A Poem about Water

Li Po at the Edge of the Yellow River*

(Dedicated to all college students during finals week)

What I need are the idea of air, the essence of water, and the reality of flower. Everything is painfully real and I can feel again. Life is all but fleeting.

Music of flutes and guitars, strings and winds, percussive raindrops.

I feel the love of a thousand dead.

What is here is but a wind that impersonates…

And what alluring music from the eternal grave?

Life is calling me to go to its final moments, even though I leave a thousand things undone.

Why haven’t I noticed music before, the music in the wind through the bamboo grove?

Why haven’t I noticed the tingling in my fingertips, my quivering lips, and my undulating hips

that love here resides before I die, surely as I will die…

Wash over me, tow me to distant shores, water of the ages, water that swell my heart,

water that cleanses, water that I hope would do even more…

*Li Po threw himself into the Yellow River “to embrace the moon” and thus drowned circa 700 A.D.

Koon Woon

October 31, 2010

Cost-effective Warfare

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China needs only half a million US dollars to sink US carrier?

This topic has been sticky by szh at 2010-10-31 10:01.

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1# > A < Posted  2010-10-31 09:40  Only show this user's posts China needs only half a million US dollars to sink US carrier? 1.jpg (36.09 KB) 2010-10-31 09:40 China's DF missile The Chinese dragon has landed in the American shop. The American eagle is sputtering. Sino-US rivalry has been simmering for the past many years, as China has replaced Russia in the American scheme of things as its most potent adversary. China has begun to project itself as an equal of the United States. China's public outburst against the recent ("destabilizing") US-South Korea naval exercises and its officials' on-record statement that China had as much reason to be upset about such activities in its backyard as the US was about Soviet manoeuvres during the Cuban missile Crisis is a testimony to Beijing's changed demeanour. Some of China's recent military moves are worth taking note of. Well aware of the historical fact that only the most powerful seafaring nations have ruled the world for centuries, China is busy giving teeth to its navy. It is working on the 2400-km range DF-21 Anti-ship Ballistic missile (ABSM), a weapon that promises to be Beijing's game-changer in future naval battles as it can decapitate American warships in the region. The weapon poses the gravest threat ever to the US Navy as its space-based maritime surveillance and targeting systems make its interception well nigh impossible. 3.jpg (43.65 KB) 2010-10-31 09:40 China's DF missile 4.jpg (44.15 KB) 2010-10-31 09:40 China's DF missile Already the situation is such that the over-stretched American naval forces are no match to China, both in terms of numbers and fire power. It is a fact that the US alone is no longer capable of checking and countering Chinese naval hegemony in Asia; Washington will need the help of Japan, India, Vietnam and South Korea to do that. China is consciously investing in developing supersonic anti-ship missiles that would skim just meters above the water, something that the Soviets did as they took on the Americans during the Cold War. Such missiles present China with an economical and militarily effective option. A long-range cruise missile costs half a million US dollars, while a typical US aircraft carrier costs over one billion dollars. In other words, one American aircraft carrier can buy ten thousand long-range cruise missiles. And it does not take rocket science to understand that one or two such missiles can disable or sink an aircraft carrier. Therefore, China will not be a push-over for the Americans.(From Eurasiareview) 2.jpg (17.6 KB) 2010-10-31 09:40 Does China need only half a million US dollars to sink US carrier?

Super Computer

China Zooms Past US With New Supercomputer

Updated: 1 hour 17 minutes ago

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Lauren Frayer Contributor

AOL News

(Oct. 28) -- China has built what's believed to be the fastest computer in the world, outpacing the top American machine and boosting Beijing's role as a key technology player.

Named Tianhe-1A, which means "Milky Way" in Mandarin, China's new supercomputer has 168 graphics processing units -- the type of graphics chips used in video games -- and 14,336 Intel CPUs, according to PC World. All of these processors were made by U.S. companies, but they're linked together by new Chinese-invented technology.

NVIDIA

The Tianhe-1A supercomputer, located at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, China, can perform 2,507 trillion calculations per second.

The supercomputer can perform 2,507 trillion calculations, or 2.507 petaflops, per second, China's state-run Xinhua news agency reported. But the machine's untested, theoretical speed is nearly two times that figure, it said. That's 1.4 times faster than the previous record holder, a supercomputer housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

The new Chinese computer "blows away the existing No. 1 machine," Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who maintains the official supercomputer rankings, told The New York Times.

His official list of the world's fastest 500 computers won't be finalized until next week. "We don't close the books until Nov. 1, but I would say it is unlikely we will see a system that is faster," he said.

The U.S. is still home to more than half of the world's top 500 supercomputers.

It took 200 Chinese engineers two years to build Tianhe, at a cost of more than $88 million, the International Business Times reported. It was designed by China's National University of Defense Technology, and its specs were announced at a conference today in Beijing, though the machine sits in 103 refrigerated cabinets in China's National Center for Supercomputing, in the northern port city of Tianjin.

So far it's been used in trial runs to process weather patterns for the city's meteorological bureau, and to crunch numbers for the China National Offshore Oil Corp. "It can also serve the animation industry and biomedical research," the supercomputing lab's director, Liu Guangming, told Xinhua.

Experts say China's new supercomputer serves as a wake-up call to the West, showing how China threatens to take the lead in national investment in technology.

"It's definitely a game changer in the high-performance market," Mark Seager, chief technology officer for computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, told The Wall Street Journal. "This is a phase transition, representative of the shift of economic competitiveness from the West to the East."

Rant -- what I have learned to be American

Hey there pigtailed boy! Bring me tea! But in this Great American Land you we don' t see.

You who build the railroad, you who vineyarded the grapes, you who made the cigars, you who served us food in your innumerable "family restaurants," you who engineered our roads, bridges, and electronics, you who imported and exported our affordable products, and you who even won a Nobel Prize or two...

You must pick up the gun to be American!

1. To defend your friend's right to say anything that he damn pleases;
2. To kill whoever that you disagree with.

America, you taught me just that!
Thanks, America, now I am a Man.

I can kill with ease because I have a gun.
I have learned, finally, how to be American.

The Road to War

 The American Manhood

(or, what I have learned to become American)

Some say that peace is not all
it is not blood, vomit, and gore,

but it is Bush, Cheney, and Obama
destruction of people and environma

From guilt we don' t feel
nor sores that never heal

From Korea to Vietnam to Iraq to Afganistan
our American boys take their world conquest stand

And so it is blood and vomit and gore
with which we uphold the American pie, flag, and all

Despite all we been taught
that war settles naught

So we continue to kill with a glee
Like fucking for virginity

The US's Attempt to Maintain Naval Foothold in Asia

Indian Ocean becomes battleground for China and India ?

battlefront.jpg (67.96 KB)

2010-10-28 09:52

Helicopters fly past the Chinese Jiangwei II class naval frigate "Luoyang" at an international fleet review to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Liberation Army Navy in Qingdao, Shandong province in this 2009 file photo.
India is concerned about China's potential aggressiveness in the area of the Indian Ocean.



Robert Kaplan: Indian Ocean becomes battleground for India and China




'China wants a presence. India is unnerved by all of this,' Robert Kaplan, author of 'Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power,' told a small gathering in Cambridge.


Let's play connect the dots. After the US midterm elections, President Obama will visit India, Indonesia, South Korea, and Japan. Trace a line between the nations, noting how it loops down through the Indian Ocean and back up through the South China Sea and East China Sea, forming a semicircle around China.

The route underscores the importance of these nations and bodies of water as the United States seeks to check the growing assertiveness of China, says Robert Kaplan, author of newly published “Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power.”

“It's not a war I'm predicting, but what I am alluding toward is a very complex, Metternichian arrangement of power from the Horn of Africa all the way up through the Sea of Japan,” Mr. Kaplan told a small crowd Monday at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. "We don't have to interfere everywhere, we just have to move closer to our democratic allies in the region so they can do more of the heavy lifting."


“China is able to build a great navy precisely because its land borders are secure,” says Kaplan. By contrast, he says India is still attempting to control its borders with Pakistan (at Kashmir), Nepal, and Bangladesh, which sucks resources away from its navy.

This highlights how India is still far behind China. China paves more miles of road per year than India already has. Its economy and military are both much larger than India's. Even the recent Commonwealth Games in Delhi, fraught with delays and troubles, served to highlight China's display of might in pulling off the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Regardless of when or if India catches up to China, this much is now clear for the Washington, says Kaplan: “The Indian Ocean and Pacific are no longer American lakes.”

The Road to Peace

Will a rising China revenge for the past humiliation?

China.jpg (78.86 KB)

2010-10-23 10:19

China also rises

By Piers Brendon


AMONG THE gifts brought by Lord Macartney, who came to Beijing in 1793 on a historic embassy intended to open China to British merchants, was a map of the world, which the Emperor Ch’ien-lung found unacceptable because the Middle Kingdom was represented on it as too small and not in the middle. During the eighteenth century Greenwich was adopted as the prime meridian of longitude, a convention internationally ratified in 1884, and imperial maps using Mercator’s projection made Britain seem greater than it really was. Toward the end of the Second World War, American writers such as Nicholas John Spykman and Neil MacNeil urged that their country’s dominant geopolitical power should be recognized by redrawing maps of the world to put the United States at the center.


Today, the question arises with increasing urgency: Is China set to occupy pride of place in the global picture as it had famously done in the time of Marco Polo?


THE WAKING of the Asian giant, which was dormant for so long but has just overtaken Japan as the second-largest economy on the planet, is one of the most astonishing developments of the modern age. Then–leader of China Deng Xiaoping initiated a “second revolution” which realized the vast potential of what was, at the time, one of the poorest and most undeveloped countries in the world.


This year, according to the International Monetary Fund, China’s GDP will reach $5.36 trillion, slightly more than that of Japan. Of course, this is well below the U.S. figure of $14.79 trillion, but China’s economy is expected to overtake that of America, its largest overseas market, before 2030. Worse still for the United States, its trade deficit with the People’s Republic reached a record $268 billion in 2008. By mid-2009, China owned nearly 27 percent of America’s staggering $3.5 trillion foreign-held public debt. Thus the two nations, so alien politically and culturally, are locked together in an unprecedented, and what seems to be an inextricable, economic embrace.


How will it all end? Is it to be a spider-like clinch followed by a poisonous bite? Or is it to be a fruitful union in which each party learns to love the other? Will China attempt to translate its economic strength into military might and challenge the dominance of the world’s sole superpower?


Japan invasion provided a ghastly climax to China’s years of humiliation and confirmed its people’s abhorrence of outsiders. AMERICA IS disliked almost as much as Japan, not only because of the part it played in China’s shameful exploitation but also because it backed Chiang Kai-shek, who retreated to the fortress of Taiwan after Mao’s Communists took control of the mainland.


HERE, THEN, is an account calculated to show that the reinvigorated Chinese dragon will endeavor to retaliate against the American eagle, itself seeking a new foe in lieu of the Soviet bear. China is bound to regain face, so the argument goes, by using its newfound resources to arm itself and to confront the United States in military terms.


A clash between the two titans, divided for so long by so much bad blood, is widely supposed to be inevitable.


This is not the case. Not only does history not repeat itself, it contains no rhythms or patterns which enable its students to make sure predictions.  One conceivable outcome that deserves serious consideration is that we are at the dawn of an era of fruitful cooperation between China and America.


It must be said that commercially successful states do not automatically or immediately beat their pruning hooks into swords.  Deng’s China itself put the modernization of its armed forces behind that of agriculture, manufacturing and science, and in the two decades after 1981 its troop numbers fell by half, to 2.3 million. Admittedly, its defense spending rose thereafter, but it remains a much-lower percentage of GDP than does America’s. And this year the rise has been checked, apparently in order to assuage foreign worries about its military modernization.


In other words, there is no necessary correlation between economic growth and military strength. Yet China’s leaders seem dedicated to augmenting prosperity in order to secure stability. As Deng Xiaoping insisted, “Stability supersedes all.”


Historically, China has assimilated aggression, rolling with punches, overcoming hardness with softness. Where possible it has avoided taking the offensive. China prefers, particularly in a nuclear age, to use “soft power” and “smile diplomacy” abroad.


THERE IS little evidence that China wishes to jeopardize its burgeoning affluence by adventurist attempts to contest American hegemony. On the contrary, the Chinese leadership is all too conscious that the Soviet Union’s endeavor to compete militarily with the United States was a major factor in its collapse.


China’s priority is to tackle these problems. It aims to build a rich and great society, dedicated to peace, progress, harmony, sustainable development and international cooperation. No doubt the Chinese leaders also favor motherhood and apple pie. But it is easy to be cynical to suspect that China is still nurturing bitter resentment toward the West for the century of humiliation, and to fear that it is only biding its time and accumulating the necessary strength before retaliating in kind. Yet the Chinese are not necessarily prisoners of their past and they have overwhelming economic reasons to seek a political modus vivendi with America. Indeed, they now talk of using history as “a mirror to look forward to the future.” Certainly it makes sense for them to look forward, rather than back, since their future is much better than it used to be. And this is what China’s 1.3 billion people may well do as they advance toward the center of the world’s stage.

One of the places I have spent time orienting myself...

Locate yourself inside a seaport city
Locate yourself insider the inner city
Locate yourself inside a small square
Locate yourself inside you
this is you

You are the dragon on the wall
 You are the railroad when America was young
 You are the immigrant hands that lay the tracks
 you are here
 it is you

This is a place where you come to
 This is a place within you
 You were here when the sky was born
 you are here
 you are you

 America I have no other place to go now
 But to go within myself and find all that is still new
 This is too a place for you as well as for me
 you and i are both here
we are here

 Of all the places where I have spent my time
 Of all the places that have bruised my heart
America you are deep within my heart now
 The pain was enormous
 yes, it was you

 Now don't tell me now to go back
 Back to Wales or to Bavaria
 America I am now a Native as any Native can be
 to have withstood the pain
 and yet still be free...

Chapter 37 of the Tao Te Ching tr. Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English

Click on people's faces in the photo to tag them.

Formless Poetry -- writing the Tao

Chapter Thirty-Seven

(Tao Te Ching --- Tr. Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English)

Tao abides in non-action.
Yet nothing is left undone.
If kings and lords observed this,
The ten-thousand things would develop naturally.
If they still desired to act,
They would return to the simplicity of formless substance.
Without form there is no desire..
Without desire there is tranquility.
And in this way all things would be at peace.


(Commentary: Koon Woon) To write without straining oneself is not easy to do; yet the very act of straining oneself is not truly writing. To write in formal verse is difficult to do and for this reason, people strive to write in forms and adhere strictly to them. In this way, people rank themselves in a command. Those who are below envy those at the top and those at the top fear and pity those at the bottom. This is not the way to stability or peace.

So to be at peace is not to glorify in any unnatural order, no matter how grand and intricate are such edifices. To act without forethought cannot be first planned. Therefore let go of thought when one decides to act. Acting without desire is not acting without purpose. Best yet still to act merely because it is another
flow of the Tao. The Tao does not prefer this to that nor that to this. Those who know this work without doing and when less and less is done, form slows disappears, and in this way all co-exist peacefully.

China vs. US-Japan military alliance

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Is U.S.-Japan alliance tested by China actually ?
This topic has been sticky by szh at 2010-10-14 11:49.
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1# > A < Posted 2010-10-14 11:48 Only show this user's posts Is U.S.-Japan alliance tested by China actually ? marines.jpg (72.7 KB) 2010-10-14 11:48 China spat underscores security realities, trumps Futenma politics ??? Only a few months ago, the Japan-U.S. military alliance — considered by both nations as the "cornerstone" of peace and security in the Asia-Pacific region — was in crisis. But owing to a wakeup call in the East China Sea — military tensions with Beijing — Japan is taking a fresh look at the role of the U.S. military in the country. The tension with China has led people in Japan to acknowledge the strategic importance of having U.S. forces based here, not only for the defense of Japanese territory but also to maintain stability throughout East Asia. In the past month, Tokyo and Beijing waged a war of words over the Diaoyu (Senkaku) Islands after Japan arrested a trawler captain near the uninhabited islets in the East China Sea. The islets are controlled by Japan but claimed by China. Japan Coast Guard boats were trying to board the trawler, and it collided with them. Tokyo even saw what an economic war would look like, as Beijing apparently halted exports of rare earth minerals critical to Japan's high-tech industry. China's fury over the sea incident eventually prompted Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to confirm that the Japan-U.S. security treaty applies to the Diaoyu Islands. The treaty obliges the U.S. to defend Japan against an "armed attack" by another country. Before the Diaoyu crisis, Japan was having a hard time trying to sell the relocation of U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma within Okinawa amid strong local opposition. Indeed, before the crisis, many Japanese at home and abroad were questioning the strength of the Tokyo-Washington military alliance. The relationship was suffering for the past year from the contentious Futenma airfield relocation in Okinawa, where anti-base sentiment is strong, a fact not lost on politicians looking to score votes. But “pressured by Beijing”, many in Japan's leadership ranks have felt compelled to reaffirm the strength of the U.S. alliance, particularly amid perceptions of China's growing military strength, and potential reach. Do you also believe China’s move could somewhat determine how strong the US-Japan alliance ? Yes, to some degrees. No, it's impossible. 24 2 UID 318 Posts 181 Digest 1 Credits 1517 Fame 379 Money 556 Permission 70 Online 2 hours Registered 2009-9-27 Last login 2010-10-14 Profile TOP KHDavis * Buddy * Offline 2# > A < Posted 2010-10-14 17:10 Only show this user's posts
Obviously China's actions could influence it, but I think the amount of influence is not as great as people think.
Some, within China, confuse local sentiment about bases as some sort of negative view on the overall cooperation between Japan and the US, which it is not.

There is also an over-exaggeration that I have seen in China as to the US involvement in the area.

Any move that the US makes in the area are incorrectly turned into a "move against China" within the Chinese media, while other major points seem to be conveniently forgotten.

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Rare Earth

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Is China a rare earth bully?
This topic has been highlight by szh at 2010-10-6 11:47.
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1# > A < Posted 2010-10-6 11:26 Only show this user's posts
Is China a rare earth bully?
rare earth.jpg (28.91 KB)
2010-10-6 11:33



Japan will cooperate in promoting projects to develop rare-earth minerals in Mongolia as it seeks to diversify sources of materials needed for high-tech products.


Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan and Mongolian Prime Minister Sukhbaatar Batbold agreed on such cooperation during a meeting in Tokyo on Oct. 2, Japan's foreign ministry said in a release.


The move comes as Japan looks to broaden sources of rare-earth minerals after some Japanese companies late last month reported delays in receiving shipments from China due to more stringent customs checks by Chinese authorities. China has denied any interference, and later Japanese commerce minister confirmed China didn't curb rare earth exports to Japan, Reuters reported.


Japan depends on China for 96% of its rare-earth minerals, while China controls more than 90% of the world's output.


In contrast to the high share in market, now China holds only about a third of global reserves for rare earths. In 2009, rare earths were not mined in the United States while it owns 13% of global rare earth resources.


rare earth.jpg (51.79 KB)
2010-10-6 11:26

(Source: U.S. Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries)


Rare earth elements are essential to a plethora of modern high-tech stuff including the new green technologies. Despite it’s for sure that global output of rare earth minerals will decline amid China starts to regulate the production, the high-tech manufacturers will not immediately panic because stockpiling should guarantee enough supply.


The major rare earth consumers are always blaming China's stranglehold threatens the world's green revolution. However, rare earths supply in fact exceeds demand in these years. For example, the world rare earth minerals production was 124, 000 tons but the consumption was 90,000 tons in 2009. The worries about China’s moves on exports mainly come from the consideration of the probable price hike.


China has been supplying cheap rare earths and it's the right time to change the status quo. Shen Jiru, researcher of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), said it’s irrational that the majority of countries with rare earth reserves contribute low even zero to global supply (As the charter shows above). Bill Chameides, environment professor of Duke University, believes America’s reserves are sufficient to meet domestic needs. Why does China provide rare earth at low price even if it has become the dominant rare earth player in the world?


farmland.jpg (43.55 KB)
2010-10-6 11:45

farmland 2.jpg (42.8 KB)
2010-10-6 11:45

The rare earth mining cause serious water loss and soil erosion. The land is not suitable for farming any more.


The mines in China use low-level techniques to exploit rare earths by and large, which saves production cost economically but severely pollutes the water resource and farmlands near the mines. Meanwhile Chinese producers suffer from the Western countries blockade on advanced mineral processing technologies.

Moreover, there is no uniform pricing mechanism in China, therefore Chinese rare earths suppliers adopt low-price policy to compete for market share as much as possible.


The exhaustion of China's rare earths would be a major blow to the world's green energy industry, so China must regulate to curb excessive and disorderly mining of the non-renewable resource. The complainers need to rethink: who cares about China's sustainable development and what's the real threat to world's rare earth supply?
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Could it all end?

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America, world’s top military forever?
This topic has been highlight by szh at 2010-10-6 13:51.
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1# > A < Posted 2010-10-6 13:51 Only show this user's posts
America, world’s top military forever?
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2010-10-6 13:53



America’s defense establishment, from the Pentagon to think tanks, is trying to work out ways to cut military spending at a time of economic trouble. Proposals range from $100 billion to $1 trillion. None touches the underlying philosophy that led the United States to spend almost as much on military power as the rest of the world combined.


Of the many explanations of that philosophy American leaders have offered over the past few decades, one of the most succinct came from Madeleine Albright, when she was Secretary of State in the Clinton administration: “It is the threat of the use of force…if we have to use force, it is because we are America, we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other nations into the future…”


Since Albright made that remark, in 1998, the U.S. defense budget has grown every year, in real terms, and is now higher than at any time since the end of World War Two, according to the liberal Center for American Progress, one of the Washington think tanks to make savings suggestions. Even if the United States were to cut its spending in half, that would still be more than its current and potential adversaries.


The figures are remarkable: the United States accounts for five percent of the world’s population, around 23 percent of its economic output and 46.5 percent of its military spending. China comes a distant second, with 6.6 percent of the world share, followed by France (4.2 percent), Britain (3.8 percent) and Russia (3.5 percent).


Military expenditure 2.png (98.83 KB)
2010-10-6 13:51


How did the United States get there? Because every American president since Harry Truman has subscribed to four basic assertions: the world must be organized, lest chaos reigns; the U.S. is the only country capable of organizing the world; Washington’s writ includes articulating the principles of the international order; and the world actually wants America to lead, a few rogue nations and terrorists excepted.


This is the catechism of American statecraft to which mainstream Republicans and mainstream Democrats are equally devoted, writes Andrew Bacevich, a retired army colonel and prolific author on military matters, in his just-published book “Washington Rules – America’s Path to Permanent War.”


There’s little empirical evidence to demonstrate the catechism’s validity, says Bacevich, but that doesn’t matter. “When it comes to matters of faith, proof is unnecessary. In American politics, adherence to this creed qualifies as a matter of faith. Public … figures continually affirm and reinforce its validity.”


US.jpg (57.45 KB)
2010-10-6 13:51



President Barack Obama is no exception and has shown no sign that he differs from his post-World War Two predecessors in believing it is essential for America to have a global military presence, global power projection and the right to global intervention.


Bacevich calls this the sacred trinity. It is a national security consensus that among other things keeps around 300,000 American soldiers stationed abroad and U.S. military bases in at least 39 countries. Even the most radical of recent proposals to cut military spending only envisions reducing rather than ending the global U.S. military presence.


The Cold War ended in 1989 and while the U.S. presence abroad has been thinned out, around 150,000 still remain in Asia and Europe alone, where they served as a high-profile deterrent to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.


The commission found that about $1 trillion could be cut from defense budgets over the next decade without “compromising the essential security of the United States.” It’s a far-reaching proposal, unlikely to get traction, but it does not clash with the American credo of global leadership.


Neither does a determined attempt by U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to find $100 billion in savings over the next five years by eliminating projects for futuristic weapons systems, cutting flab from the Pentagon’s bloated bureaucracy, eliminating duplication and reducing “overhead,” i.e. people and infrastructure not directly involved in fighting.


The $100 billion plan is modest — U.S. military spending over the next five years is likely to exceed $3.5 trillion — and does not affect the overwhelming military superiority enshrined in official policy. “America’s interests and role in the world require Armed Forces with unmatched capabilities,” according to the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), a report required by Congress on the future of U.S. national security strategy.


Despite their relatively limited scope, Gates’s reform plans have run into fierce opposition from the heirs of what President Dwight Eisenhower, the World War Two general who led U.S. forces to victory in France and Germany, termed the “military-industrial complex” five decades ago.


That term, Bacevich writes, “no longer suffices to describe the congeries of interests profiting from and committed to preserving the national security consensus” and the money that lubricates American politics and fills campaign coffers.


The list of beneficiaries has lengthened since Eisenhower coined the phrase but their base of operations has not, which makes Washington “one of the most captivating, corrupt and corrupting places on the face of the earth.”


The frustrating war in Iraq and seemingly endless battles against insurgents in Afghanistan have declared a dead end for rebuilding peace by force in failed states. Will America, the most powerful military giant in the world, wake up from the self-deceiving force worship?


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a US - China split would be very bad

A US-China split would be very bad ...

Bad for both economies, political and military relations....

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U.S.-China split would be a catastrophe

This topic has been highlight by szh at 2010-10-2 12:24.

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1# > A < Posted  2010-10-2 12:22  Only show this user's posts U.S.-China split would be a catastrophe Wen GA.jpg (29.61 KB) 2010-10-2 12:24 Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao addressed the 65th UN General Assembly. The world's two biggest economies are facing off over tensions that could ignite a trade war and lead to a catastrophic split between the United States and China, says analyst Fareed Zakaria. President Barack Obama says an undervalued currency is giving Chinese companies an unfair advantage in selling products, and this week the House of Representatives passed a bill that would let the United States put tariffs on goods from China. China has retaliated against earlier trade sanctions by the United States and strongly opposes the bill passed by the House. "One has to hope a lot of it is bluff because the consequences of a significant trade war between China and the United States would be very dramatic," Zakaria said. "We need the Chinese to still have enormous faith in the U.S. economy, not just to buy Treasury bills, but to maintain all the links they have with the U.S. economy." Zakaria conducted a rare interview with China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, his first with a Western journalist since a similar interview by Zakaria two years ago. The interview is being shown this weekend on Zakaria's Sunday show, "Fareed Zakaria GPS." The author and host spoke to CNN Thursday. Here is an edited transcript: CNN: What sense do you have of the current state of China's economic relationship with the United States? Zakaria: Clearly the U.S. is pushing very hard on the issue of the Chinese currency and I think that a lot of it has to do with the realities of a bad economy here, coupled with a kind of sense that there are very few other levers that the U.S. has. So you're seeing a lot of rhetoric focused around Chinese currency and the fact that the House just passed this week a measure that would punish the Chinese for having artificially undervalued their currency. The Chinese central bank has actually driven its currency even lower as a kind of response to all this. Now the Obama administration has managed to maintain a pretty good overall relationship, and I think that the Chinese understand that some of this is pre-election politics, but I don't think its fundamentally good because these are the two biggest economies in the world and they should be trying to find a way to avoid getting into what appears to be the beginnings of a trade war. Remember the vast numbers of companies that are exporting from China that are American companies. The Chinese have opened up their economy to a huge number of American firms. ... Now this is all interdependence, no one is doing anyone a favor here. CNN: What's the impact of an undervalued Chinese currency? Zakaria: The Chinese benefit. We benefit enormously from having cheap Chinese goods. The big charge against the Chinese that is being made by Congress and even being made by the administration is that they are keeping their currency artificially low, and that favors Chinese manufacturers, that they have an unfair advantage to sell their goods more cheaply. But one has to keep in mind two things.One is that a large number of those so-called Chinese manufacturers are actually American companies manufacturing out of China. The second thing is that these Chinese goods that are now cheaper are bought by Americans and Americans benefit enormously from cheaper goods. The reason there is almost no inflation in America is largely due to cheap Chinese manufacturing. The reason that the Federal Reserve has been able to maintain interest rates so low without any fear of inflation is that they have China acting as a deflationary machine pushing down the price of manufactured goods, which has allowed the Federal Reserve to rescue the American economy by keeping rates so low even now. Americans get cheap mortgages for that reason, get cheap credit, get cheap interest rates for their credit cards. So it's not as if Americans don't benefit from the Chinese having the currency cheap. CNN: Do you think this is a relationship that can continue to exist or is it an imbalance that has to change at some point? Zakaria: There's a structural problem, which is that the U.S. is the established superpower in the world, China is the rising power. Those kinds of relationships have often ended up badly. Think about Japan as it rose in the 1930s, think about Germany as it rose in the 1890s and 1920s, think about the Soviet Union. But it doesn't always have to be that way, and today the world is so interdependent that it would be a catastrophe if the United States and China were to have a serious schism. There are going to be these points of tension constantly, and the question is can we navigate those periods of tension and get over them ... for the last 10 or 15 years we have. The big shift that's taken place is that the Chinese are much more confident and much more powerful than they've ever been. CNN: How is that greater power being used? Zakaria: Look at what happened with the Japanese. The Japanese had picked up a Chinese captain of a trawler who had wandered into what the Japanese regard as Japanese waters. They picked him up and arrested him. The Chinese demanded that they release him; the Japanese said no. But eventually the Japanese bowed to Chinese demands. Why? Because they sensed that the balance of power had shifted. It was only a few weeks earlier that the news came out that China had overtaken Japan as the second largest economy in the world. If you look at the way the Chinese stimulus has been so successful at restimulating the Chinese economy, which is now growing at 9 percent again, and you compare it to the fate of Western economies, you can understand why the Chinese are more confident, assertive and sure of themselves. CNN: So if the relationship with China is helping the U.S. in the short term, is it causing long-term damage to the U.S. manufacturing base and the overall economy? Zakaria: I think that suggests that you have an alternative to being engaged with China. It's an open world economy. It's not just China that is manufacturing stuff, it's Vietnam, it's India, it's Brazil, it's Indonesia, it's all over the world. The way I would put it is that China represents a challenge to the United States. The best way to solve that challenge is for us to get our act together. The real threat China poses is not a cheap currency. It's a competitive economy that is producing things at every level cheaper than we are, and the question is what should we be doing to be a competitive economy. While we do many things very well ... we have lost too much manufacturing capacity in America. We could revive it. Look at Germany, a case of a very high wage economy that still has maintained a manufacturing capacity, but they didn't do that by isolating themselves from the world economy. To the contrary, Germany is a huge trading nation. They've gotten their act together, they've gotten their workers better training, they've gotten their manufacturing to be more high end and more complex, so what they make is more in the BMW model, highly skilled, complex engineering, putting out premium products and commanding premium prices, which allows you to have a high wage structure. We've done that in some areas ... but by and large we've let manufacturing erode. But that's not China's fault, that's our fault. CNN: Is the Obama administration taking the right approach in dealing with China? Zakaria: I think the Obama people have been very serious about the Chinese relationship. They approached it from the start as a major strategic partnership. I think you can't really fault the Obama administration for some of the friction, some of it is congressional short-term re-election stuff. Some of it frankly is that the Chinese have been somewhat unpredictable in their responses. They dis-invited [Defense] Secretary Gates from visiting China, which seemed a bad idea, because the one thing you do want to maintain is constant contact and collaboration between these two countries. The Chinese military clearly wanted to send some kind of a signal and withdrew an invitation, which has now been re-extended ... the Chinese are engaging in somewhat unpredictable behavior, which is unfortunate, but I think it reflects their growing pains as a great power. CNN: What's driving that unpredictable behavior? Zakaria: They're becoming more assertive, they're getting more arrogant, which is natural given their success and their size, but I don't think they're becoming more threatening. I think the problem is that they haven't figured out what their national interests are, what kind of a great power do they want to be in the world. What are their broader interests with regard to nuclear nonproliferation, with regard to the Middle East? I don't think they've thought that through. Twenty years ago, they were a struggling Third World nation that never thought about any of that stuff; now they have to have a foreign policy for everything. From CNN 5 1

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Why China Distrusts the US

TTo Put It Bluntly, The US only Got Itself to Blame!

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People Forum » Focus discussion » Why China won’t engage on strategic reassurance

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Why China won’t engage on strategic reassurance

This topic has been highlight by szh at 2010-10-2 15:48.

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1# > A < Posted  2010-10-2 11:04  Only show this user's posts Why China won’t engage on strategic reassurance Wen Obama.jpg (166.93 KB) 2010-10-2 11:04 By Gregory Kulacki President Obama and his leading foreign policy advisors are attempting to engage the Chinese in a bilateral dialog on strategic reassurance, but with little success. It’s not because of a lack of effort. The President regularly sends members of his Asian security team to Beijing to try to start a discussion on strategic security issues, principally space and nuclear weapons. The goal is to reassure China about U.S. strategic intentions, to obtain reciprocal reassurances from China, and to develop confidence-building measures to sustain U.S.-Chinese strategic reassurance over the long term. The Chinese leadership routinely placates the President’s emissaries with polite acknowledgement, but refuses to engage in serious talks. Administration officials seem perplexed. Some wonder what message China may be trying to send the U.S. Some seem to see it as evidence that nothing the U.S. does can influence China. What I’ve discovered in my discussions in China is that the real reason for this lack of engagement is both simpler and more complex than this. There are currently two factions shaping the internal Chinese debate. One could be described as a “status quo” faction that does not seek major changes in the relationship with the United States. It sees the U.S. as a benign power supporting an international system that is conducive to continued Chinese economic, scientific, and cultural development – despite longstanding contentious, but manageable, disagreements on Taiwan, trade, and human rights. The other faction, which is less cohesive but more bellicose, believes the United States feels threatened by China’s rapid development and that the U.S. is seeking to contain and constrain it in a variety of ways, including aggravating disputes between China and its neighbors and limiting Chinese access to resources, markets, and technology. U.S. officials should not be surprised by the feelings of distrust toward the United States. Over the past several decades the United States pursued policies that some members of the Chinese leadership found threatening. For example, on space policy, U.S. defense publications suggested the United States intended to dominate space and dissuade China from competing there. The U.S. refused to engage in substantive discussions on the peaceful use of outer space in the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. It isolated China from the international space community, kept China out of the international launch services market and turned a cold shoulder to Chinese overtures to participate in the International Space Station. On nuclear weapons policy, the U.S. listed China as a possible target of U.S. nuclear weapons and shifted the bulk of America’s submarine-launched nuclear-armed missiles to the Pacific. It called for developing systems to track and target mobile missiles. It withdrew from the ABM Treaty, deployed long-range ballistic missile defense interceptors in Alaska, and began developing ship-based interceptors with Japan. It signed a nuclear energy agreement with a nuclear-armed India that appeared to strengthen its ability to produce fissile materials. While the Obama administration has deliberately taken a different approach to China, from China’s perspective recent U.S. strategic decisions that impact China are not reassuring. While attempting to engage China on strategic reassurance, President Obama’s Asia hands are also working to shore up U.S. alliances with Japan, South Korea and the member states of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN).The Obama administration views the reinvigoration of U.S. alliances in Asia as essential to promoting regional stability and prosperity; a confidence building measure for nations who are concerned about the growth of Chinese economic, diplomatic and military influence in the region. China’s security establishment views alliance building as exclusionary: an expression of deference to the interests of friends at the expense of the interests of non-friends. Unfortunately, military posturing over unresolved sovereignty claims between China and its neighbors is taking center stage. U.S. military exercises, combined with new U.S. statements of concern about longstanding Chinese sovereignty claims are strengthening the credibility of the minority of Chinese political leaders who believe the United States is seeking to contain China.