he only mentioned the role of the United States in the recent tensions in East Asia once in passing. And it was in his last sentence of the commentary. (Sometimes I almost feel there is a “latent rule” in western journalism that it is always the last paragraph of a report that tells the real truth.) Yet, as my blogs showed, it was because of the Obama administration’s “returning to Asia” policy that we saw the heightened tension in the region, from soiled relations between China and Japan to the massacre of Hong Kong tourists on Manila street -- not to mention the tense situation in the Korea Peninsula.

And the ultimate objective of the Obama administration is to keep most of the Asian countries, starting from China, subservient to its economic interest. They have no intention to “rebalance” the world economy, despite their hypocritical claim to the contrary. All people need as proof is their skyrocketing debts and deficits. That’s why they have been hindering China’s move to a genuine democracy, including enabling - yes, enabling - President Hu’s continued authoritarian rule, just like his predecessor, President Bush, did before. As Professor Ho-fung Hung showed, as long as the U.S. government keeps China as its “head servant”, other Asian countries would then likely follow as its “team of servants”. That’s also why the Obama administration has been busy instigating tensions around China’s borders, in case China does break away from Washington's "hostage".

As for the current situation in and around Korea Peninsula, yes, I did say that “China has regained its influence over North Korea since Mr. Kim’s last visit to China in late August”. But it was clearly in contrast to the situation before Mr. Kim’s visit, when China had lost its influence. And we all knew what a dangerous situation it was when the Obama administration and North Korea was flirting with each other. As I detailed in my previous blogs, we only avoided a disastrous and potential nuclear war between the U.S. and China because my August 16 update had caught Mr. Obama red-handed with his plan to instigate a war with China to write off some of the U.S. debts held by China. And Mr. Obama’s plan needed the help of North Korea. As such, for the Obama administration official now to say to the Washington Post that China has “embraced” North Korea “in the past eight months” is just an outlandish lie.

Moreover, if by nut-cracking of my writings, the Obama administration official was trying to create the impression that his or her statement had the backing of my writings, then surely he or she must recognize the role of the Obama administration in staging the phoney war, too, including its “enabling” of South Korea government in the shelling. In fact, insofar as the Obama administration and Hu government are the two leading actors in the phoney war, it is obvious that it is Mr. Obama who has a more “enabling” role in the bilateral dynamics between them. In fact, I think I have used the word “poodle” before in describing President Hu in his relations vis-à-vis President Obama. As such, for the Obama administration now to put the blame squarely on China as the “enabler” just borders on absurdity.

I noticed such a blame game did not start right after the shelling, but rather, did right after the U.S. carrier group George Washington had finished its 4-day joint military exercise with South Korea troops in the Yellow Sea. So the nature question was why. Furthermore, why didn’t President Obama immediately call President Hu to try to calm down the situation? Why didn’t Secretary Clinton immediately call the foreign ministers of South Korea and Japan to Washington? Instead, the only thing that was immediate was the dispatch of the carrier group to the Yellow Sea by Mr. Obama.

The conclusion can only be that the military exercise was not intended to be just a routine one. It was intended to force a war in that region to, at a minimum, bring North Korea under the U.S. influence. This is logical in that from Obama’s viewpoint, when China regained its influence over North Korea in late August, he lost a card he could use to help start wars in the region in the future. Indeed, right after the military exercise started in the Yellow Sea, we saw WikiLeaks - Oops, ObamaLeaks - created a worldwide headline that China was “ready to abandon North Korea”.

This phoney WikiLeaks story must have been a wake-up call for China to realize that it had been fooled by the Obama’s promise of a “phoney war” in and around the Korea Peninsula. Chinese officials must have had a nervous few days during the U.S.-South Korea military exercise, hoping North Korea would not do anything foolish. That’s the real reason why, when the military exercise did not achieve its real objective of turning into a real war, the Obama administration tried to put the blame on China. That’s also why they, having declined China’s suggestion to convene an immediate informal six-party meeting, will reportedly dispatch a high-profile envoy to Pyongyang next week for a “private chat” with North Korea. And at the mean time, we see the tension continues in the region with more and more U.S.-enabled military exercises.

It is high time for the Chinese leadership to free themselves from the ultimate enabler and chart an independent course for the Chinese people.

P.S. 20101212:

It’s a shame to watch this year’s Nobel prize ceremony. I don’t understand why the Chinese government had to put Mr. Liu Xiaobo in jail. Charter 08 appears to be a completely innocent document.

I think President Hu Jintao should go. If he is not willing to start political reform, let someone else do it.

P.P.S. 20101220:

Thank God North Korea did not retaliate over South’s live-fire drill on Yeonpyeong Island last night.

Worried about the situation, I wrote the following during the weekend. Let it be entered into records that this time, it was the North Korea that had exercised maximum restraint; and it was South Korea, backed by the U.S. government, that was being deliberately provocative.

If you read my previous blogs, you will know I am not a big fan of the North Korea regime. But as a facts-and-logic guy, I believe stereotypical reporting does not serve anybody any good. Besides, demonization is usually the first step towards a war. For example, in the initial reporting of the November 23 shelling by the mainstream media, we were told the North’s shelling of Yeonpyeong island was in response to the South’s shelling into its territorial waters. Yet somehow this fact was lost in more recent reports and the November 23 shelling became as a unprovoked act by the North. Of course, this modification of fact by the mainstream media was wholly consistent with the changing needs of the Obama administration, who usually sets the global media agenda. -- When you had sent a carrier group to the doorstep of North Korea, you were hoping military pressure along would provoke a war. Only when that provocation failed, you then started to demonize the other party to justify your continued provocations.

The following is what I wrote during the weekend, with some minor editing.

The dogged determination of the Obama administration to provoke a war in or around the Korea Peninsula is becoming clearer by the day.

The latest tension is being brought on by South Korea’s insistence to go ahead with its planned live-fire drill along a disputed maritime border with the North in the coming days. That such military exercises are “enabled” by the United States is obvious for all to see. Not only had senior Obama administration officials from both the State department and the Pentagon defended South’s plan, U.S. military personnel is also expected to be physically present at the coming drill.

Yet at the same time, the Obama administration had already labelled the North as provocative and threatened to escalate the conflict if North Korea reacted to South’s drill. And most of the mainstream media dutifully carried the official line in their reporting. How the South’s live-fire artillery drill in or near a disputed territory is not a provocation in the first place is beyond any reasonable people. As BBC anchor Alistair Yates repeatedly asked its South Korea correspondent on TV just a few hours before the drill last night: Why did the South insist on conducting the exercise in disputed areas? And why can’t the South postpone the exercise in light of the current tension in the region?

Furthermore, the Obama administration, as the rotating Chair of U.N. Security Council, had initially spurn Russia’s call for an emergency council meeting. No wonder the council was deadlocked to provide further cover to the South’s military provocation.

I can understand South Koreans’ desire to feel secure after recent skirmishes with the North. But the best way to long-lasting security is not through military means, but through a thorough understanding of the other side’s concerns and aspirations. To start with, people should be told the whole truth about those recent skirmishes, whether it was the sinking of Cheonan or the shelling along the disputed border, particularly in their connections with the U.S. government. Only then can they make informed decisions based on facts and logic, rather than agitated emotions conjured up by politicians and media.

Update 20101230:

In this joyous holiday season, Mr. Obama, the world’s most powerful man, is zealously beating the drum for a war in East Asia. But of course, you wouldn’t know that he is actively preparing for war from just reading or listening to the mainstream media. In fact, not only is the MSM pretending that they did not hear Mr. Obama’s drumbeats for war, they are also chipping in to help him "fix the (war) game", i.e., set up China for blame for the eventual military conflict. (Such is the journalistic standard of our time: America is always right because of the American might.)

Only on this blog will you hear Mr. Obama’s drumbeats and see how the game is being fixed. That’s probably why on Christmas day, two of my computers - one of them had never been connected to the Internet before - crashed under exactly the same circumstances. I believe it was a “Christmas gift” from the Obama administration that nothing is too untoward or brazen for them and they can easily take down my blogs at any time, with or without the collaboration of Google, Inc.

The reason for their targeting my blogs is not only because what I am about to update on the situation in the Korea Peninsula, but more importantly, because what I have already documented about the long history of Mr. Obama’s intentions and actions to “take on” China militarily, dating back to his Cairo speech in June 2009.

What I found particular repulsive throughout, though, was that the excuses the American political class invented to put the blame on China for Sino-U.S. tensions. One fashionable excuse is so-called Assertiveness Theory: Because China has been able to maintain rapid economic growth despite the global financial crisis, it became more assertive in its dealings with the U.S. But if you read my blogs, you would know that that theory could not have been furthest from the reality. Simply ask yourself the question: If the reason for China’s assertiveness was the relative performance of Chinese and U.S. economies in this global financial crisis, why did not China become more assertive at or around the height of the crisis when the U.S. economy was at its weakest? As I detailed in these blogs, when the U.S. economy was at its weakest, it was Chinese lending to the U.S. that helped stabilizing the U.S. banking sector through its TARP program. It was also Chinese lending that boosted U.S. economy recovery through its stimulus program. Yet, once Mr. Obama felt he had gotten from China what he wanted, he turned around and started to “take on” China. As I suggested before, there was a perfect Chinese idiom for the U.S. behaviour: En Jiang Chou Bao.

Mr. Obama’s confrontation towards China took to a military dimension in May when the Cheonan report was due to come out. The sinking of the South Korea warship presented him the perfect opportunity to stir up the waters in East Asia. (An opportunity that was deliberately handed over to him by North Korea, I should emphasize.) Using the Cheonan issue as an excuse, the U.S. military conducted one exercise after another in East Asia, the most dangerous one being in mid-August when Mr. Obama had planned - with the assistance of North Korea, of course - to provoke a war with China and then to use the U.S. casualties from that war as an excuse to write off his government’s agency debts held by China.

Essentially, Mr. Obama was intending to carry out a raid on China’s huge dollar reserves in August. The dirtiness of Mr. Obama’s plan was not only in his scheme to provoke a war with China and then use it as excuse to rob China of its hard-earned fruit of 30 year’s economic development, but also in his willingness to sacrifice the lives of American service men and women to achieve that objective. Sure, if Mr. Obama had succeeded in his plan, China would suffer huge losses and Chinese economy would be greatly weakened. And he might argue the U.S. economy would be in a relatively stronger position vis-à-vis China’s as a result. But have no doubt that the most direct beneficiary of a write-off of China’s holding of U.S. debts would be the toxic assets-plagued U.S. banking sector, including those Wall Street firms, which also happened to be his real constituencies. Just take a look who contributed most into his presidential bid in 2008. The same can be said of the U.S. Fed’s quantitative easing program, which he also defended. As Professor Michael Hudson noted: “Mr. Bernanke’s helicopter flies only over Wall Street. It does not drop monetary relief on the population at large.”

After I had caught Mr. Obama red-handed with his dirty plan on these WebPages, he started to play his Japan card. That’s why we saw a row between Japan and China developed in September over the detention of a Chinese fishing boat in disputed waters. Accordingly, the alliance between the U.S. and Japan got strengthened, as reflected in Japan’s latest defence guidelines which essentially treated China as its enemy.

Part of the reason that Mr. Obama took such an aggressive military stance towards China is, as he boasted in his Christmas message, that he is the Commander in Chief of “the finest fighting force” in human history. Instilling that message in the minds of American people at this time certainly would help him garner support for a coming war with China. Quietly, he has already dispatched three aircraft-carrier groups to Western Pacific. Apparently, three carrier groups gathering in one theatre is a very rare occurrence for the U.S. navy except when the U.S. government is preparing for war in that particular theatre. Do you hear the drumbeats now?

Besides, South Korea has not really stopped its military exercises ever since my last update on the situation in the Korea Peninsula on December 20. From December 22 to 24, it conducted a massive land and sea live-fire drill near the DMZ. From December 27 to 31, it conducted another round of navy exercises in multiple locations. All the while, there is an eerie silence on the North side, occasional verbal assaults notwithstanding.

What made me particularly uncomfortable in all of these was the MSM’s portrayal of China’s supposed influence over North Korea as the explanation for the North’s restraints in the face of South’s repeatedly provocations. Apparently, such a new line of reporting started quite suddenly on December 23, when three major U.S. newspapers - The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal - all carried the same narrative from the Obama administration of mostly anonymous sources. And such a portrayal of China’s role continued till this day. For example, one headline on The Financial Times yesterday read “China helps defuse Korea crisis”.

At the mean time, MSM continues to cut slack for the South’s provocative words and actions. But when President Lee Myung-bak had just a few conciliatory words to say to the North yesterday, MSM was all over the place in its coverage. The Wall Street Journal reported “Lee nods to N. Korea talks” and McClatchy-Tribune Information Services (via The Montreal Gazette) declared “S. Korea’s overture on talks may signal easing of tension”. But when a South Korea defence policy document labelled the North the “enemy” today, you can barely find any mention of it in the MSM.

I got the feeling that the situation in the Korea Peninsula is returning to the pre-August state where the North is ready to do the U.S.’s bidding. I hope I am wrong because it is a dangerous, dangerous state of affairs. But facts and logic seem to persuade me otherwise. Consider first New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson’s visit to Pyongyang a couple weeks ago. Mr. Richardson’s visit, by all accounts, was a quite successful one. Among the deals he secured - even if “unofficially” - was a “military commission and hotline between the two Koreas and the United States”. -- Noticeably China was left out. (And don’t tell me Mr. Richardson’s trip was a solely private mission. The Obama administration can not even clean up all the contradictions in the public domain about his “unofficial diplomacy”. For example, did his trip has the prior approval of the State department or not? Did he brief the State department after his trip? There is even rumours now that he is soon to replace Secretary Hillary Clinton.) Then, the North had deployed tanks near the Chinese border in the past few days, a development that was again rarely reported by MSM here. (Which reminded me of an incident in June where three Chinese were killed near the North Korean border. Again, you would not know this because, unlike the shelling death of four South Koreans, the MSM did not provide the coverage.)

In sum, we have a volatile situation in the Korea Peninsula: South Korea kept provoking the North and the Obama administration says publicly: South Korea is our ally and we stand firm with our allies no matter what. The North feels it can not respond to the South’s provocation perhaps because its main “ally”, China, would not provide it with the same assurance that the U.S. is providing to the South, either in public or in private. At the mean time, the Obama administration is sending overtures to the North through back channels such as Bill Richardson. Under such a miserable condition, sooner or later, I believe, the North is going to do the U.S.’s bidding to ignite a war with the South that will eventually draw both U.S. and China in, because the North knows that such a war is exactly what Mr. Obama wants. And the Obama administration had it all figured out as it would carry the whole MSM to say that it was China’s “enabling” of the North that was to blame for the war, having spewed out the narrative in the past week that China does have influence over the North as evidenced by the North’s recent restraints.

But of course, the essence of the danger was best captured by a quote I used in writing about Mr. Obama’s dirty plan in August by George Soros: “A declining superpower losing both political and economic dominance but still preserving military supremacy is a dangerous mix.” Mr. Obama’s August war plan was an attempt, in a sense, to solve U.S. economic problems with military means.

If the Obama administration shuts down my blogs before the war breaks out, there is a good chance that they would use the same military confrontation tactic as an excuse again to write off their debts held by China, or to gain other concessions from China. Even if Mr. Obama feels that he can not use the same dirty trick twice, given what I feel the ever increasing “people in the loop” readership of my blogs, there are other considerations behind his attempt to provoke a war with China.

As we all know, China’s economy has been growing with phenomenal speed, mostly because it is in a fundamentally different stage of economic development. To the self-interested U.S. empirists, China’s rapid economic development represents the biggest challenge to their hegemonic power. Hence, a big part of the Obama administration’s foreign policy objective with respect to China is to break the momentum of China’s economic development. That’s why, not only did they invent all sorts of excuses to pressure China to appreciate its currency, but they wanted China to appreciate it rapidly, knowing fully well that such a manufactured market expectation about renminbi appreciation would surely draw financial speculators to create a huge asset bubble in China and eventually cause a hard-landing of the Chinese economy. (In that sense, Mr. Obama is really the Speculator in Chief.) That’s also why they have been busying creating instabilities and conflicts along China’s borders, knowing fully well China desperately needed a peaceful environment to focus on economic development.

Looked from another vantage point, the continued U.S. pressure on China also meant that the Obama administration has not got what they wanted from China. They have neither broken the momentum of China’s economic growth, nor written off a lot of their debts held by China through pressuring renminbi appreciation. For those, Chinese government should be commended, especially in the face of heavy pressure on the Chinese economy from such U.S. actions as quantitative easing.

Still, the task of the Chinese government in managing the economy would be made much easier if they start political reform at home. As I argued before, political reform is required for the difficult task of structural reform in China’s economy. Otherwise, China’s economic growth can not be sustainable. In fact, that’s the major reason why the Obama administration has been hindering China’s move towards democratization. Their pressure on such issues as rare earth exports also demonstrated the same point: They simply does not want to see China’s economic development move onto a more sustainable path.

As a huge meritocracy, I believe Chinese government boasts one of the finest public service in the world in terms of competence. All they need is political will and political leadership. I believe “leadership is doing the right things”. And the right things to do politically are always those desired by the people, rather than by the political class themselves.

Update 20110124:

I can’t believe what I read in the Sino-U.S. Joint Statement issued last week during President Hu’s visit to Washington: “The United States stressed that the promotion of human rights and democracy is an important part of its foreign policy.” What a bloody lie.

If you have read my previous blogs, you would know that I have documented quite extensively on the hypocrisy of the U.S. foreign policy from my personal experience, including torture in mental institution, an assault in prison and an attempted assassination -- all the while when the U.S. and Canadian governments knew that I was for China’s democratization. The objective of U.S. foreign policy is always to serve its national interest. If promoting human rights and democracy in a particular country at a particular time serves its national interest, the U.S. government will do it. Otherwise, the U.S. will not do it. Indeed, there is no shortage of examples where the U.S. government have supported dictatorships around the world. China’s Hu is but one such example. -- Note that I have used a general term “the U.S. government” rather than a specific term “the Obama administration”, because from my experience, the Obama and Bush administrations have been remarkably consistent in this area of their foreign policies.

With a collaborating mass media, such demagoguery can very easily fool a good-intentioned but unsuspecting American public through repeated propaganda. For most Americans living in a democracy, they know from their intuitive experience that human rights and democracy are good things. Naturally, they would like to be told that their government is doing good around the world.

Indeed, there is another common misconception among western public that democracy equals peace. The reason for such a misconception is a similar one. Partly it is due to the intuitive experience of the citizens in western democracies. While there are many ways to describe a democracy, a key feature of a democracy is to resolve differences through peaceful means, including dialogue, debate, negotiation, peaceful and orderly protest and yes, even demagoguery. And demagoguery is precisely the other part of the reason for this public misconception. Those so-called experts know such demagoguery as “democracy equals peace” has no basis either in theory or in historical facts. A democratic country is not necessarily more peaceful than a non-democratic country. Take Japan for example. It was the first Asian country to have started political reform in the late 19th century. While the Japanese political system, like those of many other countries, evolved over time, 1889 could be seen as a key year as the first modern Japanese constitution was proclaimed. Yet we see that five years later, it launched an attack on China and Korea without declaration. And in 1904, it started the Japan-Russia war, again Pearl Harbour-style.

The trick the so-called experts and the MSM played on the public is that they did not distinguish - perhaps deliberately - the difference between domestic politics and international politics. Just because a country is a democracy internally does not mean it will automatically act in a democratic manner towards other countries on the international stage. The obvious example nowadays is in fact the United States, which I called a totalitarian democracy, i.e., a democracy at home but a dictatorship abroad. It really uses two sets of values - one set internally and one set externally. This inconsistency of values is at the heart of American hypocrisy. In contrast, my proposal for China’s embryonic democracy and international relations uses the same values domestically and internationally. That’s also why starting democratic reforms in China would be a good values offensive against the U.S.

Because I had thoroughly and repeatedly exposed this aspect of hypocrisy in the U.S. foreign policy with respect to China in these blogs, I am particularly upset to see that it had made its way into the Sino-U.S. Joint Statement last week. Even though what the Obama administration "stressed" did not appear to have the backing of the Chinese government, this false statement inserted in such an important document will nevertheless continue to fool both American and Chinese peoples, and indeed, people around the world. I can’t simply sit idly by.

P.S. (20110127):

When I published the above update Monday night, something strange happened. Initially my writings, while appearing all right in the “Edit” box, were all messed up after I hit the “Publish” button on the Blogger. Only after I had deleted my initial published posting and re-did the whole process for the second time, did I publish it right.

Granted, those sorts of strange things happened to me quite a lot soon after I started my journey in 2004, as I mentioned before. That’s why I had always thought it was Google’s Blogger who was deliberately creating problems for me, even when I was fasting and often times at critical moments along my journey. Of course I now know that the governments were ultimately behind it. That’s also why I felt on Monday night that the governments were starting to re-create those annoying technical difficulties for me again. -- Note that since two of my computers crashed on Christmas Day, my online activities has become much more cumbersome, to say the least.

It only occurred to me the next afternoon that the governments might have a more sinister political motive in creating a messed-up version of my above writing. As I recalled, the initial messed-up posting had in its last paragraph the Japanese aggression example, followed immediately by the truncated sentence starting from the phrase “embryonic democracy” I used to describe today’s China. By re-arranging my writings this way, the governments appeared to be insinuating that embryonic democracies - as Japan happened to be in my example - are always violent.

Sometimes you have to marvel at the way the U.S. government plays international politics. They are able to create issues out of thin air, much like the U.S. Fed’s wealth-creation printing press. But I have to take seriously their insinuation about a democratizing China, especially given an always collaborating MSM. (And China’s pending democratization seems to be inevitable at this moment, as you shall see later in this update.) This new “theory” about young democracies, if left unchallenged, will surely come handy in assigning blames in a future Sino-U.S. military conflict, which also remains a distinct possibility.

Frankly, I am not an expert on Japan and I don’t know why, in its pursuit of modernization starting in late 19^th century, it had descended into decades of militarism, which brought untold misery to its Asian neighbours and beyond. However, there is no inherent rationale that today’s China will necessarily follow Japan’s path. In fact, since very few Chinese would entertain a “total westernization” model for China’s modernization, of which democratization is an integral part, previous western experience of struggle among big powers - many of them could be considered democratic, by the way - really does not apply to China. That’s fundamentally why some Westerners’ fear of a rising China is misguided as they essentially project their own experience onto China.

As I wrote in my Democratization series, the ideals of China’s coming democratization should be inspired by its own cultural resources. While China should undoubtedly learn from more advanced western democracies, this does not mean to merely copy their experiences, but to transcend them. Ultimately, it is the upholding of the underlying traditional Chinese values in its next stage of modernization that will ensure its peaceful nature, as can be seen from China’s long history of dealing with outside world.

P.P.S. (20110128):
It is not only hypocritical for the Obama administration to claim that the promotion of human rights and democracy is an important part of its foreign policy, but in the case of China, to have stalled China’s progress towards democratization is arguably Mr. Obama’s biggest foreign policy achievement. And he would do anything, such as orchestrating the deadly Manila hostage crisis last August, to stop China from making that move. Indeed, his latest success was achieved right during President Hu’s visit last week by pulling President Hu back from announcing political reform in China.

Granted, President Hu was unwilling to start political reform himself. Obviously it was because of the persuasion and/or pressure from other top Chinese leadership that he was willing to make the move. And his visit to the U.S. was apparently a catalyst as bringing my story public and making an announcement on political reform during the trip would help the Chinese government gain considerable diplomatic advantage. Essentially it was to be an offensive move during the visit.

In anticipation of China’s move, the Obama administration manipulated an apparently deranged individual, Jared Lee Loughner, to conduct a shoot rampage in Tucson, Arizona on January 8. In fact, it was mostly because of this tragic event that I realized Chinese government’s plan. (In Canada, we saw federal political atmosphere suddenly heated up, with campaign-style ads and cross-country tours of party leaders. Understandably, no federal parties would want to have to discuss my story in the Parliament.)

After my last update posted on December 30, 2010, it was apparent to everyone that I was going to get to the “underbelly of the American system of government”. That’s why immediately after the Tucson shooting, Mr. Obama used the phrase “the essence of what our democracy is all about” in his remark from the White House. (One day before President Hu was to arrive at Washington, he made a similar remark again in an off-the-cuff manner, reflecting his anxiety over what I was writing. -- I will post at the end of this update my draft writing that was last edited on January 17. (1) Note that in anticipation of being brought out by President Hu, I was unusually positive on him. (2) Despite the fact that it was a unpublished document, I saw yesterday that James Mackintosh of the Financial Times had already started to mount subtle attacks. -- Memo to Mackintosh: Flying the stars and stripes for the Federal Reserve does not change its private nature.) Other nuts in his remark made just a few hours after the shooting include:

“We are still assembling all the facts…” -- I was assembling all the materials to prepare for my writing. And facts and logic would be an issue I would focus on in my writing.
Mr. Obama emphasized that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was an extraordinary “public servant” and urged Americans “to come together and support each other”. -- Note that my criticisms had been largely directed at the American political class.
“Root[ing] for” was the phrase I used in describing my experience in the mental institution seeking his help with my cause.

As it soon became apparent, the suspect had some mental issues. (And I was “certified” by the governments as a mental patient.) He mumbled about a “new currency” in his videos. (And I have been writing about the important currency and international monetary architecture issue for some time.) He also talked about “grammar structure”. (And most of the facts I used in my blogs were based on the “nuts-cracking” of people “in the loop”.)

Then there was the connection to Sara Palin. As many people “in the loop” probably knew, Ms. Palin made some remarks about Fed’s QE2 program after my November 4, 2010 update. (So was World Bank president Robert Zoellick, who thought I was going to advocate for a return to gold. And the Wall Street Journal saw all of these and ran an editorial on Palin and Zoellick.)

By staging the Tucson shooting, Mr. Obama’s plan was to hope that, instead of continuing with my writing on the currency and other issues, I would blog about the shooting. He then could create a massive confusion just prior to President Hu’s visit, i.e., by discrediting me as another lunatic (because I could not be brought out as a politician as everyone knew I am no politician material and Mr. Xi Jinping appeared to be the definite leader-in-waiting in China) mumbling about currency and attacking "public servants", etc. By wrong-footing China’s plan this way, not only could he stall China’s political reform again, he could also take public’s focus away from the incestuous relationship between Washington and Wall Street as well as from the fundamental question: Who really controls the U.S. dollar.

As Thomas Jefferson famously warned: “If Americans ever allow banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless.” Today as the U.S. dollar is the de facto world currency, President Jefferson’s warning should not only concern the American people, but also all those who use the dollar as their reserve currency.

Draft as of 20110117, with minor editing:
In last week’s GPS program on CNN, Fareed Zakaria mentioned that the U.S. does have some influence on North Korea, but “to a lesser extent” when compared to China. On the surface, Mr. Zakaria appeared to be attempting at a more balanced reporting. But as I reflected on his words, I found they unquestionably gave people the impression that either China and the U.S. were both to blame for any past tensions or the coming conflict, or, in light of the current calming situation in the Korea Peninsula, the U.S. perhaps deserved part of the credit too. If those were what Mr. Zakaria’s had really meant to convey to his audience, I have to say that his comment amounted to subtle political spins. As my previous postings clearly showed, while China’s influence on the North was largely meant to reduce tension and preserve peace in the peninsula, the U.S. intention had always been to use the North to provoke a war with China. (I hope Mr. Zakaria does not think that the North’s “good behaviour” in the past couple of weeks was a result of the “rein-in” by the U.S. and its enabled ally, South Korea, through their repeated military exercises.)

Indeed, Mr. Obama’s “dogged determination” to provoke a war with China remains intact, as everyone in the MSM knows. The essence of that danger, as captured by the above George Soros quote, is still with us and will be with us for a long, long time. (Remember the fundamental economic problem with the U.S. is its debt problem.) That’s why, in order to pretend he does not have any economic reason to go to war with China, Mr. Obama has been trying to talk up the U.S. economy lately. (So did Mr. Zakaria in his commentary, I should note.) That’s also why, I believe, we have seen some incredibly good economic news coming out lately. In fact, the top economic news on January 5 was so good that a CNBC headline said: “Sorry ADP, Not Everyone Believe the Economy Created 297,000 Jobs”.

The U.S. military build-up is continuing in the Western Pacific, above and beyond the three aircraft-carrier groups already deployed as I mentioned in my last update. In particular, the Obama administration had sent their most advanced fighter jets F-22 Raptor into the theatre. Note the continued U.S. military deployment was made against the background of a visibly reduced tension in the Korea Peninsula in the past couple of weeks. I guess Mr. Obama does not even bother to hide his intention anymore.

Then, in connection to Secretary Robert Gates’ visit to Beijing, the Obama administration tried to create the appearance that there was a rift between the Chinese civilian leadership and the military. Their apparent intention was to cast President Hu Jintao as a weak leader and to paint the PLA as a rouge military. Aside from attempting to create confusion on the Chinese side to their advantage in the coming military conflict, it is also easy to see that such a portrayal of Chinese military is a natural progression on their part in trying to fix the blame for the eventual military conflict: When they felt that they could not put the blame squarely on China, especially after my last update, they tried to either split the blame between China and the U.S. (as Fareed Zakaria and others suggested) or to simply demonize China or the Chinese military. (Note that fixing the blame is very important for the Obama administration because their objective is to rob China economically or to gain other concessions from China.)

Of course, to most Chinese readers, the suggestion of a rift between the political leadership and the army in China is absurd given PLA’s a long tradition of civilian control. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Chinese politics knows that without sufficient PLA support, Mr. Hu could never have become the party chief in the first place. And if he did not have control over the military, he would not have been able to hold on to his power within the Party. But for most western readers, I am afraid they are much more gullible to the official propaganda. So it is worthwhile to poke the many holes in the story as reported by the MSM.

By all accounts, China’s new fighter test took place just a couple of hours before Mr. Gates was to meet President Hu on Tuesday. I don’t think the timing was a coincidence, obviously. Indeed, as the report by the New York Times suggested, China’s stealth jet test was probably a response to the U.S. deployment of naval and air forces in Western Pacific.

Soon after the meeting ended, an anonymous “senior U.S. defence official” started to spin the story. According to Wall Street Journal, he or she claimed that “it was clear the civilian leadership was uninformed” of the J-20 test, citing from his or her supposed first-hand knowledge of the Hu-Gates meeting.

“But Gates played down the incident”, reported Washington Post online. “‘I asked President Hu about it directly, and he said that the test had absolutely nothing to do with my visit and had been a pre-planned test, and that's where we left it,’ Gates told reporters in Beijing [on Tuesday]. ‘I take President Hu at his word that the test had nothing to do with my visit.’”

Note that Mr. Gates’ immediate description of the meeting, possibly made in response to a suggestive question from the media, implied that President Hu was in fact aware of the flight test. Note also the Washington Post had deleted much of Mr. Gates’ above quotes in its print version of the story the next day.

Indeed, the new fighter had gone through a high speed taxi run about a week before and its pictures were all over the Internet. A Wall Street Journal report on January 4 quoted a defence expert to predict a test flight “very soon afterwards”. In other words, all these information, including a soon-to-be conducted test flight, was virtually public. How could the President of China be surprised at the test? I would venture that, if President Hu was at all surprised, it’s not because he did not know the test, but because of fact that Mr. Gates actually made a direct inquiry about it. -- He was surprised that Mr. Gates would display his concern and lack of confidence so openly.

Perhaps because Mr. Gates realized that he was not in sync with his own spin machine on Tuesday, the next day on the Great Wall he tried to catch up. “The civilian leadership seemed surprised by the test”, he declared. And as if to make up for his 24 hour delay, when “asked by reporters whether the incident was a sign of a split between China’s civilian leadership and its military”, he added: “I have had concern about this over time.” Oh really? That’s certainly news to me.

Then, perhaps realizing that his spin had gone too far to be believable, Mr. Gates backtracked his comment on Friday while visiting Japan, stating that the U.S. has no doubt that President Hu is in control of China’s military. He also reduced his charge against PLA from “rogue” to “opaque” - whatever it means.

Despite the obvious spin of story, however, the U.S. objective had been achieved with a collaborating MSM and the damage appeared to have already be done to China. For example, The Guardian asked on January 13: “In China, is the gun beginning to command the party?” And Reuters offered a lengthy analysis of “China politics guessing game”. Even local journalist Jonathan Manthorpe of the Vancouver Sun, picked up the official line in his January 12 article, aptly titled “China’s stealth jet test hints at rogue military”.

I noticed that reports by all three major U.S. newspapers, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, mentioned China’s A-SAT test in January 2007 as further proof of the “rift” between Chinese political leadership and the military. There was indeed a miscommunication between Chinese military and foreign affairs over that event. That’s the major reason why I wrote a blog about it. However, I believe that miscommunication was a one-time event. I tried to seek consular protection from several foreign consulates in Vancouver that morning, convinced that I was about to be thrown into jail later that day after court. (It was the first time I faced an immediate prospect of imprisonment along my journey.) Having failed to secure any, I called the Chinese Consulate in desperation. As such, the Chinese military really conducted the A-SAT test at a short notice. To complicate China’s communication situation even more, I did not end up in jail later that day as the Crown Counsel found some excuse to postpone my trial to another date.

I should emphasize that the Chinese military always takes order from the political leadership. It’s their tradition. For the A-SAT test, the Chinese military likely took the order from the political faction headed by former President Jiang Zemin, who was my chief backer then. Of course, as the MSM knows, a week in politics is a long time, let along three years. Indeed, as my blogs documented, I have had multiple rounds of “political fortunes” with the Chinese government and President Hu has been consolidating his power over the military since January 2007. There is no doubt that Mr. Hu’s hold on the military is strong, especially in relation to my own “political fortunes”. Remember Mr. Obama’s own “strongman vs. strong institution” comment not so long ago?

I sensed a major objective in Mr. Gates’ visit this week, and indeed, the U.S. engagement with Chinese military in general, was precisely to try to weaken Chinese military’s political tradition. As Mr. Gates subtly remarked in Beijing, he wanted to see a Sino-U.S. military to military tie that was “not subject to shifting political winds”. Apparently in Mr. Gates’ mind and indeed, in his dreams, PLA will not be labelled a rogue military only if they do as the U.S. government demands. -- Don’t think I am far-fetched in my analysis. That’s exactly what the Washington Consensus is all about when it comes to central banks of the world.

Other late developments of the week:

The Washington Times reported that the Obama administration is preparing for another round of arms sale to Taiwan, to be formally announced after President Hu’s state visit to the U.S. Note that arms sale to Taiwan is exactly one of the issues the Chinese military cites as undermining the political foundation for the Sino-U.S. military-to-military engagement. If the report turns out to be true, aside from the hypocrisy inherent in such a decision, a far more serious question is: Given that cross-strait relations have warmed greatly in the past couple of years, what’s the purpose of another round of arms sale to Taiwan, pray tell?

Immediately after his visit to Beijing that was supposedly aimed at improving ties with the Chinese military, Mr. Gates gave a belligerent speech to a Japanese student audience on Friday, painting China as a threat in the region. American hypocrisy really knows no bound.

The first time the phrase Washington Consensus caught my attention was in early 2009 when I read an essay on the global financial crisis by then Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. I learned that Washington Consensus is the prevailing economic doctrine of our time. Marked by “free-market fundamentalism, extreme capitalism and excessive greed”, it is largely responsible for causing the global financial crisis.

What does Washington Consensus say about the central banks? I learned later that it says that central banks of the world should be “politically independent”, just like the U.S. Federal Reserve. But unbeknownst to most people, U.S. Fed is not owned by the U.S. federal government or the U.S. taxpayers, despite its moniker. U.S. Fed, with the New York Fed at its core, belongs to its member banks and essentially represents the interest of Wall Street. In that sense, of course it is politically independent. In fact, it is so politically independent that it is politically omnipresent in the American governance superstructure, wielding enormous power within the U.S. federal government regardless “shifting political winds” in the United States.

As such, by promoting the idea of “political independence”, what Washington really want to see is that central banks of the world also represent the interest of the banking sectors of their respective countries, instead of serving the interest of their respective peoples. Presumably, central banks oriented to the profit motive of their respective banking sectors and free of the political oversight and direction from their respective sovereign governments will be much more susceptible to taking orders from Washington, especially if Wall Street banks themselves also make inroads into their bank sector. Which is hugely important for Washington as it is through these central banks that the surplus U.S. dollars around the world are recycled back to the U.S. in exchange for U.S. debts. (I do recognize that there are economic reasons for foreign central banks to put their surplus dollars into U.S. Treasuries as well.)

Yet, as Professor Michael Hudson points out, the MSM would only tell the public that this recycling process to finance the U.S. budget deficit is “a show of foreigners’ faith in U.S. economic strength”. Pretending that they do not know that those investment decisions are made by those central banks, rather than by millions of individual or corporate investors around the world, the MSM hides the real truth on how the U.S. government deals with other countries. (Not surprisingly, you would not read in WikiLeaks/ObamaLeaks how Washington persuaded foreign central banks to put their surplus dollar into buying U.S. debt.)

Let me back up a bit. As I said before, I am not really an expert on economics. Although I took an interest in economics at college, I never felt I learned much. Several years after I got out of college, I happened upon an article about Warren Buffett on the Internet, which I regarded as one of most important events in my life. Reading every word I could find by and about him ever since, I gradually built up an intellectual framework to look at business and economic matters. However, as you can imagine, my intellectual framework mostly just covered microeconomics.

I feel I started gaining knowledge on macroeconomics by asking questions I encountered in my journey, after I was dragged into politics. Being a good observer with a strong intuition also helped. For example, largely based on my own experience, I ventured in my June 16, 2009 update that there is probably an “incestuous relationship between Washington and Wall Street in the underbelly of the American system of government”. Which turns out to be spot-on. Still, without much of a knowledge of macroeconomics, I made many mistakes along the way. For example, as I detailed above, I was duped for a long time by the real intentions of American political class when they pressured China to appreciate its currency.

It was mostly during the research and writing on international economic and financial issues in the past ten months or so that I am finally closing in on the complete picture of international finance and economics, mostly in the writings of Michael Hudson and Henry C. K. Liu. I want to emphasize the phrase “complete picture” because the reason that so many mainstream economists are able to fool the public is precisely because they only present a part of the picture and pretend it is the complete story. For example, in pressuring China to appreciate its currency, the American political class often points to China’s trade surplus as the rationale. But that’s only part of the picture. If the U.S. government can make sure China’s surplus dollar has nowhere to go except for the U.S. Treasury Department, the large trade imbalance, the better for the U.S. That’s why the Obama administration has no intention to correct the trade imbalance, despite its hypocritical claim to the contrary. Of course, everyone knows for the U.S. to run large trade deficit year after year is unsustainable in the long run and represents a serious danger for the whole world.

With my usual qualifier aside that the only thing I completely agree with is my own writing, I should say that I am extremely impressed by their courage and integrity in speaking the truth. After all, it is not easy to be a pariah even among the elites. Moreover, their writings were consistent with my unique personal experiences, offered me a complete picture of international economics from a commanding height, and provided answers to many of my questions. For example, In my July 31 update, I wondered whether the fact that Professor Ho-fung Hung’s excellent article was not published in a mainstream academic journal meant there was a systematic effort to root out academic researches that did not fit into prevailing ideology. Having recently read Professor Hudson’s 2008-09 Project Censored award-winning article, Economic Meltdown: The “Dollar Glut” is What Finances America’s Global Military Build-up, I now know that those journals do have “gate-keepers” to protect the interest of the financial industry. As another example, I intuitively wondered in my June 17, 2009 update, with only one example of China’s experience with respect to UNOCAL, if the so-called “Dollar Trap” was a result of a comprehensive policy by the U.S. government. And Professor Hudson confirmed that it was indeed so. In fact, as he said, any attempt by foreign central banks to put their surplus dollars into gold or to make direct investments in American industry would be viewed as a unfriendly act by the U.S. government.

Perhaps my single most direct experience that was later confirmed by Professor Hudson’s writing as part of a comprehensive strategy to ensure dollar’s recycling process, was my encounter with an agent ultimately representing the U.S. government, as I recounted in my above June 17, 2010 update. Essentially the U.S. government was making an attempt to bribe me so that I, seen as a potential political leader for China at the time, would direct China’s central bank to keep buying up the U.S. debt if and when I am in a position to do so.

A good summary can be found in the introduction to Professor Michael Hudson’s excellent book, Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire, first published in 1972 and revised in 2003, which is also available online for free. Professor Hudson coined the term Super Imperialism exclusively for America’s new form of imperialism that exploit other countries “via the central banks (and international lending agencies) rather than via the activities of private corporations seeking profits”. Insofar as America’s Super Imperialism traces its genealogy to early forms of imperialism, there are some similarities between them. For example, both of them use national armies to protect the business or financial interest of a selected few, although it is to a somewhat lesser extent and less obvious for people to see today. Indeed, since Super Imperialism is mostly a form of economic colonialism through the complex utilization of so-called “dollar hegemony”, most people do not recognize its colonial nature. Of course, censorship by the U.S. government and self-censorship by the MSM of Professor Hudson’s writings only made the mass even less informed.

Still, America’s Super Imperialism is probably no less exploitive than earlier forms of imperialism. And it is largely the driving force behind our current global economic pecking order that is inherently unbalanced, perverted and ugly. (Just think of China, a relatively poor country, sending many billions of dollars to the U.S. every year to finance its consumption binge and its astronomical military budget. Or consider all those dollars, some may have been recycled from China with a petty 1% cost, pouring into China to make a killing on financial speculation and corporate takeovers while China won’t even be allowed to invest in basic U.S. industries such as a steel factory.) Left along, the current international financial architecture anchored on the dollar will surely cause more crises down the road and probably collapse onto itself eventually, as many economists have recognized.

Which brings me to the potential role of the renminbi. As I wrote before, through my words and actions, I inadvertently found a strategy to internationalize the renminbi. The important thing about that strategy is that it provides an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary transitioning to a new global monetary architecture, whose feasibility is backed by a detailed and comprehensive analysis of Sino-U.S. relations. As such, I am particularly saddened to see that Mr. Obama is insisting on a duel-out with China. In my original plan, there needs not be a currency war, just currency competition.

Currency competition is a good thing. In a sense, the fundamental problem with dollar hegemony is that there is no check and balance on the dollar. Indeed, once we have a truly multi-currency monetary regime, the exploitive nature of the reserve currencies would be greatly curtailed and “everyone on this planet [would] benefit from the new monetary regime” as compared to dollar hegemony. As a pragmatist, I do not vouch for absolute equality, just like I do not vouch for absolute freedom. When thinking about changes to such fundamental issues as international monetary architecture, one should focus on what feasible improvement we can make, rather than some ideal solution that is impossible or too costly to implement.

Part of the reason that Mr. Obama insists on a duel-out with China is because dollar’s reserve status is backed by the American power, of which its military power is a big component -- another feature of the current regime my modest plan does not seek to change. In a sense, Mr. Obama is really forcing China to show its hand. That’s probably why U.S. Ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman, Jr., perhaps in a slip of the tongue, advised that China should learn from the U.S. to be more thick-faced. As such, I think China’s new stealth fighter test is an appropriate thing to do at this time.

Still, displaying a fighter jet that is not expected to be in service for many years is a pure defensive gesture, especially considering the massive U.S. military deployment in Western Pacific. The renminbi is even worse - it has been retreating. When China is retreating under U.S. financial aggression, it is Chinese people who suffers. The most serious problems facing Chinese people today are inflation and high housing prices. Both of these problem can be traced to the extremely loose monetary policies of the United States. If the best defence is an offensive, I think China should be on the offensive now for the goods of its people. And the best offensive for China now is to start democratization based on my proposal.

As this long-running blog showed, it was after I seriously bungled China’s plan to bring me out as No.5 one more time during the Nuclear Summit in Washington in April 2010 that former President Jiang Zemin finally gave up on me, realizing that I am really no politician material. Which also helped to explain why Mr. Obama started to take advantage of the Cheonan issue in May, rather than immediately after its sinking in March. And the Obama administration has been on the offensive since then. Personally, I feel bad for my political obtuseness, which is partly to blame for Mr. Obama’s being able to hold back China’s progress towards democratization as well as economic structural reform.

Another reason why starting democratization is a good offensive has to do with the values. Even though there is a general military balance between China and the U.S. - which is a pillar for renminbi eventual reserve status - that balance is asymmetric at the moment. Given that it will take some time for China to close that hard power gap with the U.S., it is especially important for China to show the world the underlying values of the new reserve currency. And the best way to do that is through democratization towards a Chinese-style socialist democracy. As everyone knows, the reputation of the dollar has taken a beating in the global financial crisis. This is not to mention that the public does not know the true nature of America’s Super Imperialism due to the censorship by American political class.

I believe President Hu has been inclined to accept my ideas for China’s democratization and especially for international relations. After all, my ideas are based on traditional Chinese values. I urge people read President Hu’s speech at the UN General Assembly on September 23, 2009. It was a speech I wish I could have written as the approaches to international relations it outlined is permeated with the philosophy of Pragmatism. (My feeling is that while China had always wanted a genuine cooperative relationship with the U.S., the United States never gave up the idea of hegemony.)

President Hu’s state visit to America presents a perfect opportunity for China to make that move towards democratization. As I said before, without such a move by China first, the chances are very low that the American people would want to have a genuine and enduring cooperative relationship with China. But if China makes a move first and the U.S. and China establishes a genuine cooperative relationship, there would be no need for Mr. Obama’s “finest fighting force” to be deployed at China’s doorsteps. That would be a good thing not only for both peoples, but also for the world.

Without such a move, President Hu would be just continuing playing defence. Already the Obama administration has listed a number of demands in the speeches by their cabinet members this past week. On top of the list, not surprisingly, is renminbi appreciation. However, the more China appreciates its currency, the less room China will have to start economic structural reform, which requires political reform. The U.S. intention is really to perpetuate the current dollar hegemony and preserve its Super Imperialism.

And again China is playing defensive as can be seen in the rapid rise of the renminbi in the past couple of weeks. Although Chinese officials have always maintained that the Chinese currency does not respond to outsider pressure, the realities certainly gave people an impression otherwise. (My previous blogs documented how the various manufactured pressures by the Obama administration - military, diplomatic and electoral - were connected to the rapid rise of renminbi last fall.) This perception does not bode well for renminbi to become a reserve currency.

No wonder you can already hear people on the CNBC discussing which companies will benefit from the upcoming renminbi appreciation. And what were the names I heard? Various luxury goods makers. This exactly proved a point I made before. -- The vast majority of working people in China can not afford western imports. Indeed, because of their depressed wages, Chinese workers can not even afford the goods they themselves produced for export. Renminbi appreciation sounds good, but it does not benefit the vast majority of Chinese people. In fact, such a policy exacerbates income inequality problem in China, contributing to an even more unbalanced development. It is simply wrong.

Besides, there is a common misconception among western public that democracy equals peace. The reason for such a misconception is a complex one. Partly it was due to the intuitive experience of the citizens in western democracies. While there are many ways to describe a democracy, a key feature of a democracy is to resolve differences through peaceful means, including dialogue, debate, negotiation, peaceful and orderly protest and yes, even demagoguery. And demagoguery is precisely the other part of the reason for the public misconception. Those so-called experts know such demagoguery as “democracy equals peace” has no basis either in theory or in historical facts. A democratic country is not necessarily more peaceful than a non-democratic country. Take Japan for example. It was the first Asian country to have started political reform in the late 19th century. While Japanese political system, like those of other countries, evolved over many years, 1889 could be seen as a key year as the first modern Japanese constitution was proclaimed. Yet we see that five years later, it attacked China and Korea without declaration. And in 1904, it started the Japan-Russia war, again Pearl Harbour-style.

The trick the so-called experts and the MSM played on the public is that they did not distinguish - perhaps deliberately - the difference between domestic politics and international politics. Just because a country is a democracy internally does not mean it will automatically act in a democratic manner towards other countries on the international stage. The obvious example nowadays is the United States, which I called a totalitarian democracy. It really uses two sets of values - one set internally and one set externally. This inconsistency of values is at the heart of American hypocrisy. In contrast, my proposal for China’s embryonic democracy and international relations uses the same values domestically and internationally. That’s also why starting democratic reforms at home is a good values offensive against the U.S.

Since I started this update on an observation of the MSM, perhaps it’s a good idea to finish it with some thoughts on the media.

Media is sometimes referred to as the Fourth Estate in western democracies because of its indispensable role in the democratic process. An interesting question therefore is: What should the proper role be for the media in a (more) democratic international order? Do they have a similar responsibility in ensuring the smooth functioning of a (more) democratic international order? Just like holding individual political parties to account within a democracy, perhaps they should learn to do the same with respect to individual countries, especially those more influential ones.

I understand these question are fairly theoretical at the moment. Besides, as I observed before, “integrity is … sorely lacking among America’s political elites and in their political debates as well.” And “integrity in political debates starts with ascertaining the facts.” The mainstream media, as an integral part of the political process, has not done a very good job in helping to ascertain the facts. Too often, they contributed to the polarized and confrontational nature of the political debates within their respective democracies. If they do not have the habit of facts-checking in domestic political discourse, no wonder they can be extremely biased or downright hostile when it comes to entities outside of their respective democracies, such as China.

Granted, I learned a lot from the media along my long journey. And I admire the vibrancy they bring to our democratic life despite my personal feeling about them for ignoring my story. Still, I believe there is ample room for improvement of our journalism quality.

How to gauge the quality of journalism? I happen to think objectiveness is the highest standard that journalists could aspire to attain. Balance and fairness are important too, but they are fairly subjective to personal and other biases. Of course, all good journalism requires press freedom. Without press freedom, none of the above qualities would be possible.

I recognize that objectivity in journalism is not that easy to achieve. But I think it is a worthy goal for the good of our political discourse. And the best way to achieve high degree of objectivity is to use a facts-and-logic approach to reporting. A fact consists of who, what, when and where. A problem we have right now is that too often our reporters neglect the when of the fact, sometimes deliberately in order to mislead readers. So a rather simple way to start making improvement to journalism is to include the “when” in the facts whenever possible. If we do that, the logic of the events will easily follow and be clear to the readers.

As an example of a facts-and-logic approach to story telling, I will provide an update on the WilkiLeaks/ObamaLeaks story.

The latest major outbreak of the WikiLeaks story started on the weekend of November 27-28, 2009. On November 29, David Brooks cracked numerous nuts in his column about the WikiLeaks founder. On Novermber 30, Thomas Friedman linked WikiLeaks story to China. Since both of them were “people in the loop”, I wondered if the WikiLeaks story was the job of the Obama administration designed to take public attention away from my story, and indeed, as it gradually became clear, to demonize China. Which I wrote about in a update on December 3.

The next day, December 4, Mr. Friedman responded by writing again about the WikiLeaks story. Reading “between the lines” of only his first paragraph, one can see that the “sobering message” Mr. Friedman really “admitted” to have conveyed was: America is a lying power.

Revealing this particular truth about America does not mean I think America as a country has a character problem. On the contrary, what this example does show is that American people, together with people around the world, has been fooled by the American political class for way too long. The MSM is supposed to hold the governments to account. It’s time we all demand some accountability from them as well.

Update 20110201:

The modus operandi of U.S. foreign policy is to focus on the political class of foreign countries, particularly on those in power or potentially in power. One could imagine the U.S. government maintains a list of all potential leaders of a foreign country, ranked by the U.S. preference and according to the U.S. national interest. -- An interest, by the way, defined by the American political class and not necessarily in congruence with the interest of American people, as evidenced by decades of their economic policy at home. -- For those highly desirable foreign leaders, the U.S. government might choose to “enable” their rule. For those highly undesirable ones, the U.S. government might choose the extreme measure to eliminate, literally.

As for the people in those foreign countries, four words best sum up the attitude of American political class: They just don’t care. They don’t care about their human rights. They don’t care about their democratic rights. And they don’t care about their development rights. They just don’t care. The observation in my October 6, 2010 update on their changing position on Chinese wages vividly illustrated this point. They do not give a fig about the rights of Chinese workers. Likewise, when they flooded the world with all those newly printed dollars, they don’t give a fig about the hardship and misery of the people around the world felt from the inflation and asset bubbles their action caused.

Generally speaking, if promoting human rights and democracy in a particular country at a particular time will bring a regime change that is preferable to the current one, or simply cause chaos or instability in a country that is considered America’s opponent, the U.S. government might do it. Otherwise, they won’t bother. As for whether the regime reflects the will of the people, they don’t give a fig, either. They might pay lip service to human rights and democracy from time to time, but it is mostly to fool American people and indeed, people around the world. Indeed, promoting human rights and democracy has essentially become a huge smoke screen of the U.S. foreign policy, conveniently propagated to hide away the true U.S. foreign policy goals, i.e., ensuring U.S. hegemony and enforcing economic colonialism around the world, an idea and a practice that runs diametrically against the spirit of universal rights and democracy.

Of course, you’ve got to have a complete lack of social conscience to do what the American political class is doing to others. To say that the American political class only cares about themselves is an understatement. They have to be completely obsessed with “us” all the time. No wonder we saw excessive greed as a hallmark of their so-called Washington Consensus. Not surprisingly, President Hu, whose rule Mr. Obama had greatly “enabled”, shared their “who cares” attitude, as evidenced by the Internet article by his writer Mr. Xian Yan.

I am reminded of a phrase used by Naomi Klein when commenting on Mr. Obama’s winning the 2009 Nobel Bubble Prize. Corrupting influence is the true nature of American leadership around the world. And it is partly because of the America’s corrupting influence that China has not been able to make the critical move towards democratization. As my previous update implied, I support President Hu’s leadership as long as he is willing to start political reform in China, because that’s the ideal way to take on the challenges of such a momentous and complex task. However, if President Hu proves that he can not free himself from the U.S. influence, I believe it is time for a new leadership in China.

Update 20110208:

I am really tired. One indication of my tiredness is in the poor quality of my recent writings, as everyone can readily see. That’s primarily why I had not wanted to post my draft update as of January 17. However, I knew it would take me considerable time and energy to improve my exposition of the economic subjects in that update, ideally to a level so that even a layman can easily understand. (Fortunately, for more curious readers, they can always consult Professor Hudson’s excellent book, Super Imperialism, themselves.) Still, I am playing with Twitter and Facebook right now to see if any of them could serve as another platform for me to post my occasional observations on economic matters.

In the end I decided to post that update as it was because I felt many “people in the loop” had already got hold of it and indeed, started to crack nuts of it or steal my ideas from it. It made me angry and sad. But such was my life.

As for U.S. foreign policy vis-à-vis human rights and democracy, I recalibrated my observations in my last update. In this update, I would like to add more of my unique personal experience.

It was wrong for the U.S. and Canadian governments to have treated me so inhumanly, no matter what was their rationale. It was more wrong for them to do so, knowing very well that I was for China’s democratization. And It was even more wrong, obviously, considering that they knew I had had a chance, from time to time, to actually influence China’s prospect to move towards democratization. But of course, they knew I was essentially a 17, i.e., I was for China’s democratization but I was not a politician. Indeed, I never regarded myself as a politician, even if I consciously played the politics game after I got out of the Canadian mental institution in spring 2008 because I figured that was the only way I could get my life back.

Several incidents in prison and the mental hospital convinced me of my reasoning.

When I was first taken into the Forensic Psychiatric Hospital (FPH) for a court-ordered assessment in September 2007, Dr. Garen Gharakhanian was my assigned doctor. Since every aspect of my court process had been hijacked by the governments from behind the scenes, naturally I did not trust him, to say the least. As it turned out, the real goals of the governments in putting me through the psychiatric assessment were to “torture me” and to “look for problems”, as I revealed in The Governments Pushed Me To The Edge Yet Made Sure I Did Not Fall Over The Edge, which can be found in the 13-page document I submitted to the Court. And to do so, they relied “on extensive misrepresentation of my words, mischaracterization of my actions and even outright lies” through Dr. Gharakhanian and others in the hospital.

Indeed, I was so afraid to talk going into my first meeting with Dr. Gharakhanian that I even wrote a letter beforehand and presented it to him in person. Still, I remember that in one of our sessions he was so intimidating that he even pounded the table with his fist. This particular detail was so out of character of a doctor that it remained in my memory for a long time. Indeed, as I recalled this detail from time to time after I got out of the hospital, I found it quite comical as it reminded me the stereotypical scenes from movies like Red Corner, purportedly depicting interrogation techniques of Chinese authorities.

A later incident in the mental hospital was even more revealing of the governments’ motive to discredit my personal cause of seeking justice for 9 year old Cecilia Zhang and indeed, 5 year old Tamra Keepness and myself, by suggesting that I was perhaps politically motivated. This time I was taken back to FPH for treatment, i.e., forced psychiatric medication, and my assigned doctor was Dr. Brian Guan, a Chinese psychiatrist at the hospital. Before I was to meet Dr. Guan for the first time, my intake psychiatrist - who had seen me and recommended treatment for me - came to give me some printouts from my websites and suggested that I show them to Dr. Guan. This was very surprising to me because every time I had seen a psychiatrist, I would ask him or her to read my websites and they would invariably ignore my plead. As it turned out, one of the two stacks of papers were stapled together from “Page 14 of 34” to “Page 34 of 34”. The first 13 pages of the printouts were “missing”. After this apparently deliberate arrangement of my writings, sitting on the top page of the stack was my May 22, 2007 update to my blog on China’s A-SAT test, written in Chinese. Reading this passage on political reform in China without knowing anything else about me, one would immediately get the impression that I was a political figure. As such, I did not bring them to my meeting with Dr. Guan for fear of unnecessarily complicating my personal cause for justice. Of course, if the intake psychiatrist had given me my blog printout on the summary of connections between Cecilia Zhang murder case and my personal experience in Canada, I would have eagerly shown it to Dr. Guan.

Another detail was in the prison assault incident. As I mentioned before, the attacker was a very experienced criminal. As soon as he heard guards coming, he stopped assaulting me. By the time the guards opened the door, I was sitting against the wall, tired from defending myself. (My bunk bed was the top one - not that I had time to clime up there.) However, after the guards rushed in, the first thing they did to me was to push me under the bunk. Then I felt a flash, much like that coming out of a camera. (The lights in our cell had been broken for a long time and therefore, it was very dim inside.) As I thought about this detail later, I realized that not only had the government orchestrated the assault by, among other things, reducing or dropping a murder charge against the attacker beforehand, they also had a unseemly political motive. Apparently, by taking a picture of me under the bunk after the assault, they would have an opportunity to show - if and when I become a political leader in China - how “cowardly” I was.

It was because of these experiences that I realized that even though I did not think of myself as a political figure, I could never shake off that perception. If the governments always viewed me as a potential political leader of China, the only way I could be brought out and get my life back was to play the politics game along -- even though I did not want to be a politician and never intended to give up my personal cause. That’s essentially what I did after I was released from the mental hospital and had a chance to clear my head from the debilitating drug effects. But unfortunately, I am just not a politician material, as everyone can see. I guess my problem is that I am guided more by doing the right things than winning the political game at hand. In the end, if I had some influence on Chinese and international politics, it was in my ideas. And I do believe they are the right ones both for China and for the world at large.

As such, if my decision to play the politics game along will pay off in some way, it can only be due to my ideas. In other words, if I am brought out by the Chinese government, it will mostly be because of my ideas on China’s democratization and its international relations. Obviously, such an occasion will not only give me a great personal satisfaction, but also a great satisfaction in seeing China finally moving towards democratization. (After all, I do love my motherland deeply.)

I believe Chinese government had just such a plan on February 2, Chinese New Year’s Eve. However, Mr. Obama - yes, him again - gave a televised address on the Egyptian situation in the evening of February 1, in which he cracked nuts by saying “an orderly transition … must begin now”, which then became headline everywhere. I could not believe his bullshit. -- Having stalled China’s progress towards democratization for a long time, he now wanted to give people the impression that China’s democratization was in response to his call. -- I used the word “bullshit” not so much as a deliberate affront but as a fairly common phenomenon defined by philosophy professor Harry G. Frankfurt because Mr. Obama does not care about truth, as this and many other incidents revealed. Not surprisingly the American mainstream media got Mr. Obama’s bullshit. And you could almost feel their giddiness the next day when they cracked the nut again with Robert Gibbs, Mr. Obama’s official spokesman in the White House.

Yet, I had so much respect for China’s coming democratization endeavour based on my own ideas that I felt China had better not to start the process under such a circumstance. That’s why, not knowing how else to stop China’s plan, I again harshly criticized President Hu and even suggested a power shuffle in the top Chinese leadership at the end of my update above. The truth of the matter is, Chinese leadership are very cautious and democratization in China will likely take place only when there is a widespread consensus among top leaders - a consensus likely built around my ideas for China’s next stage of development. And as the tried and tested leaders in such a huge meritocracy, I have no doubt that they will be able to bring my ideas to a gradual and orderly fruition once they start the democratization process.

Two days later, I noticed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak gave an interview to ABC, in which he also cracked several nuts. For example, he said that he “cared” about Egypt. He also said that President Obama did not “understand” Egyptian “culture” and that there would be “chaos” if he left office. It appeared Messrs. Obama and Mubarak were trying very hard to draw China in. -- An effort not that much different from that by Mr. Obama last year with respect to Haiti, I should add.

In light of this situation, I have to ask Mr. Obama: What does the current tumult in Egypt have to do with China? Please, leave China’s internal affairs along. And leave China’s democratization along.

P.S. 20110215:

I saw Mr. Obama was again “borrowing” my ideas at his news conference today. Only this time, he was “borrowing” from my unpublished draft update written last Thursday after President Mubarak’s televised address. A draft I decided not to publish at the time precisely because I felt that he would seize upon to draw me in and to exacerbate the Egyptian situation.

Indeed, it was only yesterday that I realized, from reading press reports, that my unpublished update had already been leaked out. While I lament the leak of my hard-laboured writings, I’d like to think that generally, people were drawn to them because they contained the truths and therefore, inherent longing for universal justice, and they contained the right ideas for our troubled world. However, I am not sure the same can be said about Mr. Obama based on my past experience with him. Indeed, I feel what Mr. Obama did today had essentially cheapened my true, original thoughts and sowed confusions among the public. Which made me really sad and mad. Yet at the mean time, Mr. Obama also cemented his administration's reputation as a hypocrite when it comes to its foreign policy vis-à-vis human rights and democracy.

P.S. 20110210:

Judging from today’s remarks by the spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry, it’s clear that the Chinese government did not want to be pointed finger at for inadvertently exacerbating the Egyptian situation, even though they might want very much to bring me out and to start China’s democratization. And I understood the problem was that I mentioned Messrs. Obama and Mubarak “in the same breath” at the above update. If that’s an “idiocy”, I am certainly guilty as charged. But again, you all know that I am not that bright politically.

If I was reluctant to comment on the situation in Egypt at the beginning despite the deliberate provocations by the American political class, I certainly became even more guarded after I posted the above update. But watching the developments on TV today, I felt I had to speak out at this critical moment. As a member of China’s Tiananmen Square generation, the last thing I want to see is a repeat of China’s tragedy in Egypt today. And given the current situation in Egypt, I don’t think the Chinese government will want to bring me out and therefore, I shall remain unknown to the Egyptian people, anyways. (Needless to say, anything I say in this update and indeed, in all my writings, is still my own and does not reflect the view or the positions of the Chinese government.)

Indeed, as you can imagine, despite the fact that a simple truth had slipped out of my tongue about Messrs. Obama and Mubarak, I had exercised great restraint in writing the above update for fear of being taken advantage of by Mr. Obama to exacerbate the Egyptian situation. When I see a conflict, my nature instinct is to try to lower down the temperature. And if you would read my previous postings, such as those dealing with similar situations in Thailand and Kyrgyzstan at the beginning of this long-running blog, you would know that I am guided, sometimes at great costs both personally and for China, by the principle of humanism, which is at the heart of Confucianism and should remain at the heart of still-to-be-developed Modern Confucianism.

As an outsider, I feel for the Egyptian people. Hundreds of them have already perished and many thousands wounded in this tumult. The Egyptian people should never have to come to this point in the first place. The current tumult provides a far less than ideal environment for initiating the complex endeavour of democratization. (That’s why I have argued for a long time that the Chinese government should start its political reform as soon as possible and before the societal tension became too high.) And since the tumult started, I have prayed that the Egyptian government and Egyptian people would be able to quickly come to an resolution to their quagmire and move their great country forward.

However, as things stand now, the lives and security of average Egyptian people are at stake. They are my utmost concern and indeed, should be the concern of every conscientious person on earth right now. I think this much is clear: The best way to defuse the current volatile situation in Egypt is for President Hosni Mubarak to leave and to leave voluntarily. As such, I have this simple plea to President Mubarak: Please listen to your people and do the right thing for your country.

However, I also know that Mr. Mubarak is not likely to heed my plea, judging from his televised address earlier today. Despite all the appearances of a defiance he created against the Obama administration, he knew that his regime was still Mr. Obama’s favourite choice to run Egypt, as can be easily seen from the shifting and shifting positions of the Obama administration in the past couple of weeks. Mr. Mubarak even cracked a nut in his speech by saying that he wanted to take Egypt “to the shore of safety”. And where did the nut come from? Well, it came from the very end of Mr. Obama’s now infamous inauguration speech. A speech that called the murder of innocent children “childish things”, among other things.

Indeed, since I posted my above update, the Egyptian regime and the Obama administration have been trying to discredit the “simple truth” I uttered there by engaging in political theatrics. Mr. Mubarak’s foreign minister gave a television interview to PBS, cracking numerous nuts. Wasting no time, both the spokesmen for the White House and the State Department then sharply rebuffed his comments “in the same breathe” of the PBS’s News Hour programme. I guess even America’s public television stations belong to the always collaborating MSM.

I know that many in the Egyptian political class can read my blogs. And I know what I wrote here is plain truth to them. Indeed, as last year’s Haiti episode revealed, the effort by the Obama administration to try to draw me into the Egyptian situation is a sign of their desperation. And Mr. Mubarak just wanted to desperately cling on to his power.

While I can only pray that the Egyptian people will be able to contain their emotions tomorrow, I hope the Egyptian authorities will do everything in their power to prevent a repeat of China’s Tiananmen Square tragedy in their country. In this time of great tumult, maintaining order and stability and protect the lives of Egyptian people should be their first priority.

I will pray for Egypt, and pray for you all.

Update 20110305:

I started writing this update the morning after I posted the above update with a raging headache. A headache I got, I believe, from thinking too much about politics the previous night after reading the transcript of Mr. Obama’s news conference. Why did Mr. Obama so obviously steal from my writings? Was he, just like in his March 12, 2009 speech, again showing a sincere desire to accept my political ideas? If so, maybe I should be careful and not too harsh with my criticism of him. Oh, how I wished a genuine cooperation from him. A cooperation based on the common philosophy of Pragmatism.
As it turned out, it did not matter whether I used the word “steal” or “borrow” on Mr. Obama. And it did not matter whether I called him a “bullshitter” or not. His purpose was to draw me into the Egyptian situation and he knew the best way to do so was to steal my ideas from my unpublished writings. Indeed, before I read the transcript of his news conference, I was still debating whether I should post my draft even though I knew it had been leaked out to the media.
That’s the real reason why the Liberals in Ottawa were so energized the next day over the Bev Oda affair, I believe. Aside from insinuating that my draft 20110210 was “doctored” and therefore I had an “integrity” problem, their leader Michael Ignatieff opened his first question of the Question Period by paraphrasing part of my February 1 update.
For some time, I was completely baffled by the Liberals’ over-the-top reactions. As you all know, the governments have constant surveillance inside my home. And I can tell you that I wrote my draft 20110210 at home, starting from late afternoon and ending around midnight. So the governments and the Liberals knew I wrote it. Indeed, precisely because I felt Mr. Obama has tried to steal from it, I decided, unlike my unpublished draft 20110117, to post it as it was when I last saved it on my computer at 11:48:56PM on February 10, despite some obvious grammatical errors. I did not want to change a single letter. Therefore, for the Liberals to suggest that my draft 20110210 was doctored was an outrageous lie, a brazen smear of my character and an enormous insult.
And I was baffled by Mr. Ignatieff’s nuts-cracking too. I did not – and still don’t – know why he picked up the phrase “don’t care” from my February 1 update, although I may have some inkling about his reference to “rot fish” or “fish head”. As I said before, my February 1 update was largely a recalibration of my observations of U.S. foreign policy vis-à-vis human rights and democracy. And my observations, including those on the attitude of American political class and to a lesser extent, that of Canadian political class, came from my personal experience, much of which had been documented in my previous blogs. Indeed, I was so shocked and incensed by such an attitude during the early stage of my journey that I used an expletive – an extremely rare occurrence in my writings - together with the word “care” in one of my blogs, I believe.
It was in pondering these baffling questions that I realized days later that the Liberals’ reaction might have something to do with a sentence I initially typed into my computer on Tuesday February 15, but was subsequently deleted from the final posting. As I recalled, I had once told my computer that judging from some press reports I saw on Monday, my draft 20110210 might have played a role in the ousting of President Mubarak.
I deleted that sentence because I felt the evidence I had was not sufficient to support such a claim. I am a facts-and-logic guy. What got me to say that in the first place was largely the Toronto Star front page headline on Monday: “Egyptian Generals Waste No Time”, where the phrase “waste no time” appeared to have come from my unpublished draft. There were a couple of nuts-cracking by BBC World News on that same day, e.g., “Guilty as Charged” at 8:00AM and “Don’t Hold Your Breath” at 4:00PM, but they had no use for the question as to whether my draft had had an impact in Egypt. The timing of those nuts-cracking by the media was important in my reasoning. That they all took place on Monday suggested that these media organizations perhaps did not immediately get a hold of my draft. If these nuts-cracking had happened on Saturday - immediately after President Mubarak’s leaving office, personally I would have felt more inclined to infer an actual impact of my draft and perhaps even kept that sentence in the above posting. Indeed, the content of the Star article dealt mostly with the developments in Egypt over the weekend, i.e., the aftermath of Mubarak resignation, rather than the resignation itself on Friday.
Here comes a thing that really annoys me. As I said before, writing is a difficult task and it usually takes me a lot of time and energy to write something. Because of this and because the Obama administration, with the collaboration from the Harper government, knew what I was writing perhaps in real time, they were able to gain considerable political advantage by reacting to my writings even before I was able to publish them, as can be seen from many of my previous blogs. Personally, what annoyed me most was seeing people cracking nuts or even stealing from my unpublished writings. That’s why I had to publish some of my more recent updates even though I was not completely satisfied with them for various reasons.
Besides, writing is a process. Many of my ideas only come forth when I put my pen on paper, so to speak. I should be afforded the same opportunity as any other writer to refine, to recalibrate and to correct whatever I type into my own computer. It really horrifies me to see people cracking nuts immediately on something I have not even made public and to think that perhaps all the absurdities I ever typed into my computers had been leaked. As I said before, the standard I maintained with respect to my writings was that every word I ever put on the Internet was true to the best of my knowledge at the time of its publication. I would still like to maintain that standard. However, if I am constantly forced to publish my writings in order to combat leak, it will be extremely difficult for me to maintain that standard in the future. And I don’t really want to lower my standard on the veracity of my words.
I am not sure if the more intensive nuts-cracking of my unpublished writings recently was due to fact that two of my computers were attacked or inflicted with virus on Christmas Day and therefore, my computer activities could be more easily monitored by the governments. Maybe the ever increasing readership of my blogs created a demand on the part of the governments to leak ever more frequently my writings to “people in the loop”. In any case, I don’t like these leaks a bit. That’s why, on Friday February 18, I decided to buy another computer - my 4th one since I was released from the mental hospital, all for the same purpose. And frankly, I am still not completely sure that everything I do on this new computer would remain “private”, even if I write outside my home. (And if you happened to know my spending habit, you would know that this purchase represented a big deal for me. Besides, I consider it a huge waste as all I use this computer for is word-processing.)
Although I deleted that sentence for lack of sufficient evidence, I can see why the Liberals might want to seize it as an issue not only for partisan purpose, but also for the purpose of attacking my character, my story and ultimately, my political ideas. For all their appearances of being a central-left party, the Liberals are indeed much more hostile to my political ideas than the Conservatives, strange as it may sound. And the reason lies chiefly with their leader Michael Ignatieff, I believe.
This is because my political ideas, by calling for a genuine and enduring cooperative relationship between U.S. and China based on the common philosophy of Pragmatism, necessarily call for the abandonment of the obsolete idea of American hegemony. Yet Mr. Ignatieff is an adamant American empirist, as can be seen from his previous writings such as his defence of the Iraq War. By contrast, Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a much shrewder politician. Just like many American politicians, he is more pragmatic than Mr. Ignatieff in respect to my ideas.
(20110305: Mr. Jeffrey Simpson over at The Globe and Mail seems to be saying in his column today that it’s unfair to judge Mr. Ignatieff on his previous views on the Iraq War. I’ll just repeat that my judgement is based on his writings, including those on the Iraq War. Think of the enterprise of the Iraq War as a ship. The ship had long sunk. It’s not surprising that many previous cheerleaders of the enterprise had jumped ship and recanted their views. But many of them, whether they are in the U.S. or elsewhere, could still remain to be adamant American empirists. I believe Mr. Ignatieff is one of them.)
Like I said before, I firmly believe that my ideas are the right ones not only for China, but also for the world at large. Indeed, I believe many world leaders, including those in the U.S., know deep down in their hearts that my ideas are the right ones for our time. That’s why we saw some of them, such as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Sara Palin – who all has presidential ambitions, by the way - showed their receptiveness to my political ideas from time to time. Still, having been the dominate power for much of the 20th century, it is not easy for the American political class to voluntarily give up their idea of the American hegemony.
To illustrate this split personality of American political class, perhaps a refinement of my January 28 update on the Tucson shooting is in order. As I wrote previously, a critical pillar of American hegemony is the dollar hegemony, i.e., the U.S. dollar as the predominate reserve currency. If you don’t know anything else about global finance and international trade, the mere fact that the almighty dollar, as the de facto world currency, is controlled by the U.S. Federal Reserve – a private central bank essentially representing the interest of Wall Street - should already ring an alarm bell. But that’s exactly the reality of American governance superstructure, or in the words of Mr. Obama himself, “the essence of what our democracy is all about”, or as I ventured last June, “the incestuous relationship between Washington and Wall Street in the underbelly of American system of government”. Indeed, knowing this fact will give you an intuitive understanding as to why, having brought the global financial system to the brink of collapse, Wall Street bankers are once again pocketing astronomical bonus year after year while much of the world economy is struggling ever more desperately. Or why there appears to be a never-ending revolving door between successive U.S. administrations (mainly the White House and the Treasury Department) and Wall Street banks.
Despite the inherent ugliness of the international financial system hinged on the dollar hegemony, much of the American political class does not want to give it up just yet in order to prolong the American hegemony. That’s also the primary message of Tucson shooting to the American political class. An ominous disciplinary message sent out by Mr. Obama himself on behalf of that omnipresent power in the American governance superstructure essentially representing Wall Street interest, just hours after the shooting rampage in Tucson. Not surprisingly, much of the American political class got his message. Whether they had shown an inclination before to accept my ideas (i.e., Sara Palin) or not (i.e., John Kerry), they all reaffirmed their support to American hegemony. Apparently, the code word this time was “American Exceptionalism” in their respective speeches, as a number of pundits had already pointed out.
(By the way, even though I personally do not favour a return to gold for the simple reason, aside from some economic reasons, that it is too costly and too disruptive, I believe the Wall Street Journal editorial on Palin and Zoellick did provide, in between the lines, an obviously accurate prediction for the future of international monetary system: China would either be playing a constructive role in the new international financial structure that sees the end of dollar hegemony or we should all be prepared to go back to gold. There is no way that China would let the U.S. rob its huge dollar reserves, which represents much of its hard-earned fruit of 30 year’s economic development. Besides, the current international monetary system would have collapsed anyways without China’s massive assistance and timely cooperation at the height of global financial crisis. Even today, China is still essentially propping up the current system. The vastly revised figure on China’s holding of U.S. debts released by the Treasury department on February 28 not only confirmed my previous observation about the sheer unreliability of such Treasury reports, it was in fact a reflection of the Obama administration’s anxiety over the ever more shaking foundation of the dollar hegemony.)
Separately, I could provide more details on the rivalry between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton, but you’ve already got the idea: The default option for the post-America world is almost surely built on my political ideas, as many would agree. With so many American political leaders hedging their options with my ideas, it is no surprise that Mr. Harper, being a shrewd politician as he is, would hedge similarly. That’s why, for example, having refused to visit China for a long time after taking office and boycotted the Beijing Olympics to boot, when Mr. Obama visited China in November 2009, he immediately followed in Mr. Obama’s footsteps.
Of course, when compared to Mr. Ignatieff the loyal American empirist, Mr. Harper is a far less preferable choice to run Canada in the eyes of the Obama administration and the American political class. That’s why he was called to Washington on February 4, ostensibly for the announcement on the start of a negotiation on a new trade and security deal between U.S. and Canada. In reality, Mr. Obama was (a) handing the opposition Liberals some convenient political ammunition to be used against the Conservatives in a possible spring election and (b) letting Mr. Harper take some heat with him from the fallout of my file in case I had been brought out by the Chinese government just two days before. Now you see how the U.S. government “enables” its favourite foreign leaders? (I got the feeling that Mr. Ignatieff went after my February 1 update precisely because he was angry that I had exposed the trade secret of American imperial diplomacy. And he knew I had included him in my mind when I wrote that passage.)
Frankly, just like I don’t trust Mr. Obama’s occasional “borrowing” of my ideas, I view the difference between the Liberals and the Conservatives on my file as wholly insignificant. As I said before, to have stalled China’s progress towards democratization is arguably Mr. Obama’s biggest foreign policy achievement. And without the close collaboration of the Harper government in hiding my story from the public, Mr. Obama would not have been able to make that achievement at all. There really is not an iota of a difference between the Harper government and the Obama administration with respect to my file. Now for the Liberals, who would portrait them to be more aligned with American interest, to try to involve me in a partisan brawl with the Tories, it just smacked petty politics.
I use the word “petty” here not as a derision. I love Canada. And I have utmost respect for Canadian democracy. If you read my blogs, you will know that when I started my journey to seek justice for those two innocent angles as well as for myself, I knew almost nothing about politics. I learned politics mostly from my experience over years of my journey. And most of my political knowledge I gained came from observing Canadian politics. I often marvelled what a great country Canada is – not only in its nature and its people, but also in its governance system, which also partially explained my fierce advocacy for China’s democratization. The fact that many issues that dominate the political debates here are petty - when compared with the multitude of problems facing China and many other developing countries - is in fact a testimony to the maturity of Canadian democracy. Now that China is poised to embark on the journey of democratization after thousands of years of authoritarian rule, I just wish Canada would choose to play an encouraging role and perhaps lend its expertise in a genuine and unselfish way, rather than blindly follow the U.S. government’s international hypocrisy. Such a posture would surely bring much-needed international credibility and goodwill back to Canada.

Part II

I started writing this part of the update in the morning of March 3 at home, having convinced that the previous part, plus a partially outline of what I was about to write, had been snooped up by the governments. In the past couple of weeks, it has been really tiring carrying all my materials and computers around to find places to sit down and write, especially when I was fasting this week. At home, at least I could lie down a bit when dizziness hit.
However, I found I could not concentrate well at home now, always feeling someone looking over my shoulder. So, much of this part is still written outside of my home, although I knew it probably did not make much of a difference in terms of evading the all-powerful governments. I just felt better when I was outside, which helped my writing. (Hey, I hoped at least all the absurdities I typed into my computer would remain my won.)
Besides those mentioned elsewhere in this update, the facts that supported my initial conviction include:
·    President Obama called Prime Minister Harper on Monday night, thanking him for his handling of the Libya file. I believe Mr. Obama’s real purpose was political, i.e., to create the impression that he has not been enabling the opposition leader Michael Ignatieff.
·    Mr. Ignatieff, when commenting on the election charges facing the Conservatives last Friday, said that it was “a big deal”.
·    When raising the same question again on March 2, Mr. Ignatieff said: “This is fundamentally a question about the public character of the Prime Minister, his lust to win at any cost and at any price”.
It’s clear that Mr. Ignatieff still wanted to draw me into his partisan fight with the Conservatives. Of course, he knew that there is not much of a difference between him and the Conservatives when it came to my file. In trying to drag me through any muds they could dredge up in connection with my draft writing on Egypt, a far sinister motive of the Liberals was to attack my character, smother the truths I uncovered along my journey, and ultimately discredit my political ideas. That’s why we saw economic deceits staged a pushback at a G20 meeting for finance ministers and central bankers during the weekend of February 19.
Because of the constant surveillance the governments put on me over the years, I am sure there will be no shortage of materials that they can use in their planned smear campaign. I don’t want to compare myself with Martin Luther King, Jr. although he is one of the few people in the world I truly admire, as I probably mentioned before. Yet Dr. King was also under heavy FBI surveillance during his fight for social justice in the U.S. and part of FBI’s real objective was to discredit him “through revelations regarding his private life”. I got the same feeling when Mr. Ignatieff mentioned “fish head” in his attack on February 16.
As you probably know, I enjoy taking a walk in my daily life. Before I moved last November, Granville Island was my favourite destination – beautiful, with an art college on site, and neither too far nor too close to my then apartment. Often times I would take a stroll inside the Public Markets as well. And there I would find, from time to time, one of my favourite foods with an incredible price – salmon heads for 99 cents per pound. Succumbing to my temptations, I would purchase a couple to take home to make a dish for my lunch or dinner. -- I am sure the governments knew this little routine of mine. In fact, in one of the occasions I noticed someone taking a picture at my direction when I was doing the transaction, although I could not be sure if he was merely a tourist.
I understand that most Canadians probably wouldn’t entertain the idea of having salmon heads as part of their diet. That’s precisely why Mr. Ignatieff wanted to bring up this, and perhaps some other parts of my private life in the first place. Getting into the details of my private life and driving a wedge between me and most Canadians would undoubtedly cast a negative view of me in people’s minds. Besides, such personal attacks would also take people’s attention away from what’s really important in my story: Was 9 year old Cecilia Zhang Canadian? Was 5 year old Tamra Keepness Canadian? What was the role of the governments in their murder and the subsequent cover-up? (I would just suggest Mr. Ignatieff refrain from calling those salmon heads “rot”. If you don’t have any respect for me, at least show some respect for those hard-working grocers on Granville Island.)
And there is another similarity between the treatment of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by the FBI and the treatment of me by the Liberals for the benefit of the Obama administration. The premise the FBI used to put surveillance on Martin Luther King, Jr. was to investigate if Dr. King had communist ties. Apparently, the premise the Liberals used to attack me was that I had jihadist connections, absurd as it sounded. That’s why Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae made a reference to “jihadist” in the PMO on February 24.
Of course, just like the FBI case against Dr. King, Liberals’ accusation or insinuation of me being a “jihadist” also mounted to a wild witch hunt. However, I know I have to take such an accusation seriously. It’s not just that I had been accused of being a terrorist or indeed, had been framed in staged terrorist acts in Ottawa back in 2007, as I detailed before. I believe a hugely important goal of the Liberals and indeed, the Obama administration, was to use this wild allegation as a pretext to launch personal attacks on me with the ultimate objective to discredit the many truths I uncovered as well as my political ideas. Perhaps as a sign of things to come, by emphasizing the word “intention” when announcing sending HMCS Charlottetown to the Libyan coast on Monday, Defense Minister Peter MacKay appeared to be saying that even the Conservatives would not vouch for my intention on writing my draft on Egypt. (Apparently, Mr. Mubarak justified his dictatorial rule of Egypt to his chief foreign backer the U.S. government at least partially on his suppression of such groups as Muslim Brotherhood, which is viewed with suspicion by the U.S. government. If my draft 20110210 had played a role in his ousting or even if I wrote that draft with the intention to help the Muslim Brotherhood, then I must be a “jihadist”. And everyone knows how the U.S. government treats a “jihadist”, given the widespread islamophobia in that country. In fact, on the same day when the Liberals launched their wild attacks on me, Obama administration’s director of national intelligence openly casted doubt on the intentions of the Muslim Brotherhood, which then made headlines everywhere.)
I hate being put on the defensive. As I realized soon after my previous posting, it’s Mr. Obama who had successfully drawn me into the Egyptian situation with truly malicious intentions. Now I’ll have to treat seriously the above accusations or insinuations - however far-fetched they may be - and nip them in the bud.
First of all, I don’t know if my draft 20110210 had an impact on the Egyptian situation the next day, even though the peaceful step-down of President Mubarak was exactly the outcome that I had hoped for when I wrote that draft. Indeed, since I have provided all the information I had at the time when I typed that sentence into my computer, you can make your own judgement as to whether such an inference was warranted. (There has not been any new information in this regard since.) And your judgement would be just as good as mine. Or better yet, simply ask The Toronto Star directly: Were they implying that my draft had an actual impact in Egypt?
Secondly, the thought of Muslim Brotherhood never even came close to my mind when I wrote that draft. Indeed, I did not even know Muslim Brotherhood or any other similar groups before the Egyptian unrest. When I wrote that draft, all in my mind was to avoid potential bloodsheds in the streets of Cairo, which looked like a very distinct possibility at that moment.
Let’s recap what had happened on that day. You got hundreds of thousands of protesters on Tahiri square demanding President Mubarak to step down. You got high-ranking officials from the Egyptian government, the ruling party and the military, all suggesting that that could happen soon. And everyone knew Mr. Mubarak was to give a speech later that night. So the expectation was very high that Mr. Mubarak would indeed step down that night. Then you got the shocking speech from Mr. Mubarak himself essentially repeating the same lines he had been saying to his people for years. You could just imagine the roller coaster ride of people’s emotions.
Indeed, the situation was so “explosive” – in the word of Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammed ElBaradei – that I felt that I probably could not write fast enough to make a difference. Soon after Mr. Mubarak’s speech, there were TV reports that angry protesters were marching toward the presidential palace and/or the state television station even though it was late night in Egypt. It looked like a confrontation between the people and the regime was imminent.
As it turned out, I was able to finish writing my draft fairly smoothly. (Mind you, that’s by my own standard. It still took me about 9 hours.) There were several reasons for my relative swiftness in composing that draft: (1) The urgency of the situation in Egypt that night; (2) I had given some thoughts to the Egyptian situation for some time because of the deliberate provocations by the American political class; (3) The situation in Egypt seemed particularly pertinent to my deep-rooted philosophy with respect to social and political changes. As I had written quite extensively, whether it’s on China’s own democratic transformation, or on the international financial structure, or on international political order in general, I always favour an evolutionary change than a revolutionary change. This is because I attach paramount importance to the lives and well beings of the average people in all these situations.
That’s why it upset me so much to see Mr. Obama stealing from my draft, especially since I had not published it at the time. Yesterday (March 4) I saw David Brooks, perhaps having gotten hold a copy of the first part of this update, mounted a subtle defense for Mr. Obama’s behaviour in his column, Huntington’s Clash Revisited. Leaving aside the obvious fact that Mr. Brooks’ effort was nothing more than a switching of concept to that of general learning and communication among civilizations, I should point out Mr. Obama’s specific behaviour was unethical on several fronts. Not only had he never acknowledged me when he stole from my writings, he has also been actively preventing me from being known to the public. What’s more in this latest occurrence, through his minions in Canadian politics, he has been trying to brand me as a criminal. That’s why the Liberals had brazenly attempted to turn the whole thing upside down and accused me of “doctoring”.
Now, as I probably said before, I have no problem when people subscribe to my philosophy – in fact I would welcome that – AS LONG AS THEY ARE GENUINE. However, Mr. Obama’s behaviour was nothing but genuine. His purpose was, plainly, to bullshit. He did not care about the truth. On the contrary, he wanted to obscure the truth. While people can easily find my consistent adherence to the principles of humanism through the many many examples in my long journey, what can be said about Mr. Obama on that? Frankly, just the opposite.
Indeed, as I mentioned in passing in my draft 20110210, Mr. Obama had been trying to exacerbate the situation in Egypt. In doing so, he had shown a wanton disregard for human lives. Looking back, I can see that this is hardly surprising. From the onset of the Egyptian unrest, it’s clear that the Mubarak regime, U.S. government’s 30 year ally in the region, could not last long. That could not have been a good feeling for the people in the White House and Mr. Obama must have lamented his bad luck in seeing it happen during his watch. And if he was going to lose Egypt anyways, why not make the most of it by manufacturing more chaos in the process to see what happens, especially considering that he could possibly draw China in? After all, China represents the biggest threat to American hegemony in his mind.
That’s exactly what Mr. Obama did. In his first address on the Egyptian situation on January 28, he cracked several nuts on my January 24 and 27 updates, including “pursuit”, “true” and “around the world”. (Let me just quickly say that Egypt was never in my mind when I posted those two updates. The phrase “around the world” is simply part of my vocabulary, as everyone can see from my previous writings. Indeed, my intention was hoping to be brought out on January 25 and therefore put Mr. Obama on the defensive during his State of the Union address that night in front of the whole world, having learned my lesson from last January, which was also a time when the Chinese government was actively trying to bring me out. -- I only realized it after the facts last January, though. For example, Mrs. Hillary Clinton apparently did not want to share the potential fallout of my file with his boss on the same stage. As the Drudge Report headlined at the time: “Hillary Decides: Skip the State of the Union”. Even former president George W. Bush went to the hometown of Confucius in China during the State of the Union occasion. -- Of course, the governments knew my intention when I posted my update on January 24. That’s why they created a messed-up version of my posting and potentially disrupted my plan.)
Then, of course, came Mr. Obama’s bullshit second address on February 1. Even with that kind of provocation, I refrained from directly commenting on the Egyptian situation in my posting that night. However, when I saw such sensational VoA headlines as “If a million Chinese went on the streets, what would PLA do” (translated from Chinese), I felt I could not take it anymore. Perhaps sensing that finally they were about to successfully draw me in, they hatched a violent plan with the then Mubarak regime for Friday, February 4, billed as the “Day of Departure” by the Egyptian protesters.
That’s why The New York Times – the official mouthpiece of the Obama White House in the MSM, as can be seen from my previous blogs - published an article late in the day or evening on February 3, saying that the Obama administration was working on an “orderly transition” of the Mubarak regime. Soon this little online article, strangely, became a major item on many news networks that night. What’s even stranger, as a puzzled veteran reporter John King pointed out on CNN, there was nothing new in this NYT article. At the same time, the Mubarak regime was reportedly using heavy-handed methods to round up journalists, which led to at least one commentator worrying out loud about the next day’s massive protest. It was then that I realized Mr. Obama’s evil plan. If I had commented on the Egyptian situation and the Chinese government subsequently brought me out that night, Mr. Obama, with an always collaborating MSM on his side, would be able to put the blame of HIS manufactured bloodshed in Cairo squarely on China. Moreover, having bombarded the public with his propaganda that his administration was working on an “orderly transition” of the Egyptian regime in advance, he could even claim that he was the good guy. In the ensuring confusion and chaos, he might just be able to justify Mr. Mubarak’s continuing stay in office to head off foreign (i.e., Chinese) interference and therefore save Mr. Mubarak from his inevitable fall. Indeed, reading between the lines of Mr. Mubarak’s final speech on February 10, that’s exactly the pretext he was using to justify his desperate hold on power.
It was mostly because of this hair-raising experience that, after I finished writing my draft in the evening of February 10, I hesitated again about posting it. Although my hope was to avoid potential bloodsheds on the streets of Cairo, my concern was: What would happen if Mr. Mubarak did not step down? Would Messrs. Obama and Mubarak engineer another plan to exacerbate the already volatile situation and blame it on China if I made my writing public? That’s primarily why eventually I decided not to post it.
As it turn out, President Mubarak resigned from office the next day. Naturally, I was quite relieved. I knew I did not have to post my draft anymore. Indeed, I almost forgot about it until the next Monday when I noticed it had been leaked out to the media. Still I was not prepared to post it. That’s why, I believe, Mr. Obama went on the stage himself to steal from it publicly on Tuesday, knowing very well that was a sure way to prod me to post my draft. Once I posted my draft, his minions in the Liberal party here immediately launched a massive smear campaign again me and even insinuated an Islamist connection. I got the feeling that Mr. Obama is really going for the kill this time.
Still, as someone who cares about truth, I believe truth will also serve me well.

P.S. 20110315:

As usual, Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman of the New York Times were at the forefront of carrying out Mr. Obama’s strategy with respect to my file. Of all their efforts to draw me into the Egyptian situation, perhaps the most provocative and indeed, most malicious one was their lie that China and other developing countries are to blame for the recent soaring food prices worldwide and therefore at least indirectly responsible for the unrest in Egypt and other places.

I was so incensed reading Mr. Friedman’s column, China, Twitter and 20-Year-Olds vs. the Pyramids, on Sunday February 6 that I typed the following sentence into my computer on that same day: “I see Mr. Friedman is lying again about China, this time in his column on Egypt.” However, before I even had the opportunity to expose his lie in detail, Paul Krugman piled on the next day, saying in his column that the weather is also to blame. (I should note that this was not the first time – and likely will not be his last - when Mr. Krugman responded to or cracked nuts of my unpublished writings. Simply compare his January 16 column, The War on Logic, with my “draft as of 20110117, with minor editing” to see more of them.)

From the nuts in his column, such as “six most dangerous words” and “upholding”, it is obvious that Mr. Friedman, just like Mr. Ignatieff here in Canada, was particularly unhappy about my recent updates, especially the one posted on February 1. Which is understandable given that, asides from the fact that my update had revealed the trade secrets of American imperial diplomacy, Mr. Friedman was one of the people with shifting positions on Chinese wages cited in one of my two examples to illustrate the “don’t care” attitude of the American political class towards average people in other countries. Instead of providing any facts-and-logic to refute my writing, however, the best Mr. Friedman seemed to be able to do was to go after my other example, i.e., the cause of worldwide inflation and asset bubbles. Which is also understandable, frankly, given that economics is a complex subject for everyday folks and therefore, it is much easier for the American political class to peddle demagoguery and/or bullshits.

Of course, for Mr. Friedman to blame the soaring worldwide food prices squarely on China and other developing countries was ridiculous. It is true that as the economies grow in those countries, people tend to eat better. (I should emphasize this is still in comparison with what people in those countries ate before, rather than with what people in developed countries normally eat. In China, for example, many people still regard eating meat as a luxury.) However, this type of demand on foods is a long-term trend with only incremental effect on food prices year after year. Like most questions in economics, the issue of food prices cannot be explained by a single factor along. Especially in discussing the question of soaring food prices in the past 6 months or so, this factor is really a minor one at best.

Which was why Paul Krugman piled on the next day. I used the phrase “pile on” because Mr. Krugman joined the “debate” not to present the whole truth, but to obscure the truth. This is not surprising. As I found out last year, he is a bona fide economic demagogue and bullshitter. To obscure the absurdness of Mr. Friedman’s allegation, he muddled the water furthermore by pointing finger at another marginal factor – the weather, while deliberately presented a twisted logic for the truly relevant explanation of recent soaring food prices.

Granted, bad weather certainly had some adverse effects on some crop yields in some countries. But Mr. Krugman did not actually provide “the evidence” for his “much more ominous story” about the effect of bad weather on food prices. Nor did he explain why “severe weather” “stood out” among all other factors that contributed to rising food prices. He just wanted us to take him at his word. After all, he did win a Nobel economics prize, didn’t he?

However, a fact is a fact is a fact no matter who peddles the demagoguery. As Professor David Dapice of Tufts University pointed out in a February 18 YaleGlobal article, worldwide per-capita food production has actually increased from 2006/07 to 2010/11, meaning the increase in global food production outpaced population growth in this period. And “global food production is set to rise sharply this year” too, according to a recent report on the Globe and Mail. Therefore, as Professor Dapice argued, “it’s hard to argue that bad weather has driven up food prices”.

The truth of the matter is, Mr. Krugman does know the truth behind the recent soaring food prices. He just does not us to know. So he had to resort to bullshitting, as he did, most notably, in the third paragraph of his column: “So what’s behind the price spike? American right-wingers (and the Chinese) blame easy-money policies at the Federal Reserve… Meanwhile, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France blames speculators…”

Reading this paragraph by Mr. Krugman, unsuspecting readers might get the impression how incoherent “American right-wingers”, the Chinese and President Sarkozy were in criticizing the U.S. Fed and the speculators for their roles in rising food prices. The truth, however, is just the opposite of what Mr. Krugman cunningly implied in his writing. The U.S. Fed’s extremely loose monetary policy and financial speculation in commodities are two parts of the same, coherent and indeed, predatory action perpetrated by the Wall Street-Washington cohort on the rest of the world. To borrow Mr. Obama’s infamous words, that’s “the essence of what [American] democracy is all about” with it comes to its dealings with outside world.

Using the unemployment situation in the United States as a smoke screen, the U.S. Fed launched the rumours for the second round of its quantitative easing program (QE2) last summer in order to help its real constituency – the Wall Street – to deal with their debt problems. And it was mostly through those Wall Street firms and other financial speculators that much of the hundreds of billions of newly-printed dollars flooded the rest of the world, partly via bid-up commodities destined for the real economies of other countries and partly through avenues such as foreign currency speculations and corporate takeovers, as I mentioned before. Note that Mr. Obama, a.k.a. Speculator in Chief, is himself an integral part of the process. Which is not surprising given that Wall Street banks, through their financial contributions to his presidential campaign, are also his real constituency. That’s the real reason behind what Mr. Krugman called the “general commodity boom” - of which food prices are only a part – for the past six months.

Think of this way: If we had had only a selected few food commodities with soaring prices in a selected few countries, we might have been able to explain them away with certain specific factors. Instead, what we’ve got here is soaring food prices across the board in the midst of a general commodity boom across the globe. Intuitively there has to have some common factors underlying this boom. Mr. Krugman pointed his figure at the growth in emerging markets as the main culprit, while deliberately whitewashing the inflationary effect of U.S.’s extremely loose monetary policies.

But as an economist, it should be a no-brainer for him that loose monetary policies are inflationary. Indeed, that’s the major reason why the U.S. Fed engaged in ultra-loose monetary policies in the first place – to inflate away U.S. debt problem. As I wrote in my previous update, when the Obama administration tried to persuade the Europeans to do the same last May, it was a fairly common theme in the MSM reporting that such policies would bring huge inflationary pressures onto other developing countries. Were these people all wrong then? Obviously not. It was only when the American political class saw the havoc its policies had wreaked around the world that they started – as I noticed, at the beginning of this year - to invent another narrative that China and other developing countries were to blame. For example, as a panellist on the January 9^th edition of the GPS on CNN put it with quite a little flame: “A lot of Chinese are eating meat and driving cars too”. (Apparently, erasing the past is a favourite game played by the American political class especially in international politics, as I have observed over the years. I may have more to say on this in the future.)

Truth is, countries like China and India are still relatively poor as a whole, if we look at their per-capita GDP rankings in the world (China around 90th and India around 140th). We cannot simply deny the development rights of these people. -- Here comes a fundamental difference between the emerging economies factor and the U.S. monetary policies factor in the recent soaring food prices, even leaving aside for a minute the fact that the first one played only an incremental, and therefore, most likely a minor, role when compared with the second: While the growing demand for commodities from the emerging countries reflects their legitimate aspiration for economic developments, the U.S. Fed policies were utterly predatory and exploitative, and benefited mostly just the Washington-Wall Street cohort themselves.

Here is Professor Michael Hudson observation on the Fed’s QE2: “The object of warfare is to take a country’s land, raw materials and assets, and grab them. In the past, that used to be done militarily by invading them. But today you can do it financially simply by creating credit, which is what the Federal Reserve has done.” Indeed, when the U.S. Fed created hundreds of billions of dollars out of thin air and much of those newly created dollars went aboard, ultimately that portion of the money would represent its loot from the rest of the world. And when it was the world’s poor who were being looted, there is no question that they would feel the most acute pain - especially in their stomachs, as a large portion of their income had to be spent on foods. Even in China, a lot of people are experiencing the hardship of inflation right now.

Of course, such a brazen monetary program by the U. S. Fed would not have been possible without the dollar hegemony. It would have destroyed the dollar’s status as a reserve currency in a single stroke had we have another reserve currency serving as a check and balance. That’s why Mr. Krugman singled out French President Sarkozy for attack in his column. President Sarkozy recognized that not only did speculation in food commodities run “the risk of food riots in the poorest countries”, but also that this kind of speculation was greatly facilitated and indeed, encouraged by the extremely loose monetary policies of the U.S. Fed. Indeed, his government, as this year’s G20 chair, had tried to put the issue of dollar hegemony and the reform of international monetary system on the G20 agenda.

As President Sarkozy gently remarked during a visit to the White House in early January, “We want to assure our American friends that the dollar will remain a preeminent currency. But a preeminent currency does not mean the sole currency. We have the right to reflect on other approaches.” His Economic Minister Christine Lagarde was a little more explicit on their goals for the reform of the international monetary system: “We must move in one of the steps that are constructive and lead us towards a system that more balanced, more stable and more transparent,” as she told an economic forum in early January in Paris. -- Balance, stability and transparency happened to be some of the aspects of the system that my proposed idea sought to improve upon. I got the feeling that the Sarkozy government was quite receptive to my political ideas, especially as applied to international monetary reform.

Of course, one can just imagine the tremendous courage and political leadership it would take President Sarkozy to meet the resistance of his G20 initiative from Washington. Mr. Krugman’s conjured-up ridicule of him was merely a slight reflection of Washington’s hostility. That’s why, when I was under wild personal attack by the Liberals here in Canada after I posted my draft 20110210 on Egypt, the political climate immediately changed, as evidenced, for example, by a February 17 Financial Times report, Muted tone leave little hope of a quick fix, just prior to a scheduled G20 meeting of finance ministers and central bankers.

In the run-up to France’s G20 presidency, Nicolas Sarkozy last year called for sweeping changes in global economic governance, warning that a lack of vision would make the forum irrelevant.
But faced with a struggle for consensus, the French government has since struck a more muted note.
Finance ministers from the G20 group of leading economies meeting in Paris this weekend expect incremental change rather than revolution.
Rapid progress on the main subject – exchange rates and economic imbalances – is unlikely, as the divisions between the big economies, apparent at the G20 summit in Seoul last November, remain.
Meanwhile, two newer issues for discussion – the dollar’s dominance as a reserve currency and governments’ use of capital controls – are likely to take a while to resolve.

Consequently, I believe, at the weekend G20 meeting, not only did President Sarkozy’s initiative not gain any ground, Washington-Wall Street cohort also mounted a pushback, notably by Fed chairman Ben Bernanke in a speech whose deceitful economics made MSM headlines everywhere. Here is a sample from the MSM:

The Washington Post (February 18): U.S. policy not causing global financial woes, Bernanke says
PTI News (February 19): Emerging economies’ growth pushing commodity prices: US Fed
Financial Times (February 18): Bernanke says foreign investors fuelled crisis

And the same deceitfulness was on full display in the Obama administration’s handling of the Bahrain situation. Here is what happened in just the last couple of days:

In response to a clash between protesters and Bahrain police on Sunday, White House issued a statement saying in part: “We urge the government of Bahrain to pursue a peaceful and meaningful dialogue with opposition rather than resorting to the use of violence”.
When asked to comment on Gulf troops being sent to Bahrain on Monday, White House spokesman Jay Carney said that Gulf nations should “honour the peaceful protesters by not using force against them.”

What bloody lies. One after another.

It broke my heart to write this. But if my perceptiveness and vigilance in watching the MSM in the evening of February 3 had played a role in preventing a massive bloodshed on the streets of Cairo the next day, I felt almost guilty for my political obtuseness on February 16 when I failed to piece everything together in trying to understand the wild personal attacks on me by the Liberals here in Canada as well as the insinuation of Islamist connections by the Obama administration down there in Washington.

Of course, it did not matter whether I had been able to piece everything together and present them to the world through my blog on that day. The Obama administration would have orchestrated the atrocious violence on peaceful (and sleeping!) protesters in Bahrain’s Pearl Square the next morning anyways. According to Nicholas Kristof’s first-hand account on The New York Times:

The pro-democracy movement has bubbled for decades in Bahrain, but it found new strength after the overthrow of the dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt. Then the Bahrain government attacked the protesters early this week with stunning brutality, firing tear gas, rubber bullets and shotgun pellets at small groups of peaceful, unarmed demonstrators. Two demonstrators were killed (one while walking in a funeral procession), and widespread public outrage gave a huge boost to the democracy movement.

King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa initially pulled the police back, but early on Thursday morning he sent in the riot police, who went in with guns blazing. Bahrain television has claimed that the protesters were armed with swords and threatening security. That’s preposterous. I was on the roundabout earlier that night and saw many thousands of people, including large numbers of women and children, even babies. Many were asleep.

Despite the fact I was nowhere close to be able to finish writing the above update on that day, I did have a hectic day on February 16, as you can imagine. That’s at least part of the reason why the Obama administration thought it was almost a sure thing that I would be brought out the next day. The other part was that, as everyone knows, February 17 was a significant holiday in China (Yuanxiao and the last day of Chinese New Year celebration). Indeed, it was precisely because of their anticipation that I would be brought out by the Chinese government on that day that the Obama administration decided to use violence on the peaceful demonstrators, having failed their plan earlier in Cairo. That’s just how desperate Mr. Obama wanted to draw China into the situation in that region and at the meantime, dredge up some dirt on me. How else can one explain the sudden, unprovoked attack on those innocent protesters if not for this occasion?

Indeed, even the New York Times was outraged at such brutal violence directed at innocent people. In an editorial aptly titled, Now Bahrain, The Times, while understandably did not reveal the whole truth behind the violence in the Pearl Square, sharply criticized Mr. Obama’s support of the Bahrain regime. It even praised Secretary Clinton for the first time in a long time. Which was truly noteworthy as the paper had always backed Mr. Obama in his political rivalry with Mrs. Clinton.

Now for the White House to pay lip service to “peace” and “non-violence”, it is not just the usual political spin – it is utter deceit. Especially in the current development of sending foreign troops into Bahrain.

According to reports by both The New York Times and The Washington Post, the Obama administration was “informed but not consulted” on the decision of sending Gulf troops. The Times report also cited political analysts to say that “it was likely that the United States did not object to the deployment”. Those are hardly news. Just like Mr. Obama’s backing of President Honsi Mubarak, such a troop deployment could not have taken place without the backing of the Obama administration. The real question is: What exactly is Mr. Obama’s intention in sending troops to Bahrain at this troubled time?

Finally, I'll say a few words to the ruling class not just in Bahrain, but across the region, as I feel many of them can read my blogs: I have no intention to inject myself into your internal affairs. Indeed, from the beginning I have tried my best not to be entangled in the current situation in your region. What I am concerned about is the potential violence, especially those against innocent people. While I do not envy the heightened societal tensions in many of your countries, I still think peaceful resolutions can be found out of your current quagmire. The key on your part is to listen to your people with sincerity, with respect and with a genuine desire to respond to their legitimate aspirations. After all, a government is there to serve the people. As for your people, I will pray that they will be able to contain their emotions and maintain their rationality.

And I’ll keep all of you in my prayers.

P.P.S. 20110319:

While the world’s attention is turning to the war on Libya today, I hope the pro-democracy movements in Bahrain and other places will not become a mere sideshow.

I wrote the following draft three days ago. I did not post it for fear of further entanglement, as usual. However, the draft appeared to have again been leaked out, even to Bahrain this time. Just yesterday, Bahrain foreign minister cracked at least two nuts (“heart-broken” and “ugly”) in a brief comment shown on BBC World News. The regime’s move to tear down the monument at Pearl Square also appeared to be a reaction to my quote of The Hindu report in the draft.

We can’t turn a blind eye to the atrocities of a regime simply because it has the backing of the world’s most powerful government.

Draft 20110316:

I posted the above update last night. When I woke up this morning, I was struck by yet another shocking piece of news from Bahrain.
As if to answer my above question on troop deployment, Bahrain security forces, “apparently emboldened by the arrival on Monday of nearly 2000 Saudi-Arabia-led forces”, according to a report by The Hindu, again used brutal violence to drive out protesters from the Pearl Square this morning.
The Hindu report described today’s heart-breaking scene in Manama as follows:

A day after declaring an emergency, security forces in Bahrain have unleashed a full-scale crackdown, backed by tanks, armoured vehicles and helicopters, to crush what essentially has so far been a pro-democracy revolt in the Kingdom.
Surrounding them from all sides, with armoured vehicles and gun-mounted jeeps, troops in the early hours on Wednesday, assaulted protesters entrenched at Pearl Roundabout, now the famous symbol of the Bahraini rebellion. The teargas and rubber bullets’ barrage was so fierce that it set ablaze large parts of the area, especially rows of tents, which had for nearly a month sheltered the protesters, first seeking a constitutional monarchy, but now increasing demanding the emergence of Bahrain as a Republic. For hours the fires burnt, sending plumes of black smoke wafting in the sky. Riot police fought the flames with water cannons that are more conventionally used for breaking protests.

I was so saddened by the news that I wished – perhaps for the millionth time - that I had never being dragged into politics in the first place. I just want to live a normal life. As a normal person. Why do I have to be connected with all these situations, especially when they are so sad and so ugly? -- That’s why I went to grocery shopping this morning. Not that I had any urgent need for any groceries. I just wanted to do something normal. I just wanted to get away from all these.
Even though I thought I had got away from “all these” physically, actually I did not get away from them at all in my mind. I felt somehow responsible for what happened in Bahrain. I had to at least say something. I should say something.
But what can I say?
……..
Perhaps I should begin by noting that, while I think the above report by The Hindu was an excellent one, I do feel it contained a couple of unfortunate choices of word. Specifically, I don’t think the Bahrain pro-democracy movement can be described as a “revolt” or “rebellion”. From what I read, I believe most of demonstrators still wanted a meaningful dialogue with their government.
Secondly, if the protesters in Egypt were mostly peaceful, the protesters in Bahrain can only exceed them in their peacefulness. Faced with overwhelming firepower from deadly weaponry of state security forces today, according to Los Angeles Times, all the protesters had were sticks and rocks, not much better than their counterparts on Tahrir Square, who only had to deal with “government thugs”. Indeed, as The Hindu reported:

Analysts say that the [Bahrain] opposition has decided that it would combat the government’s military power not with violence, but moral ascendancy, acquired through persistence with peaceful protests. On Tuesday, a peaceful opposition demonstration to protest against Saudi Arabia’s military intervention in Bahrain, ended after protesters placed bouquets at the Saudi embassy, their destination for the day.

The Bahrain regime seems to be a particularly brutal one, who doesn’t hesitate to use deadly force on its people, including women and children. At least five people were killed in the February 17 assault on Pearl Square, according to the New York Times editorial. Six more protesters were killed and eight on life support today, according to a report by Australian Broadcasting Corp. What’s worse, multiple news organizations reported today that the regime had sealed off several hospitals to prevent the injured protesters from being treated. That’s just inhumane. No wonder a doctor in one of the hospitals had called the regime’s actions “genocide” on Al Jazeera.
It’s a shame that western governments have not put more pressure on the Bahrain regime in light of all their atrocities against its small populace. The reason is, of course, the “enabling” of the U.S. government. If King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa had been the head of another state, I believe a lot of western leaders would have called for his ouster already, let along other measures such as freezing his overseas assets, arms embargo or economic sanctions. Bahrain just showed what utter nonsense it is for the U.S. government to claim that it stands for human rights and democracy.

I demand an apology from Dalai

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Truth and Justice