Asia Times: Lessons from Meng Wanzhou case for Joe Biden – The US president should now see the folly of following his predecessor Trump’s footsteps on China policy By GEORGE KOO SEPTEMBER 29, 2021

People celebrate the arrival home of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou at Shenzhen International Airport.

The sudden release of Meng Wanzhou caught many people by surprise, and a flurry of analysis and speculations has followed since her uneventful arrival in Shenzhen, China. For residents of Sleepy Hollow and others who might wonder what the excitement was all about, it’s time for a refresher review.

Shenzhen is the home base for Huawei, China’s and the world’s leading telecommunications company. Meng is the chief financial officer of this giant company and she also happens to be the daughter of Ren Zhengfei, the founder and chairman of Huawei.

More than thousand days ago, Meng was detained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police while in transit at the international airport of Vancouver, British Columbia. The arrest was made at the request of the US Department of Justice, when Donald Trump was president of the United States.

The US alleged that Meng had misrepresented Huawei’s business dealings with Iran to HSBC, thus causing the bank to violate US sanctions imposed on Iran.

In 2015, the five members of the UN Security Council (China, France, Russia, UK and US) plus Germany had struck a long-term deal with Iran on its nuclear program. The deal was created after much effort by all parties to ensure stability in the Middle East.

When Trump became president, he flatly opposed anything Barack Obama, his predecessor, had stood for. Thus he unilaterally reneged on the agreement known as Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and imposed sanctions on Iran on the pretext that he could get a better deal than the JCPOA. Trump, of course, did not bother to consult with the other five nations that had co-signed the original agreement with Iran.

Meng detained on flimsy charges

As I summarized the Meng affair nearly a year ago, Washington cobbled together a flimsy set of charges to justify her arrest. Basically, a Chinese citizen doing business with a British bank was accused of violating American sanctions on Iran that neither China nor the UK had anything to do with. Subsequent examination revealed that even those accusations were on shaky grounds.

Trump had conned Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, into caving into Washington’s wishes to make the arrest. By taking Ren’s daughter hostage, Trump had hoped to blackmail Ren in some way that only Trump could have dreamed up.

Two years after the arrest, it became increasingly obvious that America’s long arm of extraterritorial reach was becoming a source of embarrassment for Washington and Ottawa. The US DOJ then resorted to its usual trick and offered to release Meng if she would plead guilty to a lesser charge. She stood fast and refused.

Historically, the American scale of justice has always been tilted in favor of the government. Even when the DOJ is clearly in the wrong, as it was in the case of Wen Ho Lee, he had to plead guilty to computer downloading in violation of laboratory rules in exchange for time served, which was a harsh 10 months of solitary confinement.

Recent history is replete with examples of miscarriages of justice meted out by the DOJ against Chinese-Americans. The US government has virtually infinite resources to wear down the hapless accused. But it didn’t work against Meng because she was not American and she had the resources of Huawei and China to back her stance.

Biden missed doing the right thing

Then Joe Biden became the US president. He could have immediately ordered dropping the American request to extradite Meng and get Trudeau off the hook, and Canada from being the country caught awkwardly in the middle. But Biden did not. He was under the influence of his China team.

Whether it was China’s first meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Anchorage, Alaska, or subsequently with visiting Deputy State Secretary Wendy Sherman or with special envoy John Kerry, Beijing’s message remained the same: China would not let the US pick and choose which issues to cooperate on and which issues to compete and confront China on.

From Beijing’s point of view, the Biden administration cannot go around the world lying about China’s conduct and recruiting allies to oppose China as if engaged in another cold war, and still expect collaboration on selected global issues. Without mutual respect, there will be no trust nor confidence in each other on doing the right thing.

Beijing handed each visiting American envoy a list of demands to be met if Washington wished to repair bilateral relations.

Interestingly, as the South China Morning Post reported, John Thornton was a visitor in China for six weeks shortly before the release of Meng. Thornton has a deep China background. He is a professor at Tsinghua University and the chairman of the board of trustees at the Brookings Institution, where the China Center is named after him.

Unlike the official envoys from Washington who were not invited to visit Beijing, Thornton met with Vice-Premier Han Zheng in the national capital. They discussed what it would take to resume bilateral talks, and then Thornton was allowed to visit Xinjiang for a week.

It’s hard to know the exact role Thornton played in triggering the release of Meng and whether the release represents a real first step toward normalizing relations and the abandonment of Trump’s confrontation with China.

The face-saving deal that allowed the DOJ to cancel the extradition request and secure Meng’s release was a device called a deferred prosecution agreement. The agreement did not require any admission of guilt by Meng.

Within an hour of Meng’s final release by the Canadian court, she got on a Chinese airliner and flew home to Shenzhen. As a show of the lack of trust and to avoid unpleasant surprises (in case Washington suffered seller’s remorse), the airliner skirted around Alaska airspace when it flew over the Arctic circle.

Since Washington insisted on designating China as an adversary, only the Biden White House can decide when and if China should no longer be considered an adversary but a powerful collaborator that the US could work with to resolve all the challenges facing the world. Perhaps a trusted intermediary like Thornton could help persuade Biden that following Trump on China policy has been a road to disaster.

George Koo retired from a global advisory services firm where he advised clients on their China strategies and business operations. Educated at MIT, Stevens Institute and Santa Clara University, he is the founder and former managing director of International Strategic Alliances. He is currently a board member of Freschfield’s, a novel green building platform.

Video: The Sino-U.S. incident reminds us: China has only two allies 中美事件提醒我们：中国，只有两个盟友
https://youtu.be/OOtTWBarfDc
https://www.facebook.com/100036400039778/posts/575719770318019/?d=n

Science News: Why does China want to build a kilometre-long spacecraft? And is it even possible? Buoyed on by its recent successful Moon missions, the Asian superpower has launched a five-year study to investigate the possibility of building the biggest spacecraft the world has ever seen. By Stuart Clark 28th September, 2021

The Chinese space programme has been raising eyebrows again – this time because of its proposal to study how to build a large spacecraft, at least one kilometre in length.

To put that into perspective, the International Space Station (ISS) is just 109 metres across, yet it cost $150 billion (£110 billion) and took thirty missions over the course of a decade to build. China’s proposal is for a spacecraft 10 times the size of the ISS. It may sound crazy but don’t make the mistake of dismissing it just yet.

“It’s about ambition, long-term thinking and instilling a sense of purpose. Such long-haul thinking does not fit in well with shorter-term western thinking, which might mistakenly dismiss this as propaganda,” says space writer Brian Harvey, author of the book China in Space: The Great Leap Forward.

There no doubt China has been making serious strides in space exploration recently. It has returned lunar rock samples to Earth for analysis, making it the third country behind the USA and Russia to do so; it has landed a rover on Mars, a feat that only the USA had previously managed; and it has made the world’s first landing on the lunar far side. On top of this, China is now building the Tiangong space station, which was inhabited for 90 days this year, and is designed to eventually rival the ISS.

Thinking about the future, Harvey points to a Chinese report published in 2009 called Roadmap 2050, which is the blueprint for how China plans to become the world’s leading space-faring nation by the middle of the century. “The horizon to Chinese spaceflight is not years or decades but half-centuries,” he says.

How the upcoming missions to Venus could reveal how life on Earth will end
How humanity will return to the Moon: The future of lunar exploration

In other words, this most recent announcement is the beginning of China thinking about how to build such a spacecraft in the future, rather than a declaration that it intends to begin construction.

The idea was floated in a wider call for research proposals from the National Science Foundation of China – a funding agency managed by the country’s Ministry of Science and Technology. It is offering 15 million yuan (£1.7 million) for a five-year feasibility study into new, lightweight designs and materials, and construction techniques in space.

But why would China want a spacecraft ten times larger than anything that has previously been built? The answer could be artificial gravity. A space station that features artificial gravity could help astronauts stave off some of the most damaging effects of weightlessness, such as muscle wastage and the loss of bone density.

For long duration spaceflights to Mars or beyond, artificial gravity could make a dramatic difference in keeping the crew healthy.

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey famously depicted a rotating space station

“Artificial gravity has been this ‘science fictiony’ holy grail thing for human spaceflight for a century, and the primary way to do it is a large spinning structure,” says Zachary Manchester an assistant professor at the robotics institute of Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania.

Inside a spinning structure, the centrifugal force makes things move outwards. If the structures spins at the correct rate, this can create a force that mimics the effects of gravity.

The problem with this is that humans are very susceptible to rotation rates. If you spin faster than a couple of revolutions per minute, the average person will start to suffer from motion sickness.

However, experiments have shown that these effects virtually disappear at rotation rates of one to two revolutions per minute. So how large would a spacecraft have to be in order to create Earth’s gravity by spinning at a leisurely 1-2 rpm?

“Turns out you need a structure that’s about a kilometre across,” says Manchester, who received a grant from NASA in February this year so that he and colleagues could study a construction scenario for a one-kilometre-long spacecraft.

Whereas China appears to be looking at how to build something huge in orbit after launching numerous components into space, Manchester is studying whether it would be possible to build a complete structure that would fold into the nose cone of a single large rocket, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy for example. It would then hugely expand once deployed in space.

The key to this idea is utilising something known as mechanical meta-materials. These use scissor-like joints to fold down to a fraction of their deployed size. The most familiar example of such a mechanical meta-material is the Hoberman Sphere. This child’s toy resembles a small spiky ball in its resting state but can expand into a large sphere many times its original diameter.

The Hoberman Sphere, a children’s toy, is an example of a meta-material that may help engineers to design gigantic space stations

“Turns out, there’s some really interesting mechanisms that you can put together, that can achieve very, very high expansion ratios,” says Manchester.

The structures he is studying can expand to hundreds of times their original size. Science ‘fictiony’ indeed! Only time will tell if either design will work out, but it’s now very clear that the world’s major space faring powers are looking forward to the creation of spacecraft much larger than any we have created to date.

Dr Stuart Clark is an astronomy writer with a PhD in astrophysics.

https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/why-does-china-want-to-build-a-kilometre-long-spacecraft-and-is-it-even-possible/

US is blocking Huawei telecom equipments in US & her vassal states. US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on Tuesday the Chinese government is preventing its domestic airlines from buying “tens of billions of dollars” of US-manufactured planes.

The US city of San Jose California was once home to one of the largest Chinatowns in California. In the heart of downtown, it was the centre of life for Chinese immigrants who worked on nearby farms and orchards.

US-style democracy ‘owned by 1%, governed by 1%, enjoyed by 1%,’ Humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan exposes longstanding problems of Western development aid by Song Wei Sep 28 2021

Afghanistan is now on the verge of a humanitarian and economic crisis. Despite the fact that the international community has pledged more than $1.2 billion in humanitarian and development aid to the country, Afghanistan appears still approaching a critical point. Executive Director of the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) said that 14 million people in Afghanistan – one-third of the population – are facing food insecurity.

In the meantime, a massive exodus of refugees may evolve into a regional crisis. Many factors have contributed to the development of this tragedy, but it is truth that Afghanistan has been the number one recipient of aid from major Western countries for more than two decades. The failure of international development aid should also face heightened scrutiny.

The first problem is that ideology was the primary consideration for western governments, instead of real development. For a long time, Western countries have been exporting ideology and governance modes through foreign aid, forcing recipient countries to reform under a threat of halting aid funds or directly imposing sanctions. The West failed to hide its parochialism even when it comes to humanitarian crises.

The second problem is an excessive paranoia about procedural justice. The UN and many international aid institutions had been providing aid to Afghanistan long before the government collapsed and the Taliban marched into Kabul on August 15. The truth is, over the past 20 years, Western aid has not helped the war-torn country in effective way. With thousands of development advisers from different fields interwoven across the country, each with its own agenda, the result is in a huge amount of local duplication and wasted development resources. According to an OECD research, an average recipient country receives nearly 300 delegations from donor countries every year, costing up to $5 billion.

Now the international community is calling for additional assistance to Afghanistan, which not only needs assistance, but also “real assistance” that can benefit its people, just like China’s assistance in building low-cost affordable housing in Kabul.

The third problem is dissociated development goals. International development assistance theories prove that when a humanitarian crisis emerges, the most vulnerable groups are often the hardest hit, so that the most effective tool to deal with the crisis is to combine humanitarian intervention with development assistance. The current crisis in Afghanistan has again confirmed this theory. Poverty rates are soaring, public services are collapsing and many may run out of food by the end of the month as rising prices dry up their salary savings, according to UN’s estimates.

“Today, around 10 million children across Afghanistan need humanitarian assistance to survive. An estimated 1 million children are projected to suffer from severe acute malnutrition over the course of this year and could die without treatment,” read a statement by UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore on children in Afghanistan.

However, Western aid practices often run in the opposite direction. For instance, the new head of the US Agency for International Assistance (USAID) in the Biden administration, Samantha Power, has repeatedly used her official and academic role to advise the Department of Defense to intervene directly in humanitarian crises overseas.

It is easy to tell that the dissociation between the goals of emergency humanitarian aid and development aid is an important inducement lurking behind the continuous fermentation of crisis.

The fourth problem is that aid has become a breeding ground for corruption. About $6 million cash and at least 15 gold bars were reportedly found at the home of Amrullah Saleh, Afghanistan’s former vice-president. In fact, western countries know that the longstanding approach to financial aid breeds corruption, which they choose to cover up in order to maintain their own image of aid and the interests of related parties.

Initial humanitarian pledges for Afghanistan have so far exceeded $1 billion. Generous as it is, many factors such as the concept, mode and target of the use of aid funds need to be reconsidered. If the Western society does not think outside the box and break the arrogance of power, the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan will be difficult to solve effectively, with the blow to global development governance possibly fatal.

The author is deputy director of Hongqiao Economic Forum Research Center under the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation. bizopinion@globaltimes.com.cn

If US wants to prosecute Huawei again, it will face China’s countermeasure by Ding Gang Sep 28 2021

Meng Wanzhou has returned to the motherland. This is a landmark event which carries significance for China’s integration with the world and the international order.

No matter how China, the US and Canada communicated and negotiated, Washington and Ottawa agreed to release her. The result shows that the US long-arm jurisdiction could be disrupted. This is China’s successful challenge to US hegemonism.

US unilateral sanctions reached their peak during the era of former president Donald Trump. Statistics from the International Law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP show that the Trump administration imposed 3,900 sanctions during its four years in office. This means it waved the sanction stick about three times a day.

But it is different now.

In May 2018, Trump announced the US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and planned instituting the highest level of economic sanctions against Iran. This was a sheer hegemonic act that violated UN principles.

This US decision met with objections from a number of countries including China, Russia, the UK, France and Germany. Some EU members criticized the US for adopting double-standard foreign policies. The US opposed the Arab League for the latter’s boycott of Israel, but pushed the whole globe to boycott Iran. EU members even threatened to adopt countermeasures within the framework of the World Trade Organization against the US.

Germany, France and the UK then accelerated setting up the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges to facilitate trade with Iran.

In March 2020, the system completed its first transaction, sending medical supplies and equipment to Iran to tackle COVID-19. The function of this system provides a long-term and sustainable solution to legitimate trade between Europe and Iran. It was during this period that the Trump administration provoked a trade war against China. It then adopted a policy to comprehensively contain China’s rise.

In April 2018, the US imposed sanctions on Chinese telecom giant ZTE Corp. After that, Washington began to step up its crackdown on Huawei.

Why Huawei? Because the rise of a country, first of all, starts from the rise of its enterprises. Huawei represents the global rise of Chinese companies and Chinese manufacturing. This collective emergence has impacted the US-led system, and has affected Western capital’s control of the global market which has lasted for about five centuries.

From Huawei’s cooperation with Iran, Washington hopes to find problems similar to that of ZTE and then impose sanctions. But to its disappointment, there is no evidence proving that Huawei violated the trade embargo. The US eventually charged Huawei with bank fraud. Its reason was that Huawei did not make it clear to its bank, HSBC, about its business dealings with Iran. This is a complete forgery created by the US side in collusion with certain people at HSBC.

Although Meng was released, the US still announced she has entered into a “deferred prosecution agreement.”

Some people worry that Washington will continue its investigation and Huawei may have to accept high fines. These people have not understood the significance of Meng’s release. What comes next will probably not be how the US will throw its punches. But how China will punch back.

If the US side decides to prosecute Huawei again, what it will encounter first will be China’s Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law.

Today, Huawei cannot be easily knocked down. In 2020, the company’s sales revenues reached 891.4 billion yuan ($136.7 billion), with a net profit of 64.6 billion yuan ($9.9 billion). This year, Huawei has ranked 44th among the Fortune Global 500 companies. And what is behind Huawei is a large group of Chinese companies on the rise and the country’s comprehensive manufacturing industry. This gives China the power to fight back against hegemony.

The latest US-China trade data is quite telling. In the first five months of 2021, China exported 1.34 trillion yuan ($207.5 billion) to the US, up 38.9 percent. Meanwhile, China’s imports from the US reached 478.3 billion yuan ($74.1 billion), up 48.5 percent. And the trade surplus with the US totaled 860.51 billion yuan ($133.3 billion), an increase of 34.1 percent. In conclusion, China’s exports to the US are much larger than imports from it.

Against the backdrop, other countries that have been suppressed by Washington’s long-arm jurisdiction will hardly be as pliant and obedient under the US hegemony as they used to be.

The author is a senior editor with People’s Daily, and currently a senior fellow with the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China. dinggang@globaltimes.com.cn. Follow him on Twitter @dinggangchina

Chinese Scientists whether American born or immigrants would be foolish to stay in US. Your Chinese heritage automatically made you enemies of US. Huawei founder urges to recruit more foreign talent through North America research center by Global Times Sep 28 2021

Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei said in a company internal memo that the company should recruit more foreign talent and turn its North America research and development (R&D) center into a recruitment platform, according to a screenshot of the memo circulating online on Tuesday.

In the memo dated August 21, Ren urged to transfer Huawei’s R&D center in North America into a talent recruitment center, which is a notable move given the major difficulties and hurdles the company face in the US.

Huawei’s North American R&D center was initially located in the US, but Ren said in December 2019 that the company would move the center to Canada, according to several media reports at the time. It was not immediately clear whether the center had been moved.

While Ren’s internal memo became public several days after his daughter and Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou safely returned to China after reaching a deferred prosecution agreement with the US Justice Department, it appears to be issued before her high-profile release and safe return.

In the internal memo, Ren stressed that Huawei will attract skilled talent from across the world amid a crucial period for the company’s “strategic survival and development,” saying that as long as they are talented, they can join our “fight” with a “surgical knife.

Ren also urged to build bonds with foreign talent in order to draw them to China for work, adding that the company should encourage foreign talent in product development to come to work in China and support European and US doctoral students to come to China for research.

Global Times

Professor John Walsh, MD, San Francisco: Hi Johnson, Things are beginning to heat up, I fear with the Dem hero Biden showing a grim determination to bring China (and Russia) down.
The situation of Chinese in Australia is much worse than before, with Chinese being called upon to publicly denounce the CPC!
And those who are opposing the anti-Asian racism here are confining themselves to crying “racism,” carefully avoiding:

1. The cause of it, which is the official denunciations of China from on high and the daily demonization articles in the NYT, NPR, ETC
2. The fact that at its heart it is NOT anti-Asian but anti-Chinese with a spillover to others from EAST Asia. Indians are quite OK and even doing better in some ways as a result.
   You are right. The US is becoming No Country for Young Chinese.

Video: Hostages exchange lies! Meng Wanzhou NOT GUILTY & Two Michaels Canadian SPIES Released 孟晚舟無罪和兩名邁克爾斯加拿大間諜獲釋
https://youtu.be/H_cMVoEnEEk
https://www.facebook.com/100036400039778/posts/575359733687356/?d=n

Video: Peter Hung, President of Forbes Global Holding Inc “a 100 years old company’s secret of success” Produced by Johnson Choi, CAAC. 9-28-21 SF
https://youtu.be/aIpCZAjcXLY
https://vimeo.com/617428673
https://www.facebook.com/100036400039778/posts/575328967023766/?d=n