Bharat Rakshak

yensoy wrote:... He is a seasoned diplomat who knows how to apply increasing levels of pressure as required using all tools at his disposal.

yensoy wrote: ... Regarding using Taiwan for geopolitical purposes - please keep in mind that Taiwan itself wants to stay under the radar in a state of ambiguous independence because it has the most to lose if China is provoked. We can certainly cement business relations with Taiwan but guess what PRC-Taiwan business connections are way deeper than ours will ever be.

Chinese biotech firm offered to build COVID labs in US, likely to try to collect Americans' DNA: report
https://www.foxnews.com/world/chinese-b ... ricans-dna
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BGI Group, touted as the largest biotech firm in the world, offered to build and run testing labs in Washington, New York and California, among other states.

The offer raised suspicions and led Bill Evanina, then-director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, to warn the states against the offer.
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Suraj wrote:The economic survey reports information on trade balances with major partners for the year up to November 2020.
Economic Survey 2020-21
Table 3 shows the impact of Indian constrictions on Chinese goods - the trade deficit with China for April-November is down by over $10 billion. Temporarily, there's likely to remain significant imports from China where capital goods are imported as part of moving manufacturing over, but losing $10 billion in business is a big deal. Hopefully the full year figure is closer to -$20 billion for them - a good valuation as to the cost to them from their Galwan misadventure.

The extension of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) between the United States and Russia to 2026 may not only prevent an out-of-control arms race but also gives China an additional five-year buffer period.

Chinese military experts and sources said the extension, announced by the White House on Tuesday, means the gap between China and the two nuclear giants, which own 90 per cent of the world’s warheads, will not widen and Beijing can spend the next five years catching up.

In the 1980s, the US and former Soviet Union each possessed more than 10,000 warheads, but these stockpiles have been cut to between 5,000 to 6,500 under the New START, which aims to reduce the total to just 1,550 as the ultimate goal.

China has not disclosed how many warheads it has, but an assessment by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute put the number at 320.

However, a source close to the Chinese military said that its stockpile of nuclear warheads had risen to 1,000 in recent years, but less than 100 of them are active. {By 'active', they mean 'mated' and ready-to-fire. There are six Type-094 SSBNs each with 12 tubes for JL-2 SLBMs. Some of the SLBMs are MIRVd.}

“Both the US and Russia have competed with each other to upgrade their nuclear arms over the past few years, especially their intercontinental ballistic missiles [ICBMs], submarine-launched and airborne missiles, as well as other new weapons to upgrade their nuclear triad capability,” the source, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic, said.

“Since [late leader] Deng Xiaoping’s era, the Beijing leadership has believed that the country doesn’t need so many expensive weapons, because the exorbitant maintenance costs would drag down China’s economic development,” the source said.

The source said China has a strict nuclear arms control mechanism which means only the chairman of the Central Military Commission – now President Xi Jinping – has the right to decide the deployment of nuclear warheads.

“Nuclear warheads would be distributed to the rocket force only when a war is likely to happen,” the source said.

Hong Kong-based military affairs commentator and former PLA instructor Song Zhongping said Beijing might use the five-year period to narrow the nuclear modernisation gap with the US and Russia.

“Based on the fact that China currently has only about 100 nuclear warheads in active service, it is not enough to completely destroy all major cities in the US,” Song said.

In 2018, China disclosed that its air-launched CJ-20 cruise missiles, with a range of 2,000km (1,200 miles), were able to carry both conventional and nuclear warheads, indicating it had finally caught up with the US and Russia’s preliminary strategic technology.

“But that means the PLA just completed the initial requirement of the nuclear triad’s second-strike capability in recent years, but the US and Russia completed most of the nuclear triad in the early 1960s during the Cold War,” said Zhou Chenming, a researcher from Yuan Wang, a Beijing-based military science and technology institute.

Zhou said the extension of New START gave China more time to reconsider its future security policy, including biochemical weapons as well as nuclear.

“If China is going to join the New-START in the future, Beijing needs to adjust its strategic weapons development direction, for example, no more long-range strategic bombers and ICBMs, which may be cut,” he said, referring to calls from Washington that the treaty should also include Beijing

However, the Chinese military source and observers said even though Beijing may benefit from the extension of the treaty, it is worried that the US would exert more pressure on it to join.

In an article published by the Washington-based news website The Hill, Rose Gottemoeller, who served as the State Department’s top arms control official during the Obama administration, said Joe Biden’s administration should try to bring China to the negotiating table.

“We also need to draw China into talks, to focus on constraining the intermediate range missiles at the heart of its force structure – the ‘carrier killers’ that are dangerous to our naval operations in the Pacific,” Gottemoeller wrote.

She was referring to the PLA’s DF-21 and DF-26 dual-capability intermediate-range ballistic missiles, a type of weapon banned under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed by the US and Soviet Union towards the end of the Cold War.

Gottemoeller said urgent discussions were needed on whether the hypersonic glide vehicles and other new weapons with nuclear strike capabilities should be defined as strategic weapons and covered by the treaty.

David Santoro, vice-president and director of nuclear policy at the Pacific Forum, a Honolulu-based affiliate of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said that if Washington and Moscow wanted to bring China to the negotiating table, the pair may also have to include nuclear states like India, Pakistan and North Korea.

“It’s possible to imagine realistic trilateral (US-Russia-China) arms control bargains. By and large, however, multilateralising arms control is more likely to be successful if it includes all or most nuclear-armed states,” Santoro said.

But he stressed that the three powers faced another challenge to reaching an agreement because both the US and Russia have large strategic nuclear arsenals, but lack intermediate-range forces, which China has fully developed. {That's the gap that Russia was clandestinely trying to bridge with its Iskander-M that ultimately led to collapse of the INF}

Exclusive: Suspected Chinese hackers used SolarWinds bug to spy on U.S. payroll agency - sources
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cybe ... SKBN2A22K8
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Security researchers have previously said a second group of hackers was abusing SolarWinds’ software at the same time as the alleged Russian hack, but the suspected connection to China and ensuing U.S. government breach have not been previously reported.

Reuters was not able to establish how many organizations were compromised by the suspected Chinese operation. The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing investigations, said the attackers used computer infrastructure and hacking tools previously deployed by state-backed Chinese cyberspies.
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The men always wore masks, Tursunay Ziawudun said, even though there was no pandemic then.

They wore suits, she said, not police uniforms.

Sometime after midnight, they came to the cells to select the women they wanted and took them down the corridor to a "black room", where there were no surveillance cameras.

Several nights, Ziawudun said, they took her.

"Perhaps this is the most unforgettable scar on me forever," she said.

A notice from China's education ministry has caused a stir after it suggested young Chinese men had become too "feminine".

the country's most popular male role models are no longer strong, athletic figures like "army heroes".

The Proposal to Prevent the Feminisation of Male Adolescents called on schools to fully reform their offerings on physical education and strengthen their recruitment of teachers.

Last May, a delegate of China's top advisory body, Si Zefu, said that many of China's young males had become "weak, timid, and self-abasing".

Si Zefu said the home environment was partly to blame, with most Chinese boys being raised by their mothers or grandmothers.

sanjaykumar wrote:https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/ ... 774108.ece
India has transgressed LAC more often than China: V.K. Singh
No surprise at all.

Post by rajpa » 05 Feb 2021 04:54 am

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content ... -telegram/

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/news/tr ... have-read/

American strategy emerges to contain China.. starting with Xi Jumping. Similar to thoughts echoed here on BRF....

yensoy wrote:

sanjaykumar wrote:https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/ ... 774108.ece
India has transgressed LAC more often than China: V.K. Singh
No surprise at all.

Sorry this quote is going to do more harm than good. Hope it gets forgotten soon.

DavidD wrote:

Suraj wrote:The economic survey reports information on trade balances with major partners for the year up to November 2020.
Economic Survey 2020-21
Table 3 shows the impact of Indian constrictions on Chinese goods - the trade deficit with China for April-November is down by over $10 billion. Temporarily, there's likely to remain significant imports from China where capital goods are imported as part of moving manufacturing over, but losing $10 billion in business is a big deal. Hopefully the full year figure is closer to -$20 billion for them - a good valuation as to the cost to them from their Galwan misadventure.

Isn't India's overall imports down? What's China's share of all Indian imports like? I think that would tell a fuller story.

Suraj wrote:China is the only country on that list from which imports were explicitly targeted. The other poster asks for a causal relationship, implying that there's only a correlative one (imports from everywhere dropped, China just more so). But the reality is that China was the only one explicitly targeted, and that shows in the data. There's an indirect causal relationship in the drop in crude imports, since there was a drop in economic activity from the lockdown.

Amidst call to boycott 2020 Beijing Winter Olympics, Canada says it would warn athletes against publicly criticising China
https://www.opindia.com/2021/02/canada- ... pics-2022/
As China gears up to host the 2022 winter Olympics in Beijing in February next year, the call to boycott the winter games being hosted by China next year has been growing. Amidst all this, the Canadian Olympic organisers have said that they would warn its athletes to refrain from openly criticising China ahead of the winter games. The decision was taken due to concerns that the Communist Party’s critics could be prosecuted under the draconian national security law
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Suraj wrote:You're interested in the import data. I'm interested in the trade balance. US and SoKo show a YoY drop in both imports and exports and a small improvement in trade balance. The gain in surplus against China is more than 2x the gain against anyone else who's not a source of hydrocarbons or gems/gold (e.g. Switzerland). The latter will naturally revert to the norm as the economy recovers.

The top 5 US import items to India (USTR data) are mineral fuels ($8.2 billion), precious metal and stone (diamonds) ($6.4 billion), aircraft ($2.8 billion), machinery ($2.4 billion), and organic chemicals ($1.9 billion). Indian exports to US were primarily precious metal and stone (diamonds) ($11 billion), pharmaceuticals ($7.6 billion), machinery ($3.7 billion), mineral fuels ($3.6 billion), and organic chemicals ($2.8 billion). The main items in both directions are impacted by Covid driven slowdowns, except for pharmaceuticals from India. There's no explicit policy in action here.

India's top 3 imports from China are electrical and electronic goods, machinery and organic chemicals. This is primarily concentrated in mobile phones and other gadgets. For example, Xiaomi went from 30% marketshare in Q2 to 23% within a single quarter, falling behind Samsung, while others (especially Apple with local manufacturing growing) picked up share. This is at a time when YoY smartphone sales are growing at double digits.

But yeah this could be better - more needs to be done to squeeze the Chinese companies out. Easier to ban apps than to find effective ways to ban products.

NRao wrote:The challenge of FONOPS

[img...]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EtfxLbzXYAI ... name=large[/img]

Couples in China weren’t much in the mood to get busy in the bedroom during the country's various lockdowns last year, dashing the government’s hopes of a post-pandemic baby boom to stave off a looming population crisis.

Ten million births were registered in 2020, 15 per cent lower than the previous year, and hitting a new record low since the 1960s, when China was in the middle of a famine.

In recent years, Chinese couples have become less willing to have children due to the rising cost of housing, health care and education. Even Beijing’s 2016 decision to scrap a decades-long one-child policy had little impact.

“House prices [are] the best contraceptive pill,” one person posted online.

“There are many regulations on pandemic prevention and housing compounds always ask people to quarantine,” scoffed one person online. “That’s upsetting enough, don’t talk to me about having a baby.”

“It would be such a headache if one gets pregnant during the pandemic and has to go to the hospital,” said another.

“Locking men and women up at home could by no means increase birth rate, but the divorce rate would definitely spike,” said one online post.

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Biden also announced a new Pentagon-led review of the U.S. military strategy towards China, including operational concepts, force posture, and technology concerns. The task force is expected to work over the next several months to produce recommendations for Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to guide his approach to China.

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