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CHINA’S XI: “EAST IS RISING, WEST IS DECLINING.” President Xi Jinping said in a closed-door meeting last month that China is on the ascent while the U.S. is on the descent and continues to be its biggest “source of chaos.”
“The United States is the biggest threat to our country’s development and security,” he said, according to The New York Times, citing an official who recalled the meeting. The paper reported that Xi has been trying to bolster the country’s confidence but has continued to warn about the West’s strength, saying things like, “The West is strong and the East is weak.”
China said last week that it would target a 2021 GDP growth of 6 percent, according to the Wall Street Journal. The paper reported that economists believe China’s economy will grow by 8 percent or more.
Beijing also announced it would increase military spending by 7 percent, according to Bloomberg. The country has allocated $208.6 billion to its 2022 defense budget. Fox News reported that Republicans on the House Armed Service Committee, led by Representative Mike Rogers from Alabama, countered the Chinese announcement by urging President Biden in a letter to increase military spending.
“The Chinese Communist Party increased its defense spending by over 75 percent in the last decade,” the letter read, according to the report. It continued, “If we do nothing, over the next decade, China will fully modernize its military, potentially bringing it into parity with our town.”
TRENDPOST: According to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the United States spends more on defense ($732 billion) than the top ten countries combined ($726 billion). China leads the ten other countries with an estimated $209 billion military budget.
CHINA SET TO SURPASS US ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. A congressional commission warned last week that China could, within the next decade, “surpass the U.S. as the world’s AI superpower,” according to the Financial Times.
“We are very close to losing the cutting edge of microelectronics which power our companies and our military because of our reliance on Taiwan,” Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, said, according to the paper.
Taiwan is one of the world’s biggest suppliers of microchips, but the study determined that the U.S. should make the production of these chips in the U.S. a priority.
TREND FORECAST: As we have long been reporting, when China was granted permission to enter the World Trade Organization in 2001, European and American manufacturers gave the third-world nation at the time the most advanced industrial production and hi-technology processes, so they could manufacture in China using cheap labor and sell it abroad at marked-up prices to make greater profit margins.
Now, 20 years later, having been given the keys to the manufacturing and hi-tech vaults, China has what it needs to excel in those areas without foreign nation input.
CHINA: SPENDING MORE TO MAKE CITIZENS LIVE LONGER. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that one of Beijing’s top domestic priorities is to get its population to live longer to make up for the lag in births in the country.
The report said the officials in Beijing are concerned about its aging population and its effect on the economy. The country is home to 1.4 billion people, and its projected future workforce is contracting.
The Journal reported that the country may have seen its lowest birth rate in decades last year and pointed to a consulting firm based in London that estimates the country’s workforce will shrink by more than 0.5 percent this year.
The goal of the 14th five-year plan is to increase the life expectancy in the country to above 78 by 2025, the Journal reported. The plan seeks economic and social change and provides a basic pension to 95 percent of the country’s retirees, up from the current 91 percent.
The report said Beijing also plans to make it more appealing to have children by making daycare more affordable and extending maternity leave.
TRENDPOST: Unlike China, most Western nations are silent on spending more to improve the public’s health.
As the COVID War rages, and as the data proves, which we detail in this and other issues of the Trends Journal – obesity and Type 2 diabetes are among the killer comorbidities in the U.S. and U.K. – yet, not a word from governments, Presstitutes, or politicians about building immune systems and spending more money to teach and help people to get healthy.
U.S. PACIFIC COMMAND: NEED MORE MONEY TO COUNTER CHINA. Admiral Philip Davidson, the leader of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, on Thursday told a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that the $27 billion Pacific Deterrence Initiative is worth the price tag.
Davidson compared the amount to what is spent on the European Defense Initiative, which fluctuates between $4.8 and $6.5 billion each year. Under the PDI request, the $27 billion would be spread out between 2022 and 2027. Part of the budget will be earmarked for a radar system in Pulau, Guam, with a hefty price tag of $200 million, along with $2.3 billion in what the report identified as space-based radars.
“It’s been fascinating to me, the relative ease at which the conversation happens year to year when it comes to the EDI when compared to PDI,” Davidson told the American Enterprise Institute, according to DefenseNews.com.
Nikkei Asia, the Japanese outlet, reported that one of the PDI documents submitted to Congress said one of the greatest dangers to the U.S. is the “erosion of conventional deterrence.”
“Without a valid and convincing conventional deterrent, China is emboldened to take action in the region and globally to supplant U.S. interests. As the Indo-Pacific’s military balance becomes more unfavorable, the U.S. accumulates additional risk that may embolden adversaries to unilaterally attempt to change the status quo.”
Defense News reported that along with the Guam radar system, the PDI budget would include a long-range missile system that would stretch from south Japan to Malaysia, which reportedly would be able to strike mainland China.
Some of the other items mentioned on the PDI include:
- $1.6 billion for an Aegis Ashore missile defense site on Guam,
- $4.6 billion on a “Power Projection, Dispersal, and Training Facilities within the U.S. territories, as well as Micronesia, Palau, and the Marshall Islands.
As the Trends Journal reported last month, the Biden administration has said China will be its top international priority. During his first visit to the Pentagon as president last month, Biden announced that he would form a task force that will form a policy to counter China during his first term. He called Beijing “our most serious competitor.”
TREND FORECAST: As we have reported over the years, the U.S. will not confront China militarily. And as we have noted, being that the U.S. has not won a war since World War II (and did so in part with the assistance of Russia), the Pentagon is well aware that war with China would be catastrophic, considering the size and power of China’s military.
If war did break out between the two nations, considering the depth and range of 21st-century weaponry of each nation, it will not only be the war that ends all wars, it will also be the end of life on Earth.
BLINKEN: CHINA IS THE BIGGEST ‘GEOPOLITICAL TEST” OF THE CENTURY. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a speech last Wednesday that Washington’s relationship with Beijing will be the greatest test in the 21st Century.
Blinken said that China is the only country “with the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to seriously challenge the stable and open international system—all the rules, values, and relationships that make the world work the way we want it to, because it ultimately serves the interests and reflects the values of the American people.”
The head diplomat, who addressed the State Department via video presentation, said the Chinese threat trumps other countries and regions like Russia and the Middle East. He said the “common denominator is the need to engage China from a position of strength.”
His speech reportedly seemed to reflect a 24-page “interim” strategy that deals with national security. One item in the document mentioned the need to restore U.S. credibility and reassert a “forward-looking global leadership” that will “ensure that America, not China, set the international agenda.” One of the administration’s reported goals is to strengthen its relationship with countries like Japan, India, and Australia.
TRENDPOST: A Pew Research Center released a poll on Thursday that showed nine in ten Americans view Beijing as either a competitor or outright enemy, according to the Wall Street Journal. Only 53 percent of those polled believe Biden will be able to reign in Beijing’s influence on the global economy.
TOP TRENDS 2021: THE RISE OF CHINA: As we have forecast, the 20th century was the American century – the 21st century will be the Chinese century. The business of China is business; the business of America is war.
While America spent countless trillions waging and losing endless wars and enriching its military-industrial complex, China has spent its trillions advancing the nation’s businesses and building its 21st-century infrastructure.
And while America and Europe have outsourced their manufacturing to China and developing nations to increase profit margins, China’s dual circulation/self-sustaining economic model is directed toward keeping jobs and trade and profits within the nation, thus relying less on global trade.