Ice skating at Miyun reservoir, north of Beijing

With Jerry's Take on China ...

With Brian Berletic / The New Atlas ... With Inside China Business ... With Neutrality Studies ... With Sean Foo ... With Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson ... With Lena Petrova and Richard Wolff ... With Inside China Business ... With Trip Bitten ... With The Bridge Podcast and William Brown ... With FridayEveryday ... With Alex Cage ... With Harvey in China ... Harv With Sirant in China ...

A short story for the Chinese New Year. The Spring Festival is about a new year, a new beginning. A time of renewal, and hope and a fresh start, a time of good-will. For example, fireworks, apart from being a joy to all, are to scare away bad spirits. One can see this symbolize the breaking of old habits of thought - a spring clean of the mind. A new year is a new chance for a better life - if you will take it. Keep your eyes open, heart abundant, and strive for a better world. Help others on their journey whenever you can and always share a smile. It may help another, but it will certainly be good for you. Someday, even the mountains will be gone. But right now we are alive, and we can make a difference. When faced with bad-will, take it on the chin and return only affection. It might leave a seed for the future; at least, it will not get you down. As the film says, yes, it is love that brings us closer to happiness ... Above all, the Spring Festival is a time for family. And ultimately, we are all sisters and brothers breathing the same air ...

With Walk East ... And evening walk around ...

With The New Atlas ... With NuMuves ... With The New Atlas ... Meanwhile ...

With Einzelgänger ... The less one desires, the more one has.

Fearing China's rise, and especially its basic premise that all its citizens are family, not merely livestock, the elite rulers of the West have for some time been trying to undermine China through destabilization of its periphery - Tibet, Hong Kong, XinJiang and TaiWan. Simultaneously, a huge amount of propaganda has been broadcast in the West to proffer false tales and coerce the public to demonize China. From Obama's 'pivot to Asia', and before, the West has been cranking up a military encirclement of China, and that includes destabilizing China's neighbors in South East China - Thailand, Myanmar, etc. The aim is to undermine the whole region, ASEAN, and particularly the 'Belt and Road Initiative' (BRI) that China has created to build up the region in common prosperity, plus trade with Europe, the Middle East, Africa and beyond. The 'West', particularly the US, UK and Australia, are doing their utmost to undermine the region. Economically, for sure; but also militarily. Plus, via backing all manner of separatists and front groups both in China and all of S.E. Asia.

With Pascal Coppens ... YT comments : As an ABC, I have traveled to China over a dozen times over the last 40 years. The changes over this period have been breathtaking, but the biggest change has been the deliverance of nearly 800,000,000 citizens out of poverty. Gob-smacked Americans are agape but have gone out of their way to minimize and demonize any Chinese accomplishments. It is getting tiresome hearing racist, biased Western politicians cry about "potential national security" risks. I just returned from another phenomenal trip to China (Shenzhen and Chengdu). Based on my interactions with friends and relatives in China, they are not preoccupied with Anti-American sentiment. America's hysteria about all things Chinese is rooted in unadulterated racism and the inability to accept that China could EVER be a formidable rival." "The following article is written by Ismail Bashmori, he is an Egyptian China watcher. The truth is that China is the greatest country on the face of the earth. It makes all other countries look insignificant and contemptible. It is the most brilliant, most industrious, most ambitious, most educated, meritocratic and technocratic, most modern, sophisticated, and civilised, and best-governed by far. . It is the first non-white, non-Western country to reach this status since the 1600s. The determination of this country is indescribable. Supernatural. There is no force that can stop it from accomplishing anything it wants to do. It doesn’t matter who we are. Egyptians, Syrians, Pakistanis, Indians, Africans, even Americans. Next to the Chinese, we are pathetic. We can’t do what they do. We would have a mountain, an Everest of changes to make, and we would whine and bicker and fail at every one of them. China’s story since the 1980s has been one of an almost divine metamorphosis. Next to China the entire Western world from Alaska to New Zealand has stagnated. Next to China the entire developing world from Brazil to Madagascar has progressed only at a crawl. China is the mother of all gargantuan bullet trains. Every day it manages to create something new and astonishing. And unlike the United States, unlike the British Empire, unlike the French, Dutch, Germans, Spanish, Portuguese or any other Western nation that had its turn at being a superpower in the past four centuries, China doesn’t need to run anybody over or take something from somebody else, to rise majestically. China is also standing up to the West all by herself. The West can’t believe their four-hundred-year-old global supremacy is being challenged. They hoped that the more China developed, the more it would submit to their influence, interests, and leadership. That didn’t happen. So now they will do anything possible, short of a nuclear war, to make China end. Their goal is to destroy this country. That’s why, although the United States has killed several million people and turned several regions of the earth into hellscapes. China is the worst fear of our planet’s Western masters. They want you to despise and dread a country that’s done nothing to you, that hasn’t invaded anyone, bombed or sanctioned anyone, that hasn’t overthrown any foreign government, or used its military on anything since 1979. China is the only major country in the nonwhite developing world, to stand up to the West. To look it in the eye when challenged or threatened. The Global South are simply Western puppets who submitted long ago. Even the most powerful ones. Saudi Arabia, Brazil, India. The 1500s—1000s BC were Egypt’s time. Antiquity belonged to the Greeks and Romans. The 1700s belonged to France, and the 1800s to Britain. From 1945 to the present, the world has been under American overlordship. And they call it the Pax Americana but there isn’t much Pax in it. There’s plenty of Pax if you’re in Europe or Australia. But the Middle East? Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran and Yemen in the past 20 years. Latin America? They’ve destroyed that part of the world beyond any hope of recovery. Africa? It’s only been spared because of disinterest. The US sees Africa as nothing. The whole West does. But in the twenty-first century, we are witnessing the rise of China. We are decades away from China becoming the greatest power on earth. This will be China’s time, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Attack China all you want, curse her and monger rumours and hysteria — but the truth is that none of your accusations are backed up by evidence. The Western press is under the thumb of Western governments that want to stay on top of the world for eternity. And the truth is that China is not affected by the noise and maneuvers of her enemies. For her first thirty years, from 1949 to 1979, China was basically blockaded and isolated economically and politically by the West. It didn’t even have a seat in the UN General Assembly. And it was dirt-poor in those days, barely a speck of the global economy, a tiny fraction of Japan’s or Germany’s GDP — not even able to prevent famine. And it still didn’t submit to pressure or take any orders. Why on earth would it do that now? China will be the next global power. There’s nothing that can be done about that. The first stage is that its economy only needs to grow at 4.7 percent per year to become the world’s largest by 2035. That means the usual, historical bare-minimum of 6 percent is already overkill. The US can build as many bases as it wants, slap as many sanctions as it wants, recognise whatever bogus genocides it wants. That’s what it’s been doing all along. Has any of it made a difference? China can adapt to any situation. It took China a mere ten years to go from being barred by the US Congress from participating in the “International” Space Station, to building its own Space Station from zero.

A guide to one of China's most vibrant cities ...