Richard Fernandez on China
Richard Fernandez has been writing a great many posts about China lately. In fact, his last five were on the subject: here, here, here, here (that one’s indirectly about China, anyway), and here.
One of the essays highlights a quote from John Kerry in the NY Times which goes like this:
“My response to [the Chinese on the subject of energy and climate change] was, ‘Hey look, climate is not ideological. It’s not partisan, it’s not a geostrategic weapon or tool, and it’s certainly not day-to-day politics. It’s a global, not bilateral, challenge,’” he said on a call with reporters. …
“Needless to say, adding some 200-plus gigawatts of coal over the last five years, and now another 200 or so coming online in the planning stage, if it went to fruition would actually undo the ability of the rest of the world to achieve a limit of 1.5 degrees,” he said, adding, “The stakes are very high.”
Not only do the Chinese respond by essentially saying, “Hey, little guy, what are you going to do about it?”, but Kerry’s assertion is absurd on its face. I suppose you could change it to read, “The issue of climate change should not be ideological. Neither should it be partisan, nor a geostrategic weapon or tool, nor day-to-day politics. It’s a global, not bilateral, issue and a possible global, not bilateral, challenge.”
Not that China cares one hoot. And Kerry is also lying through his teeth because climate change long ago became exactly what he says it is not.
Fernandez’s most recent post on China is the one in the group that is of the greatest interest to me. In it he writes:
But the ultimate blow to Biden’s Global World has been to its economic underpinnings. China had been going broke gradually, then all of a sudden. “The roots of the crisis date to [Chinese] tax reforms in 1994 which bolstered central government coffers but left local governments reliant on land financing for revenue.” By China’s own reckoning, the country’s vaunted economic growth rested on three huge bubbles that, once exploded, could threaten the Party’s own legitimacy. “This year, Xi has set out to reform the ‘three huge mountains’ of housing, education and healthcare to rein in soaring costs for city dwellers as a way to shore up legitimacy as the ‘people’s leader’, analysts said.”
The Communist Party encouraged the bubbles in order to tax them. But now, with the stream of new business finally exhausted and the entire edifice threatening to collapse like a house of cards, Chairman Xi has suddenly rediscovered Maoism…
Like Indiana Jones, Xi is pursued by three giant rocks and hopes to reach the socialist bunker leaving Western markets to take the brunt of the impact…
The dissolution of the landscape means the Biden administration isn’t plagued by any one malady anymore but by multiple organ failure. The Guardian writes, “Is Joe Biden failing? Less than nine months into his presidency, rising numbers of Americans and not a few foreign allies appear to think so…
At the heart of the Biden collapse is one major factor: Joe had counted on presiding over a world that no longer exists. He is king, but the king of vanishing empire. The situation can no longer be salvaged by tinkering, but only through a radical paradigm shift that the aged occupant of the White House is neither prepared nor able to undertake.
Fernandez is a very smart guy, and I would always pay attention to what he’s saying. I’m no China expert, but what he writes about that country makes sense to me.
However, I’m puzzled by some things Fernandez seems to be saying about Biden in that essay. One is that he doesn’t emphasize what I think are the two most important elements in Biden’s decline in popularity: the growing perception among US voters that Biden’s mental deficits are huge, and their judgment that Biden (or Biden’s administration) has been responsible for the debacle that was the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Another thing that puzzles me is that Fernandez seems to think – or at least he writes as though he thinks – that Biden is the one who is mainly in charge here and pulling his own strings. I’ve stated several times that I don’t think Biden is as far gone as a lot of people believe, but I do see him as very cognitively challenged and I see his policies as a combination of fairly vague ideas of Biden’s plus a lot of input from “advisors” who are mainly holdovers from the Obama administration (plus some unknown others).
I’m not sure how much credit Fernandez is giving Biden when he writes that Biden “had counted on presiding over a world that no longer exists.” My sense of Biden is that his evaluation of China was as an entity that could be played for money and favors, if not for himself then certainly for his family members such as Hunter. I think that really was as far as it ever went for Biden, who never struck me as especially involved with geopolitical strategies of any sophistication or depth.
And now I think Biden is running on habit as far as his own input into things goes, and although I think he has some input I don’t think it’s very great.
As Fernandez makes clear, these are extremely challenging times, and Biden is not up to handling them. But neither would any Democrat be, in my opinion – and precious few Republicans, as well.
It is said that Otto Von Bismarck stated, “There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America.” Let’s hope so.
Neo, Wretchard’s perspective on Biden may be affected by the fact that he no longer lives in the United States. He moved back to Australia after completing a master’s degree in public policy at Harvard (his blog is named “Belmont Club” after the Boston suburb where he lived during his student years)– and his geographic distance from the US likely accounts for his giving Biden more credit for political savvy than the old dinosaur deserves.
(Also, “Bismarck” is spelled with a “c” before the “k.”)
PA Cat:
Thanks, will fix.
Bismarck not Bismark.
Im am still of the opinion that the Urban Heat Island Effect is a far larger driver in both perceived and real climate change than CO2 rising from 300 ppm to 400 ppm.
And the Roman warming period may well have been hotter than now, based on historical agriculture.
You can literally see modern cities from space at night.
Pull up Google Earth , on the daylight pictures you can see the grey concrete , asphalt, grayish roofs long before you zoom down to streets.
You can feel the heat from concrete in the summer!
A century ago, what was DFW compared to now?
Apropos of Biden’s decline in popularity: I’m not surprised that it’s occurred, but I did not expect it to accelerate as quickly as it has. College football fans have been chanting “F— Joe Biden” in crowded stadiums (no social distancing!) for the past three Saturdays; golf fans, normally a sedate group, chanted the slogan at the Ryder Cup this week; large “FJB” polyester flags and Christmas tree ornaments are now available; and one Aaron West, a rock singer, wore a T-shirt at a recent concert that read “I Could Sh-t A Better President.”
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2021/09/27/the-f-joe-biden-chant-is-everywhere-n1481706
Omaha Public Power produces 2,200 MW of electricity. I told the OPPD board that going to net carbon zero doesn’t make any difference given the 400 GW of coal-fired power plants that China will soon have.
This whole net carbon zero thing is a charade and the Left knows it. It only benefits China and the elites who cash on the federal income tax credits.
One of the weirder stories I saw today was about widespread blackouts in China. I’m not sure what to make of it, but the explanation the article gives is that there was a significant surge in coal prices combined with Xi attempting to “curb carbon emissions…showing the international community that he’s serious about de-carbonizing the economy”. I’m not sure that I buy that explanation. When has Xi cared that much about what “the international community” thinks of him?
The Chinese (and Russians) realize this entire climate change topic
is total bullshit.
Do not be surprised one bit if it’s discovered that China and Russia are funding (surreptitiously of course) the entire climate change agenda here in the USA and Europe; the only two places on earth where there are “intellectuals” (all lefties, of course; geez, what a coincidence. Who would have thunk it??) that are promoting this scam.
They tell us what the climate will be 50 to 100 years hence, but have ZERO idea as to what caused or ended the historical climate regimes;, e.g., ice ages, Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age, previous warm periods, warmer than today’s climate, etc.
Think about that; they have NO IDEA of the causes of historical climate, but they somehow can predict the climate 50 to 100 years into the future.
Sure.
When climate theologians / “scientists” can predict the weather two weeks hence, I will start paying attention to what they say.
Oh, but wait; how convenient, weather is not climate.
True
Weather is much easier to predict because you are looking at a time frame several days or a week or so, hence.
But they KNOW the climate 50 years into the future.
What total BS.
And the US is getting rid of CFC refrigerants to “fight climate change”.
An AC guy that came to the house said they are having to get certified to handle flammable refrigerants.
Apparently , the US is moving towards flammable, explosive, propane based refrigerants.
Or should I say backwards, since some of the old , pre CFC refrigerants were flammable ?
Can you imagine that leaking out in your kitchen in the middle of the night?
Propane. A “ fossil fuel”.
I think if you substitute “Biden and his advisors” for “Biden,” what Fernandez says is true. Whoever is running this administration thinks the world is something that existed in the past, but reality shows it as being different.
I am reminded of how I felt when Trump was elected. I hoped for a few good results; instead, he exceeded my hopes beyond anything I expected. When Biden took office, I was hoping it might not be as bad as I thought it would, but it’s been worse. If Trump were still president we’d be in a much better position with reference to China and everything else.
My husband spent some significant time warning his employer, a large multi-national corporation, that investment in China was risky. He was right.
Cornhead, Nonapod, et al.:
Have you seen the calls for eco-terrorism podcasted by the New Yorker last week? The magazine invited Andreas Malm, a Swede who has written a book about how to blow up pipelines, to join its podcast. “Malm explains how it’s time for the climate change movement to ‘diversify its tactics and move away from an exclusive focus on polite, gentle, and perfectly peaceful civil disobedience.’ Malm stopped his recommendations short of ‘kidnapping oil workers’ but said that ‘civil disobedience’ ostensibly to save the planet should include mass acts of ‘intelligent sabotage’ and property destruction.”
https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/27/new-yorker-amplifies-calls-for-pipeline-bombings-to-save-the-planet/
I decided not to link directly to the New Yorker because it’s usually behind a paywall, but you can reach it through the link above if you wish.
The first commenter for this Fernandez article makes an interesting point. Socialism plants the seeds of its own destruction and, sadly, it’s now a race to the bottom between China and the USA, and it’s not clear that we won’t get there first.
I agree. Our markets are centrally planned, too. Short term expedient, long term destructive.
Several years ago, there was a serious fire in a high-rise housing lower class or assistance families in London. Started, I read, when a guy’s refrigerator exploded.
How do you explode a refrigerator? Turns out they were ahead on the Green thing.
“Apropos of Biden’s decline in popularity: I’m not surprised that it’s occurred, but I did not expect it to accelerate as quickly as it has.”
I’m pretty sure completely trashing all norms of decorum and respect for the Presidency because #OrangeManBad has something to do with it. It’s as if the Republicans had responded to Bill Clinton having sex with an intern by all having sex with their own interns, then been surprised when parents no longer let their kids become DC interns.
Mike
The whole climate thing changed the discussion during the election here in Germany. Young people were painting messages on the entrances to supermarkets that said Save the Climate. All of the parties talked about reducing CO2 emissions and plans for electric cars. And of course, they all want more windmills, but never talks about how you dispose of them.
It doesn’t really matter if one uses “Biden” as the individual or as the junta behind an ever-more confused man. The net effect is the same. I believe it’s Dr. Jill and others who control the man we call Joe Biden by whatever means they use. They need the power of the President to get anything done. Power is being used (abused) and we are on the receiving end until something changes at the top.
When those who are able to look back at the current time from a vantage point of 50 years hence they will realize that the biggest scam of this century is the catastrophic anthropogenic climate change. The honest physicists are just incidentally the only ones not supported financially by the government or non-governmental organizations. When NOAA has to adjust the historical data to make the present warming more dramatic, you know that the government is in on the swindle. Even the most reliable temperature measuring stations, none sited where other influences like hot asphalt, concrete, etc. are found, 1400 in number, and part of a network initiated in 2005, show no measurable warming in the continental USA since that date. The satellite and radiosonde balloon measurements of the upper atmosphere produce similar results. In the meantime impressionable children are being tortured with the impression of a bleak future.
What we have, what the world’s leadership consists of… is a confederation of fools. Brutal reality will be nature’s corrective.
Richard Aubrey,
The stupid green frig. started it but it was the Styrofoam and celotex exterior insulation cladding that made the fire go out of control.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire#Renovation
Some great hand wringing here on China’s(supposed) imminent econ troubles.
https://mobile.twitter.com/BaldingsWorld/status/1441355349915619334
Well and good … might even be true … but this is a bridge too far for me. Perhaps Zaphod can comment?
In a response to the tweet, by Arnold–
“And to top it off, Hong Kong used to be the gateway for 60% of the FDI into the mainland. Everybody is leaving due to the crackdown on freedoms and nobody can find a buyer for their property. HK is becoming another “ghost city”.”
Global Warming is sustained by the Left’s Big Lie. In certain, in fact, that it became the historic model for the five year campaign against Trump using the Big Lie.
The earth is cooling. It’s no warner than 7 years ago or 20 years ago.
Actual measurements of CO2 atmospheric persistence show that its rise must be natural in origin — a small fraction of what the unmeasured assumptions of the Bern Carbon Cycle model (Tom Segelstad, geophysicist Emeritus, University of Oslo).
In addition, repeated measurements and techniques show that a 1.5C accelerated tropical warming — which all physics necessarily predicts — cannot be found.
Thus, after spending nearly a decade educating climatologists against overselling certainty, Judith Curry (186 publications) dramatically quit her senior post at Georgia Tech, a few years ago.
What happened? A young woman PhD begged her advice on keeping scientific integrity. Curry could not: science has left the building. Ergo, resigning was the ethical course for her to take.
At Climate, etc (Curry’s blog), a few months ago, she published former UVa climatologist Patrick Michaels thoughts on how the field was now no more serious than a soft social science. And there’s no change acoming.
It ain’t just politics that’s depressing. The gullibility of the young and indoctrinated is everywhere.
I recently read that Germany, owing to a shortage of natural gas, the unwisely elective closing of nuclear plants, and the overestimation of “green” energy’s performance in the field, will be resuming burning coal this winter to make up the shortfall.
expat, the commentary on Fox Business this morning was that the German election results could have been worse. The center-left will now have to make some kind of coalition, rather than getting an outright victory. Meanwhile, winter is coming and it looks like it may be a hard one.
Fernandez *is* a very smart and ‘connected’ guy.
From an at least moderately well-off old Manila family. Went into the anti-Marcos underground during the 70s on the anti-communist side and from his older writings is pretty clear had Agency contacts from way back and was spending as much time reporting on the Communist Underground as plotting Marcos’s demise. I mean, who do you think arranged for him to get a scholarship to the Kennedy School after fall of Marcos? Put another way, he was a cog in part of another Diem-job — except less brutal.
Read his writings from Before Trump. He wrote much more back then and would refer every now and then to his participation as a speaker in closed door policy forums in US and Australia. Trump comes along and the entire political system of the West goes into overdrive trying to vomit out this alien body… What does Fernandez have to say about it? Does he go all Codevilla? Nope. Four years of pretty anodyne stuff. Does he have the wit and chops and insight to do so? Absolutely! Why not? Company Man. Maybe doesn’t sing the company song and do groups calisthenics in the morning.. but Company Man. He knows where his bread is buttered.
Great China Attention Switcheroo of 2021 and up he pops again.
Mind you, I think it’s smart for the West to wake up to China. I’m just a little concerned that the same Usual Suspects who have gotten badly wrong their approach to everything else they have focused their Eye of Sauron on for last 20 years will get this wrong too.
Fernandez is not going to crap all over Biden yet because see Paras 2 and 3 above. He’s in no way ‘Independent’… I’m pretty sure he’s more resistant to Groupthink and Cant when he’s alone in his study nutting things out. Anyway, he has a family. Can’t blame him.
I read, and sometimes commented at, Belmont Club before he wrote “The Three Conjectures” and before Wretchard became Richard. Smart guy, but like any online, I always take some salt with everything written. But he does make me think and that’s what is important.
@JimNorCal:
Balding used to teach at Shenzhen Campus of Peking University. He got the boot a few years ago and promptly headed off to Vietnam to teach economics at a new private university. IIRC he had sailed a bit close to the wind in some of his China classes or his research and got told his visa wasn’t going to be renewed.
I’ve had some interactions with him on my now-deleted Twitter account. Guy is sharp. Has faint whiff of a large building in Fairfax County about him, but then plenty of people do. Thick as thieves with one Mark Simon who ran Jimmy Lai’s Apple Daily and other parts of his empire day to day. Just because China is the Bogey Man doesn’t mean that there aren’t other guys out their with various agendas working in concert.
He’s for sure got lots of contacts and sources. But just because he says the sky is falling doesn’t mean it necessarily is so. Case-in-point, Gordon Chang. There’s a lot of ruin in a nation. This works both ways… The USA/West will probably kick along much longer than *I* might expect.
So don’t hold yer breath.
Look.. these are not bad guys (The Baldings and Simons types).. They’re kind of Uber-Zaphods — dinosaurs from the 80s/90s who would be cancelled in the blind of an eye if they carried on in Maoist USA 2021 the way they do Out East. They hew to the Old Ways and hold up a Western Ideal which no-longer exists, if it ever did. For them, it will always be June 6, 1989.
Re Hong Kong becoming a Ghost City… That’s not what my lying eyes see. A chunk of the middle classes are taking advantage of in effect free UK resettlement passports. Reading and Manchester seem popular. How they will feel after a few English Winters and exposure to the local Diversity remains to be seen.
Property prices have done nothing but boom here. They’re still going up.
If more people leave, the Chinese will just replace them with more Chinese. There’s no shortage of *them*. This is nothing like your Great Replacement… but it’s been planned for decades anyway. 150 Mainland-chosen immigrants arrive in Hong Kong every day and none can be turned back. Part of the 1984 Joint Declaration and has been happening since 1984 or 1985 – well before 1997. These guys are Fu Manchu level *smart*.
The biggest concern most HK people have is schooling. Expensive and now likely to be riven by snitches and more nastiness due to the Big Crackdown. That is driving some people away and I don’t blame them. Going to be interesting though when they figure out just how execrably poor government schools in the UK are and find out what the fees and waiting lists the good stuff look like.
@geoffb:
Yes. Does make us think and that’s why still read him.
He published first one or few chapters of an unpublished novel a few years ago. Subject was what PRC could do to Manila with just several salvoes of cruise missiles into power grid transformers and water mains. The solution for personal survival that his protagonist came up with was pretty good, too. Various orgs must pay him well to be an Outside the Box Man.
If you ask me, the bigger news than Evergrande this week has involved HNA (Holding company for Hainan Airlines and a bunch of other companies). Evergrande is a pretty standard property bubble misallocation cluster$%@^.
HNA is a totally different kettle of fish as it became the money laundering and rent extractions vehicle for a lot of the princelings. Life is too short to do a write up on HNA, but it’s really bonkers stuff with hits being put on people in foreign countries, mysterious ‘suicides’, the works.
Hainan itself was until recently the CCP equivalent of pre-revolutionary Havana and Mob-era Vegas. Everyone has some good stories about scams going down in Hainan.
I’m about 2/3 through the newish book entitled “Unsettled” by Steve Koonin. He’s physicist who’s been involved in climate studies most of his life, first with BP’s green energy research, and more recently with the Obama admin. His viewpoint is mostly from “inside the box” of the UN’s IPCC climate studies, but he believes the science is decidedly “unsettled” and that most of the popular media accounts, including many “factual” statements are garbage.
I’d recommend it. There aren’t many (any?) huge bombshells, though that depends on the readers point of view.
My favorite shocker was the claim that climate change has reduce crop yields (corn and wheat) by 8.5% for corn between 1981 and 2010. Koonin explains that what they really mean is that crop yields for corn have only increased by 70% instead of the 77% it would have if the temperatures hadn’t gone up and the maybe the rain decreased slightly. The trick is they bank the big fertilization effect of the extra C02 as “non-climate” effects rolled in with improved farming practices, and only look at the effect of temperature and rain.
The Chinese definitely do not believe in the Climate Change nonsense.
But they are happy for YOU to believe in it and cripple yourselves and pay the Chinese hand over fist for all the stuff needed to make Green Energy ‘work’.
Additionally, the Chinese know they have to get on top of their own air pollution issues — it’s really out of hand and is affecting everyone’s health and causing a lot of discontent. So they’ll play along.. Stick up windmills near the Great Wall to show to morons like John Kerry.. and quietly build out more nuclear and gas-fired plants. Oh… and they’ll bribe CalPERS and other stupid corrupt Western Institutions to buy ‘Green Bonds’ or Carbon Credits (it is to laugh) from them.
It’s not that I think they’re great or anything, it’s just I don’t see how they can lose when *their* Enemy is so determined to throw it all away.
“Zaphod” is pretty clearly one of those FBI plants leftover from Jan. 6 with too much time on his hands and a paper bag full of slow-drying contact glue.
Nah… I run a Whoopee Cushion Factory in my Day Job.
Zaphod:
I’ve been reading Richard Fernandez fairly regularly since he was Wretchard at Belmont Club, even before I began blogging. He used to write more often when he had his own blog, and then a few years later when he moved to PJ he cut back to a few times a week, and then later about once a week. I think the change in frequency had more more to do with how busy he was in his other jobs, and what PJ wanted, than anything else.
Fernandez has never been a rabble-rouser – he’s very cerebral as well as creative, and quite philosophical – but he’s never shied away from telling what he sees as the truth. He just tells it in his own style and focuses on his own concerns (which have always included China, by the way). The idea that he’s putting a lid on it because he’s a “company man” in some way is the wrong reading of him. Your kneejerk cynicism is sometimes misplaced.
Corruption, government/private, may be the most uniting and at the same time the most divisive force on the planet. Uniting those against it, at the same time uniting those for it, and dividing those two groups in opposition to each other.
Clarity and light brought slowly by the Panama Papers and other hacks. Dare to dream of a world where the tax of corruption has been brought to heel.
I’m a long-term follower of Fernandez. As with the good blogs, Fernandez has a stable of commenters whose insight and experience is worth as much as Fernandez’ essays.
I still miss the poet, Walt. I think we all do. Walt was losing his eyesight, and said good-bye to us a couple years ago. He came back, briefly, from some new treatment, but apparently it didn’t take. *Sigh*
It’s actually fairly easy to sum up Biden. Joe Biden is a crook. That’s all he is, that’s all he ever was and all he really ever cared about is how much money he can steal.
Walt’s poems were great!
Cap’n Rusty & Zaphod: Ditto! Walt is missed.
I believe it was one of our commenters that referred to Michael Pillsbury’s THE HUNDRED YEAR MARATHON – China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as Global Superpower.
https://elkitab.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/by-Michael-Pillsbury-The-Hundred-Year-Marathon-3572536-z-lib.org_.pdf
Not so secret now. I sense that Trump was on to them but with Biden at the helm we have no chance. Check out Chapter 2: The 9 principal elements of Chinese Strategy. Proceeding exactly as planned.
China and Russia aren’t afraid of Biden, they’re afraid of us, the American people. So is Biden. They’d all like to disarm us. Well, good luck with that. We don’t work for the government, they work for us. They’ve forgotten that, and are going to have to be reminded. There are 80 million gun owners who have over 300 million guns. As a result of the former draft, there are over 20 million veterans. If you think you’re going to take us down, you’ve been smoking dope.
William Graves. Back in the mid-Sixties, I bought a pre-war Enfield from a friend. Cost $14. Sold it recently for parts on account of headspacing wouldn’t take current loads and my orthodontia cost too much.
That thing, a really good military bolt action with plenty of non-mil ammo around–friend told me the Enfields kill more moose, elk, and deer in Canada than any other weapon.
Point is, this thing had been wandering around the civilian world since the end of WW II until last spring and nobody had a record of it. Three hundred million is a very low estimate.
So there are likely more than 80 million gun owners, by a good deal. But if only one tenth of one percent decide to go tactical, that’s 80,000 guys. And of the veterans, likely overlapping the first group, that would be 20,000.
And the other 99.9 percent is looking on….
See, as I’ve said before, The Battle of Athens, and The Battle of Sugar Point.
GeoffB
I was aware of the styrofoam cladding. One dumbness on top of another. But there was a report that, at least in some cases, the cladding was not attached to the building, but was several inches away, generating a chimney effect which made things worse. Not sure about that, it seems pretty stupid not to have the insulation not in contacted with the material to be insulated.
But, see Bryson’s “The Road to Little Piddling”. Doesn’t have much sympathy for UK’s bureaucrats, as part of his tour around the country.