Ambassador Kishore Mahbubani on US-China Competition

[Riaz Haq]

Kishore Mahbubani, a prolific writer, speaker and former Singaporean diplomat, believes that the western domination of the world over the last 200 years is "aberrant" when seen in the context of the last several thousand years of human history.  In his book "Has China Won", he writes that "we are also moving away from a black-and-white world". "Societies in different parts of the world, including in China and Islamic societies, are going to work toward a different balance between liberty and order, between freedom and control, between discord and harmony". 

Kishore Mahbubabi

In a recent interview, Mahbubani made the following points about US-China competition: 

1. The United States with about 240-year history likes to pass judgement on China which has over 2,400 year history. What makes the US think China would listen to the American advice? 

2. The West is in the habit of judging everyone, including the Chinese. The Chinese have just had the best 30 years of their history. Would the Chinese listen to the American advice on "democracy" and political freedoms after they have seen what happened to Russia when the Russians decided to adopt democracy in the1990s and their economy collapsed? 

3. More than 120 million Chinese tourists go to other countries freely and willingly return to China every year. Would they return freely if China was an oppressive stalinist regime? The fact is that while political freedoms have not increased there has been an explosion of personal freedoms in China over the last 30 years.

Global Power Shift Since Industrial Revolution

A recent post-COVID survey conducted by the Washington Post shows that Chinese citizens’ trust in their national government has jumped to 98%. Their trust in local government also increased compared to 2018 levels — 91% of Chinese citizens surveyed now said they trust or trust completely the township-level government. Trust levels rose to 93% at the county level, 94% at the city level and 95% at the provincial level. 

An earlier 2018 World Values Survey reported that 95% of Chinese citizens said that they have a great deal or quite a lot of trust in the national government. Comparatively, about 69% felt the same way about their local government. 

Here's a video of Mahbubani's interview:

https://youtu.be/KaPFmYxWMzI

https://www.youtube.com/embed/KaPFmYxWMzI"; title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>" height="315" src="https://img1.blogblog.com/img/video_object.png" width="560" style="cursor: move; background-color: #b2b2b2;" />

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[Riaz Haq]

Who are India’s friends & foes? Modi govt is caught in a messy US-China-Russia-Pakistan jalebi


https://theprint.in/national-interest/who-are-indias-friends-foes-m...


Think China-Russia-America-China-Pakistan to begin with. There’s plenty of evidence in the public domain that Russia cannot last more than a few weeks in its war with the West (via Ukraine) without China’s help. The latest trade data available from the Chinese customs department shows that business between the two has boomed in a year when China’s economy has slowed down and overall trade declined.



Much of the growth is contributed by Russian exports. There’s a popular view — particularly in self-congratulatory India — that it is our purchase of Russian oil that’s driving their economy and war effort. The Chinese contribution to the Russian economy is several times greater. No surprise.

Plus, the prospect of at least the supply of softer military merchandise is always a near-term possibility. India’s oldest ally, therefore, is truly dependent economically, politically and — ultimately — militarily only on one country, our most formidable long-term adversary, with nearly 60,000 troops sitting battle-ready threatening us. That takes care of the first part of our jumbled equation: Your adversary being the closest friend of a friend.



Let’s cut to the next bit. This adversary (China) is best friends with the worst enemy (Russia) of a country you now call an essential strategic ally. We pick that description from the many joint statements issued by Indian prime ministers and American presidents. Further on, the same adversary is also the patron, friend and master, lender of first resort and security guarantor of your most immediate irritant, Pakistan.

If it is challenging to simplify this, it also underlines the complexities of the world we inhabit. Our military dependence on Russia is deep, and will likely remain so for at least five more years. Nobody can replace 95 per cent of the tanks, 70 per cent of the combat aircraft, the flagship and a majority of the flying assets of the Navy overnight.


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Which brings us back to our jumbled, ‘jalebi’ formulation of India’s strategic universe: Russia, an inalienable friend dependent on China, and Pakistan, a permanent adversary that has no other source of strength — or money. And the US, an essential strategic ally.

Pakistan’s desperation is of a different order. The Gulf Arabs are wary of it and it is alienated from the West, though the British are working hard behind the scenes for some sort of rehabilitation in Washington.

If Pakistan is selling critical tank and rocket ammunition to Ukraine, it isn’t a purely autonomous act, whatever its need for dollars or wheat in barter. This is an application for forgiveness to the US for past crimes.

It is this complex strategic world that India is navigating. Behind the talk of the Global South, equidistance, strategic autonomy, however, the business end of the strategic stuff is going on fine. A NATO team met its Indian counterparts to explore more cooperation in the Indo-Pacific even as conflicted interests reigned at the G-20.

The latest Quad statement had a paragraph on Ukraine categorically asking Russia (without naming it) to vacate its aggression with respect to Ukraine’s sovereignty, territorial integrity and the rules-based international order. It also said the ‘threat of use of nuclear weapons is inadmissible’.

Meanwhile, US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo arrived in Delhi, and not only to play Holi at Defence Minister Rajnath Singh’s home. On the agenda is a partnership on semiconductors. This follows the progress made earlier on high-tech areas during National Security Advisor Ajit Doval’s Washington visit.

[Riaz Haq]

Why Chinese Apps Are the Favorites of Young Americans
It isn’t just the algorithms, but lessons from a cutthroat culture


https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-chinese-apps-are-the-favorites-of-...

The concern around TikTok in Washington is drawing fresh attention to how Chinese apps have woven themselves into the fabric of young Americans’ lives—and what makes them so popular.

Four of the five hottest apps in the U.S. in March were forged in China. Algorithms are often cited as their secret sauce. An often overlooked facet is how cutthroat competition for users at home has given Chinese firms a leg up over Western rivals.

Much like during China’s rise to manufacturing dominance a few decades ago, Chinese tech companies have harnessed a labor pool of affordable talent to constantly fine-tune product features.

The nonstop drive to get better even has a term in China’s tech industry: “embroidery.”

“Everybody works on improving their craft, stitch by stitch,” said Fan Lu, a venture-capital investor who invested in TikTok’s predecessor Musical.ly.

Seven-month-old Temu was the most downloaded app across U.S. app stores during the first three weeks of March, according to market-insights firm Sensor Tower. It was followed by TikTok’s video-editing partner app CapCut and TikTok itself. Fast-fashion retailer Shein came in fourth. Then came Facebook, the only non-Chinese app among the top five.

One illustration of how immersed American consumers are in an app ecosystem created by Chinese companies: Under the hashtags #temuhaul or #sheinhaul, Gen-Z shoppers have taken to display the result of their shopping sprees in TikTok videos with captions such as “$50 worth of very RANDOM items on TEMU.”


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The popularity of the apps has gotten them caught in the crossfire of U.S.-China geopolitical tension—TikTok in particular. The Biden administration has threatened a possible ban on the app if ByteDance doesn’t sell its stakes in TikTok, citing national-security concerns. On Thursday, U.S. lawmakers pummeled TikTok’s Chief Executive Shou Zi Chew about Beijing’s potential influence over the app.

Beijing has opposed a TikTok sale and said it would never require companies to illegally gather data from overseas. Meanwhile, a bill gaining momentum in Washington would result in a blanket ban of broad categories of Chinese technology, including American teenagers’ favorite apps, if it is passed.

[Riaz Haq]

From Red Carpet to Doghouse: Macron Returns From China to Allied Dismay

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/11/world/europe/macron-china-allies...

Criticism of the French president’s performance in Beijing has been scathing among some allies, who saw him as cozying up to Beijing.


In short order in China, Mr. Macron managed to alienate or worry allies from Warsaw to Washington, with his embrace of what a Sino-French declaration called a “global strategic partnership with China.” He adopted the Chinese lexicon of a “multipolar” world, freed of “blocs,” liberated from the “Cold War mentality,” and less reliant on the “extraterritoriality of the U.S. dollar.”


Most worrisome, particularly for the United States, he suggested in an interview with Politico and French journalists on the way home that the security of Taiwan is not the problem of a Europe that must resist becoming America’s “vassals.”


How Taiwanese democracy and freedom differ from Ukrainian democracy and freedom, and how the threat of Russian autocracy differs from the threat of a Chinese autocracy that backs Moscow, were two questions left unanswered by Mr. Macron.

Speaking of Taiwan, he said: “The worse thing would be to think that we Europeans must become followers on this topic and take our cue from the U.S. agenda and a Chinese overreaction.”

By Tuesday the Élysée Palace, home to the president, felt it necessary to clarify France’s allegiances, so muddied had the optics become. France, it said, “is not equidistant between the United States and China. The United States is our ally, with shared values.”


The fact that this clarification was necessary suggested how much Mr. Macron had unsettled his allies.

“The alliance with the United States is the absolute foundation of our security,” Mateusz Morawiecki, the prime minister of Poland, said on Tuesday in an evident riposte to Mr. Macron, noting that some Western leaders “dream of cooperation with everyone, with Russia and with some powers in the Far East.”


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Ms. von der Leyen received none of the lavish attention showered on Mr. Macron. China prefers nation states to transnational entities, and had bristled at a speech she made this month in which she criticized China as “more repressive at home and more assertive abroad.”

On the face of it, Taiwan does matter to Europe for economic and political reasons. The world runs on Taiwanese chips. The island democracy produces over 60 percent of the world’s semiconductors and about 90 percent of the most elaborate ones.

After China’s crushing of democratic aspirations in Hong Kong, the implications of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and the suppression there of liberal democracy would be devastating for the very causes Europe and Mr. Macron have committed to defend in Ukraine.

The French presidential statement said: “Our position on Taiwan is constant. We support the status quo and maintain our exchanges and cooperation with Taiwan, which is a recognized democratic system.”

[Riaz Haq]

The facts cannot be disputed. The United States has recovered from the coronavirus pandemic faster than any major economy in the world. As Bloomberg’s Matthew A. Winkler recently pointed out, unemployment is stunningly low. Gross domestic product growth has grown at three times the average pace as under President Donald Trump, real incomes are rising, manufacturing is booming, and inflation has eased for 10 straight months. Even the budget deficit, which was at 15.6 percent of GDP at the end of the Trump presidency, has dropped to 5.5 percent of GDP at the end of last year.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/26/america-supremac...

The picture is even better when viewed more broadly. The United States remains the world’s leader in business, especially in cutting-edge technology. Scholars Sean Starrs and Stephen G. Brooks found that, looking at the globe’s top 2,000 companies, Chinese firms come first in shares of global profits in only 11 percent of sectors, but U.S. firms are ranked first in 74 percent of sectors.


Or look at artificial intelligence, which most agree is the bold new frontier of technology, likely to shape every industry. U.S. companies such as OpenAI, Microsoft and Google produce the best applications on the market, and a host of other new start-ups are surging forward. As Paul Scharre points out in a Foreign Affairs essay, “Of the top 15 institutions publishing deep learning research, 13 are American universities or corporate labs. Only one, Tsinghua University, is Chinese.” He notes that while China publishes much more AI research than the United States, American papers are cited 70 percent more often. These U.S. advantages are likely to grow dramatically now that China has been blocked from the advanced chips that are absolutely essential to developing and using AI.


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Or consider finance. Despite the recent banking crisis, the biggest U.S. banks are now more dominant than they have ever been worldwide. They have passed rigorous stress tests and built up their capital reserves, and as a result they are now better positioned than their European and Japanese counterparts. China’s state-owned banks are saddled with huge government debt and cannot operate in the open global financial system because that would almost certainly trigger massive outflows of funds, as the Chinese people seek to move their money to safer locales. And despite many challenges and efforts to unseat it, the dollar remains the global reserve currency (as the International Monetary Fund’s managing director said recently), which gives the United States a financial superpower. (It is one that I worry we are misusing, which will trigger even more efforts to replace it. But there is no denying that the dollar, for now, reigns supreme.)

[Riaz Haq]

The facts cannot be disputed. The United States has recovered from the coronavirus pandemic faster than any major economy in the world. As Bloomberg’s Matthew A. Winkler recently pointed out, unemployment is stunningly low. Gross domestic product growth has grown at three times the average pace as under President Donald Trump, real incomes are rising, manufacturing is booming, and inflation has eased for 10 straight months. Even the budget deficit, which was at 15.6 percent of GDP at the end of the Trump presidency, has dropped to 5.5 percent of GDP at the end of last year.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/26/america-supremac...


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A somewhat under-noticed development in recent years has been the United States’ rise as an energy powerhouse. Because of fracking and natural gas, the United States is now the world’s largest producer of liquid hydrocarbons. And as Columbia University’s Jason Bordoff has noted, America’s ability to ship liquefied natural gas has made it an energy superpower, able to provide or cut off energy to countries around the world. Add to these traditional energy sources the dramatic ramp-up of green energy, thanks to the vast tax credits and incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, and you have a picture of truly astonishing, comprehensive energy capacity.


The U.S. military remains in a league of its own, far superior to those of its rivals in Russia or China. China is catching up to the United States, but the lead remains vast across many dimensions of warfare. And in Ukraine, as the Republican foreign policy adviser Kori Schake has noted, the United States, at minimal cost and with no American troops, is inflicting ruinous damage on Russia’s army. Washington is also transforming the Ukrainian army into the most powerful fighting force in Europe — giving it another potent ally. The great force multiplier of U.S. power remains its alliances. The United States has more than 50 treaty allies; China has one (North Korea). And it has about 750 military bases of some kind around the world; China has one (in Djibouti).

[Riaz Haq]

Richard D. Wolff - Why the Troubled U.S. Empire Could Quickly Fall Apart - Brave New Europe


https://braveneweurope.com/richard-d-wolff-why-the-troubled-u-s-emp...

For the first time in over a century, the United States has a real, serious, ascending global competitor. The British, German, Russian, and Japanese systems never reached that status. The People’s Republic of China now has. No settled U.S. policy vis-à-vis China has proven feasible because of internal U.S. divisions and China’s spectacular growth. Political leaders and “defence” contractors find China-bashing attractive. Denouncing China serves as popular scapegoating for many politicians in both parties and as support for an ever-increasing defense spending by the military. However, major segments of large corporate business have invested hundreds of billions in China and in global supply chains linked to China. They do not want to risk them. In addition, for decades, China has offered one of the world’s lowest-cost, better educated and trained, and most disciplined labour forces coupled with the world’s fastest-growing market for both capital and consumer goods. Competitive U.S. firms believe that global success requires their firms to be well established in that nation with the world’s largest population, among the world’s least-costly workers, and with the world’s fastest-growing market. Everything taught and learned in business schools supports that view. Thus the U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposed former President Donald Trump’s trade/tariff wars and now opposes President Joe Biden’s hyped-up programme of China-bashing.

There is no way for the United States to change China’s basic economic and political policies since those are precisely what brought China to its now globally envied position of being a competitor to a superpower like the U.S. Meanwhile, China is expected to catch up to the United States with equality of economic size before the end of this decade. The problem for the U.S. empire grows, and the United States remains stuck in divisions that preclude any significant change except perhaps armed conflict and an unthinkable nuclear war.

When empires decline, they can slip into self-reinforcing downward spirals. This downward spiral occurs when the rich and powerful respond by using their social positions to offload the costs of decline onto the mass of the population. That only worsens the inequalities and divisions that provoked the decline in the first place.

The recently released Pandora Papers offer a useful glimpse into the elaborate world of vast wealth hidden from tax-collecting governments and from public knowledge. Such hiding is partly driven by the effort to insulate the wealth of the rich from that decline. That partly explains why the 2016 exposure of the Panama Papers did nothing to stop the hiding. If the public knew about the hidden resources—their size, origins, and purposes—the public demand for access to hidden assets would become overwhelming. The hidden resources would be seen as the best possible targets for use in slowing or reversing the decline.

Decline provokes more hiding, and that in turn worsens decline. The downward spiral is engaged. Moreover, attempts to distract an increasingly anxious public—demonizing immigrants, scapegoating China, and engaging in culture wars—show diminishing returns. Empire decline proceeds but remains widely denied or ignored as if it did not matter. The old rituals of conventional politics, economics, and culture proceed. Only their tones have become those of deep social divisions, bitter recriminations, and overt internal hostilities proliferating across the landscape. These mystify as well as upset the many Americans who still need to deny that crises have beset U.S. capitalism and that its empire is in decline.

[Riaz Haq]

China’s rise is reversing

by Ruchir Sharma

https://www.ft.com/content/c10bd71b-e418-48d7-ad89-74c5783c51a2


After stagnating under Mao Zedong in the 1960s and 70s, China opened to the world in the 1980s — and took off in subsequent decades. Its share of the global economy rose nearly tenfold from below 2 per cent in 1990 to 18.4 per cent in 2021. No nation had ever risen so far, so fast. Then the reversal began. In 2022, China’s share of the world economy shrank a bit. This year it will shrink more significantly, to 17 per cent. That two-year drop of 1.4 per cent is the largest since the 1960s. These numbers are in “nominal” dollar terms — unadjusted for inflation — the measure that most accurately captures a nation’s relative economic strength. China aims to reclaim the imperial status it held from the 16th to early 19th centuries, when its share of world economic output peaked at one-third, but that goal may be slipping out of reach. China’s decline could reorder the world. Since the 1990s, the country’s share of global GDP grew mainly at the expense of Europe and Japan, which have seen their shares hold more or less steady over the past two years. The gap left by China has been filled mainly by the US and by other emerging nations.


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https://x.com/rnaudbertrand/status/1727146172501086446?s=46&t=U...

This is a good example of the FT misrepresenting economics in order to fit a narrative.

The author says "China’s rise is reversing" because "the nation’s share of global GDP" has been dropping for 2 years. He highlights that his calculations are based on "nominal GDP unadjusted for inflation" which to him is "the measure that most accurately captures a nation’s relative economic strength."

Which is highly misleading... The whole reason why many economists, including institutions like the IMF or the World Bank, do not like to compare countries based on nominal GDP is for the very reason it makes it look like China's GDP is reversing right now... because the US has been suffering from very high inflation (when China didn't) which forced it to increase interest rates (China didn't), which strengthened the USD relative to the RMB. Hardly a sign of economic strength... If it was, Argentina's economy would be soaring...

It's much more accurate to compare countries' GDP based on Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) which reduces currency exchange bias and reflects actual relative living standards of different countries. And when you look at China's share of global GDP based on PPP, here are the numbers (pictured, extracted from the IMF database: imf.org/external/datam…):
- 2020: China is 18.3% of global GDP, the US is 15.78%
- 2021: China 18.51%, US 15.74%
- 2022: China 18.44%, US 15.54%
- 2023: China 18.82%, US 15.42%

In other words, China's share of global GDP continues to rise and the US's continues to drop.

The FT's author concludes his article with "no matter what Xi does, his nation’s share in the global economy is likely to decline for the foreseeable future. It’s a post-China world now." I would bet the exact contrary...

[Riaz Haq]

Arnaud Bertrand
@RnaudBertrand
Incredible, Gina Raimondo implores US industry to respect her sanctions because: "America leads the world in AI… America leads the world in advanced semiconductor design. That’s because of our private sector. No way are we going to let [China] catch up."
https://scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/3243657/us...

This is an incredible admission because the Biden administration's messaging - or shall I say propaganda - on their semiconductors sanctions has so far always been that it isn't to gain or maintain a competitive advantage over China, but solely to prevent China's military from accessing to certain technologies. See for instance what Janet Yellen said on exactly this: "[the sanctions are] tailored toward the specific national security objective of preventing the advancement of highly sensitive technologies that are critical to the next generation of military innovation and [are] not designed for us to gain a competitive economic advantage over any other country." (Src: https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/06/china-relationship-g... )

Our Anthony Blinken: "One of the important things for me to do on this trip [to China] was to disabuse our Chinese hosts of the notion that we are seeking to economically contain them... However, what is clearly in our interest is making sure that certain specific technologies that China may be using to, for example: advance its very opaque nuclear weapons program, to build hypersonic missiles, to use technology that may have repressive purposes – it’s not in our interest to provide that technology to China. And I also made that very clear. So, the actions that we’re taking, that we’ve already taken, and as necessary that we’ll continue to take are narrowly focused, carefully tailored to advance and protect our national security. And I think that’s a very important distinction." (src: https://china.usembassy-china.org.cn/secretary-of-state-antony-j-bl... )

Pretty much everyone knew this was 100% bullshit and all done for the purpose of America maintaining a competitive advantage in the technologies of the future, like AI. But now we have the Secretary of Commerce, who implemented these sanctions, say exactly that.

https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1731126664661459367?s=20

[Riaz Haq]

Aukus pact will turn Australia into ‘51st state’ of the US, Paul Keating says | Australian security and counter-terrorism | The Guardian


Former prime minister argues Australia has made itself a target by aligning with American ‘aggression’ towards China

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/aug/08/auku...

Australia’s participation in the Aukus defence pact risks handing military control of the country to Washington and becoming the “51st state of the United States”, according to former prime minister Paul Keating.

Speaking on ABC’s 7.30 on Thursday night, Keating argued that Australia had made itself a target for aggression by joining the military alliance with the US and the UK in implicit opposition to China’s growing power in the Asia Pacific region.

Australia had no quarrel with China, Keating said, and concerns about China’s designs on Taiwan were not justified because the island was “Chinese real estate”.



“Taiwan is not a vital Australian interest,” he said, adding that the American attitude to Taiwan was like China deciding that Tasmania needed help to secede from Australia.

“What Aukus is about in the American mind is turning [Australia into suckers], locking us up for 40 years with American bases all around … not Australian bases,” he



“So Aukus is really about, in American terms, the military control of Australia. I mean, what’s happened … is likely to turn Australia into the 51st state of the United States.”

Keating told the show’s presenter, Sarah Ferguson: “We’re now defending the fact that we’re in Aukus.

“If we weren’t in Aukus, we wouldn’t need to defend it. If we didn’t have an aggressive ally like the United States – aggressive to others in the region – there’d be nobody attacking Australia. We are better left alone than we are being ‘protected’ by an aggressive power like the United States.

“Australia is capable of defending itself.

“There’s no way another state can invade a country like Australia with an armada of ships without it all failing. I mean, Australia is quite capable of defending itself. We don’t need to be basically a pair of shoes hanging out of the Americans’ backside.”

Keating, a longstanding opponent of Labor’s support for the pact, said Australia had not been threatened by China, whose expanding military presence, he said, was in line with its position as the world’s second superpower.

[Riaz Haq]

Arnaud Bertrand
@RnaudBertrand
Wow, looks like Xi was extremely straightforward during his meeting with Biden, probably the most he's ever officially been in a meeting with a US president.

According to the Chinese readout (https://guancha.cn/internation/2024_11_17_755645.shtml) here's what he told Biden were the 7 "lessons of the past 4 years that need to be remembered":

1) "There must be correct strategic understanding. The 'Thucydides Trap' is not historical destiny, a 'new Cold War' cannot and should not be fought, containment of China is unwise, undesirable, and will not succeed."

2) "Words must be trustworthy and actions must be fruitful. A person cannot stand without credibility. China always follows through on its words, but if the U.S. side always says one thing and does another, it is very detrimental to America's image and damages mutual trust."

3) "Treat each other as equals. In exchanges between two major countries like China and the United States, neither side can reshape the other according to their own wishes, nor can they suppress the other based on so-called 'position of strength,' let alone deprive the other of legitimate development rights to maintain their own leading position."

4) "Red lines and bottom lines cannot be challenged. As two major countries, China and the United States inevitably have some contradictions and differences, but they cannot harm each other's core interests, let alone engage in conflict and confrontation. The One China principle and the three China-US joint communiqués are the political foundation of bilateral relations and must be strictly observed. Taiwan issue, democracy and human rights, development path, and development rights are China's four red lines, which cannot be challenged. [Note: Bold text in the original] These are the most important guardrails and safety nets for China-US relations."

5) "There should be more dialogue and cooperation. Under current circumstances, the common interests between China and the United States have not decreased but increased. Whether in areas of economy and trade, agriculture, drug control, law enforcement, public health, or in facing global challenges such as climate change and artificial intelligence, as well as international hotspot issues, China-US cooperation is needed. Both sides should extend the list of cooperation, make the cooperation cake bigger, and achieve win-win cooperation."

6) "Respond to people's expectations. The development of China-US relations should always focus on the wellbeing of both peoples and gather the strength of both peoples. Both sides should build bridges for personnel exchanges and cultural communication, and also remove interference and obstacles, not artificially create a 'chilling effect.'"

7) "Demonstrate great power responsibility. China and the United States should always consider the future and destiny of humanity, take responsibility for world peace, provide public goods for the world, and play a positive role in world unity, including engaging in positive interaction, avoiding mutual consumption, and not coercing other countries to take sides."

Funnily, all this is summarized in the official US readout (https://china.usembassy-china.org.cn/readout-of-president-joe-biden...) with this short sentence: "The two leaders reviewed the bilateral relationship over the past four years". Talk about an understatement 😅

The language compared to the readout of the last Xi-Biden meeting in San Francisco one year ago is noticeably more forthright, especially on the U.S.'s lack of trustworthiness ("if the U.S. side always says one thing and does another..."). Looks like he's getting very frustrated with U.S. duplicity...

https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1858019192370507904