Spoke Hugo Restall, WSJA; Gordon Chang, Forbes.com; Jeff Bliss, BlissIndex.com, and Victor Davis Hanson, Hoover, re the Beijing mandarin suppression and shut-down of Google search on the Mainland and, soon enough perhaps, in HK also. Also spoke of the Rio Tinto trial ongoing on the Mainland, where four executives of the iron ore company are being prosecuted in a show trial. The general sense is that the Beijing mandarins are shutting up the country, or, as Gordon Chang comments, Chinese development is going in reverse. Victor Hanson spoke his despair that the Obama administration regards Beijing as an aggressor to appease and cajole into better behavior. The facts are that iron ore prices are rising on demand, that China failed to secure good prices from Rio Tinto, that China aims to shake down the company, that Australia does not defend its nationals. Beijing aggression is rewarded by Canberra and Washington. In the meantime, POTUS meets to chastise Bibi Netanyahu and Israel, and the Obama administration dilutes the santions regime threatened against Tehran for its nuke program. The observation is that the Obama team keeps its enemies close so they can enjoy the Obama team beating on its allies.
Is this the Chinese bubble ready to pop?
Mandarins in Tienanmen are looking to blame capitalists (white Caucasian capitalists, any outsiders) for their economic decline in steel production. Grave choice made for over doing it on Steel production capacity.
Auto and Durable goods decline will have steel production in limbo for quite a while.
Foreign owned firms will think twice if they believe they will be put on a show trial for a deal gone bad. Even the Germans will avoid going to China.
Rio Tinto is UK-Ozzie corporation, no US protection. Oz has a good relationship with PRC. Suspect they will be released once Melbourne starts pressing Beijing. The show trial will go on, the anger against "western industrialists" must be stoked.
Could this pop the Chinese bubble?
The audacity of Democrat ambition to reorder the world by reversing its laws – social, political and economic – to achieve what some would regard as the lowest common denominator is truly staggering. We too are going in reverse. It seems that American progressives see reverse as the least arduous path to progress. In the process, they’ve had to change the language; re-write the dictionaries; stand opposites on their heads – which is yet the most hopeful sign the rest of us can embrace. If they indeed think it important enough alter definitions of words (i.e. enemy, ally; failure, success; destructive, benign; legal, illegal; etc.) to fit policy - as in what most of us understand as lying – perhaps there is still some remnant of truth left which they find hard to overcome. Perhaps when Obama so boastfully announces that he aims to re-make our country, he tacitly admits that there is still a country to re-make – that we are not starting from scratch.
As I contemplate Obama’s agenda, I am struck with “the vertigo of enormity, the drunkenness of the gigantic, the reckless effort of that pride which would at any cost engrave its name deeply upon the face of the world.”*
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*A quote I happened to run across last night, taken from “One of Cleopatra’s Nights” by Theophile Gautier in which he describes the sphinx and pyramids of the Egyptian desert.
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