Russia welcomes Chinese shipping to Far East port Vladivostok for first time has commercial and military significance. Sino-Russian cooperation to counter US-Japan-Korea hostility 俄羅斯首次歡迎中國航運到遠東港口海參威, 具有商業和軍事意義. 中俄合作對抗美日韓敵意.
Should Chinese forces have access to Vladivostok that expands PLA (China’s People’s Liberation Army) operational options a bit – and also gives Japanese and US [and South Korean] forces one more thing to worry about and to devote resources to covering 如果中國軍隊能夠進入海參威，那將稍微擴大中國人民解放軍的作戰選擇 – 同時也讓日本和美國 [和韓國] 軍隊多擔心一件事，並投入資源進行掩護
PLA and Russian forces conducting joint training of increasing complexity, to include coordinated naval and air operations near Japan – and even encircling Japan 解放軍和俄羅斯軍隊進行越來越複雜的聯合訓練，包括在日本附近甚至包圍日本的協調海空行動
Vladivostok, formerly known as Haishenwai, was part of China before it was ceded to Russian Empire in 1860 under the Convention of Peking. The convention, signed at the end of the Second Opium War, also ceded Hong Kong to the United Kingdom 符拉迪沃斯托克，原名海參威，在 1860 年根據北京公約被割讓給俄羅斯帝國之前，它是中國的一部分。第二次鴉片戰爭結束時簽署的公約也將香港割讓給英國
The West’s Economic War On Russia Has Failed 西方對俄羅斯的經濟戰失敗了 By Prof. John V. Walsh, MD in SF
The US with its EU vassals in tow has carried out a two-pronged attack on Russia. The first is Joe Biden’s cruel proxy war on Russia, with its cynical use of Ukrainians as cannon fodder. The second prong is the sanctions war designed to destroy Russia’s economy.
The economic war is a failure. Russia has won. This verdict comes not from a Russia-friendly source but from two well-known British publications. One is the UK’s oldest political magazine, The Spectator. The other is The Daily Telegraph, a British broadsheet that supports the Ukraine war and has always endorsed Conservative candidates. Boris Johnson was once the editor of the former and a columnist for the latter.
This writer, no follower of the British press, was made aware of both pieces by Alexander Mercouris who discussed the articles on his own YouTube channel both here and, together with his partner Alex Christoforou, on The Duran Channel here. (I cannot recommend these sites highly enough for their daily posts on geopolitics, with a focus on the crisis in Ukraine and Europe.)
The Spectator Admits Failure in the Economic War on Russia
The first, the Spectator article, titled bluntly “Why the economic war against Russia has failed,” reads in part:
“The other prong, though, has turned out to be blunt: the plan to wage economic war with Moscow, unleashing financial shock and awe on a scale never seen before. Russia was to be cut off almost entirely, with sanctions and boycotts on all imports and exports save for humanitarian ones such as medicines. Putin’s Russia, went the theory, would be impoverished into surrender.” (The brutality of the phrase “impoverished into surrender” slips so easily onto the page of this piece, because it is standard Western imperial behavior, now normalized. ~ jw)
“Few people in the West are aware of how badly this aspect of the war is going. Europe has itself paid a high price to effect a partial boycott of Russian oil and gas. ….”
“It soon became clear that while the West was keen on an economic war, the rest of the world was not. As its oil and gas exports to Europe fell, Russia quickly upped its exports to China and India – both of which preferred to buy oil at a discount than to make a stand against the invasion of Ukraine. Worse, some of the Russian oil exported to India appears to have been siphoned back to Europe, with a rise in the number of ships taking refined oil from India through the Suez Canal.
“The West embarked on its sanctions war with an exaggerated sense of its own influence around the world. As we have discovered, non-western countries lack the will (sic!) to impose sanctions on either Russia or on Russian oligarchs. The results of the miscalculation are there for all to see. In April last year, the IMF forecast that the Russian economy would contract by 8.5 per cent in 2022 and by a further 2.3 per cent this year. As it turned out, GDP fell by just 2.1 per cent last year, and this year the IMF is forecasting a small rise of 0.7 per cent. … The Russian economy has not been destroyed; it has merely been reconfigured, reorientated to look eastwards and southwards rather than westwards.”
The Telegraph Article Admits Failure in the Economic War on Russia
The second article, this one in in The Daily Telegraph paints an equally grim picture:
“Russia was meant to have collapsed by now. Britain, America and Europe’s gambit was that drastic trade, financial and technological sanctions, a cap on the price of Russian seaborne oil, and substantial help to Ukraine would be enough to defeat Moscow. It hasn’t worked. For all of the sacrifices of the Ukrainian people, the war has reached a stalemate, at least until Kyiv’s counter-offensive.
“The reason? China has quietly stepped in, bailing out Putin’s shattered economy on a transformational scale, swapping energy and raw materials for goods and technology. The sanctions are a joke. Russian-Chinese trade rose 41.3 per cent in the first four months of the year to $73 billion, financing Putin’s war. China’s exports to Russia were up 153 per cent in April 2023 alone; their rise more than cancels out the decline in German and French trade, as Robin Brooks, of the Institute for International Finance, points out. China’s trade has also shot up with Belarus, Kazakhstan, Georgia and Turkey, all with easy, porous access to Russia.
“No wonder Russian society hasn’t imploded. There may no longer be any McDonald’s in Moscow, but sales of Chinese cars are buoyant. We were told Russia couldn’t survive without Western technology, but it is switching instead to China’s rival systems.”
Mercouris describes the tone of these articles as bitter. And indeed, it seems that the Anglo-Saxons have got the taste of some very bitter fruits of defeat.
After Three Economic Assaults by the US, Russia Heads East
This is the third time since the end of Cold War 1.0 that the US has tried to destroy the Russian economy. The first was carried out by Bill Clinton in the 90s and resulted in a deeper and longer lasting Depression than the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930’s, with a declined of GDP of 43% and a shortening of lifespan by four years. Such is the cruelty of economic warfare.
The second came after the US-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014 and the shelling of the Donbas with the subsequent referendum in Crimea and its reincorporation into Russia, providing the perfect excuse for brutal sanctions against Russia. Russia learned how to handle those sanctions, one reason why it has succeeded in evading the present ones. The present failure is the third. It is hardly surprising that Russia has had quite enough and has turned decisively to China and the other dynamic economies of East Asia.
Both articles, but especially the one in the Telegraph, blame China for Russia’s successful evasion of the Western imperial maw. The Telegraph article is titled, “Xi Jinping is running out of time and he knows it.” On this view, although China (leading the rest of the Global South) was the Great Enabler allowing Putin to pivot to the East, its time is running out. Soon China will reach its peak and start to descend, a prediction we have heard repeatedly for the last quarter century but is yet to be realized.
In this telling Russia always comes out as a haplessly colonized nation with China as the cunning overlord. The only possibility is a win-lose outcome, which tells us more about the West’s world view than anything else. The idea of a win-win multipolar world with respect among nations as sovereign equals is simply not in the vocabulary of the West. Let’s hope that changes before we consume ourselves in nuclear war or in so busying ourselves with war and conflict that we fail to address the looming threats to our survival.
John V. Walsh, until recently a Professor of Physiology and Neuroscience at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, has written on issues of peace and health care for the San Francisco Chronicle, EastBayTimes/San Jose Mercury News, Asia Times, LA Progressive, Antiwar.com, CounterPunch and others.
The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD) summit to further contain China slated for May 24 will not take place, Australia PM announced on Wednesday 澳大利亞總理週三宣布，原定於 5 月 24 日舉行的旨在進一步遏制中國的四方安全對話 (QUAD) 峰會將不會舉行因為美國家中起火四面楚歌
Remembering Dean Chuck Yim Gee of UH School of Travel Industry Management, My Dean, Teacher, Friend and Mentor passed away on May 17 2019 緬懷朱卓任教授, 夏威夷大學旅遊學院院長，夏威夷大學校董會成員, 我的院長、教授, 老師、朋友和導師於 2019 年 5 月 17 日去世
Will US allowed Native American Indians to become the ruling class like the AngloSaxon in US – hell no! But Chinese & China is an entirely different story / Kishore Mahbubani: A ‘Yellow Peril’ Revival Fueling Western Fears of China’s Rise 美國會允許美洲原住民印第安人像美國的盎格魯撒克遜人一樣成為統治階級嗎？絕對不會！但中國人和中國是完全不同的故事 / Kishore Mahbubani：“黃禍”復興加劇了西方對中國崛起的恐懼
Western concerns about the rise of China are not just the result of cool, hard-headed analysis. As history tells us, they may also come from a subconscious, emotional fear of a non-Caucasian civilization. 西方對中國崛起的擔憂不僅僅是冷靜、冷靜分析的結果。正如歷史告訴我們的那樣，它們也可能來自對非高加索文明的潛意識、情感恐懼。
The world’s largest offshore liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal began trial operation on Sunday, which will increase the use of clean energy in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region
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