The film, which was released on YouTube earlier this week, features a spate of deals that Hunter Biden was allegedly involved in as a board member of a Beijing-based investment company during Obama's presidency.

A new documentary has claimed that business activity in China conducted by Hunter Biden, son of the US Democratic presidential nominee, under President Barack Obama, served Beijing's "strategic interests" and may have damaged US national security.

The 41-minute film, called "Riding the Dragon: The Bidens' Chinese Secrets", was posted by the Blaze TV network on YouTube in six segments earlier this week. Joe Biden's election campaign has not commented on the issue yet.

China recently launched the "Clean Plate Campaign," which targets people wasting food, as speculation of a worldwide food shortage mounts.

President Xi Jinping has pushed new measures to curb food waste following the virus pandemic, calling those who live stream their eating experiences on social media as "shocking and distressing."

Jinping said China had to "maintain a sense of crisis about food security" amid the virus pandemic. The warning comes as the world's second-largest economy could soon face food shortages. Besides the virus-induced economic downturn disrupting food supply chains, there's been droughts, floods, and pests that are likely to result in poor harvests this year.

Chinese state news agency, the Global Times, downplayed the notion China is headed for a food crisis. Some restaurants in China have limited the number of dishes served to diners, while others have weighed customers before ordering.

Nothing could be more ridiculous than U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declaring last month that the United States would launch a five-pronged effort under the so-called "Clean Network" program to protect U.S. assets.

Under this initiative, the United States will seek to remove "untrusted" Chinese apps such as TikTok and WeChat from U.S. mobile app stores, limit the ability of Chinese cloud service providers like Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent to access cloud-based systems in the United States, and ensure undersea cables "are not subverted for intelligence gathering" by China.

Pompeo has been mongering his "China threat" theory around the world, urging others to guard against China "stealing user data." But what about the track record of the United States in this regard?

Ever since the early stages of the US-China trade/tech/virus/cold war four years ago, there were frequent rumors - which eventually gave way to increasingly legitimate chatter - that China was looking to go full "nuclear option" by selling some or all of its $1+ trillion of US Treasury securities, which incidentally has not been too far off the mark: as the chart below shows, after peaking in 2013, Chinese holdings of US debt have been steadily declining (and not so steadily in the aftermath of the Chinese devaluation), and are currently near the lowest level in 8 years.

On July 21, two U.S Air Force B-1B bombers took off from Guam and headed west over the Pacific Ocean to the hotly contested South China Sea. The sleek jets made a low-level pass over the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and its escorting fleet, which was exercising nearby in the Philippines Sea, according to images released by the U.S. military.

The operation was part of the Trump administration’s intensifying challenge to China’s ruling Communist Party and its sweeping territorial claims over one of the world’s most important strategic waterways. While senior Trump officials launch diplomatic and rhetorical broadsides at Beijing, the U.S. Defense Department is turning to the firepower of its heavily armed, long-range bombers as it seeks to counter Beijing’s bid to control the seas off the Chinese coast.

Washington’s goal is to get countries in the Indo-Pacific region to work together as a bulwark against ‘a potential challenge from China’, says the US official- He says the four nations are expected to meet in Delhi sometime this autumn

Washington aims to formalise its closer Indo-Pacific defence relations with India, Japan and Australia – also known as “the quad” – into something more closely resembling the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nat), a senior US State Department official said on Monday.

The US government’s goal is to get the grouping of four countries and others in the region to work together as a bulwark against “a potential challenge from China” and “to create a critical mass around the shared values and interests of those parties in a manner that attracts more countries in the Indo-Pacific and even from around the world … ultimately to align in a more structured manner”, said Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun.

A soldier of Tibetan origin with India's special forces has reportedly been killed in the latest border confrontation between India and China on their contested Himalayan border, fuelling concerns of a wider military confrontation between the two regional powers.

The death is the first reported from two incidents occurring within 48 hours on the border, two months after a battle that left at least 20 Indian soldiers dead.

India and China, which fought a border war in 1962, have each accused the other of trying to cross their unofficial frontier in the Ladakh region in an attempt to gain territory.

The Indian government has not commented on the reports of the death, but Namgyal Dolkar Lhagyari, a member of the Tibetan Parliament in exile, told AFP news agency on Tuesday that the Tibetan-origin soldier was "martyred during the clash" on Saturday night. She did not identify the soldier by name.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo Wednesday morning announced severe new restrictions on Chinese diplomats in the United States.

He cited that American diplomats in China "face constant barriers to their work" and so Washington is responding in a commensurate way.

"Today, the State Department imposed new requirements on senior PRC diplomats conducting meetings and events in the U.S. We will always advocate for fair treatment of our diplomats abroad," Pompeo introduced.

This includes requiring senior Chinese diplomats working in the US to seek formal approval from the State Department in order to visit any American university campus or meet with local or state government officials.

In a press briefing the top US diplomat cited China's own "opaque approval process" for American diplomatic personnel working in China, which ultimately prevents them from "conducing regular business, attending events, securing meetings, and connecting with the Chinese people."

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

In northeast Syria last week, a U.S. military vehicle collided with a Russian armored vehicle, injuring four American soldiers.

Both the Americans and Russians blame each other for failing to follow established rules of the road. Had an American been killed, we could have had a crisis on our hands.

Query: With the ISIS caliphate dead and buried, why are 500 U.S. troops still in Syria a year after Donald Trump said we would be pulling them out? What are they doing there to justify risking a clash with Russian troops who are in Syria as the invited allies of the Damascus regime of Bashar Assad, whether we approve of his regime or not?

Nor was this the only U.S.-Russian faceoff last week.

A U.S. Navy warship has transited the narrow and sensitive Taiwan Strait for the second time in two weeks.

Taiwan's Defence Ministry confirmed the operation on Monday amid rising tensions between China and the United States.

The ministry said a U.S. destroyer, which it did not name, had sailed in a southerly direction through the strait and was continuing to sail south.

As Washington and Beijing continue to spar over the latter’s assertion of territorial claims in the South China Sea, the war of words has the two nations lurching ever closer to an actual shooting war, with all that will entail.

The dispute has escalated in the past days and weeks, with the US slapping sanctions on Chinese officials and companies involved in the construction of several man-made islands in the region, and the US and Chinese militaries facing off in increasingly provocative and confrontational encounters.

India and China have been in a border stand-off along the 4,057 km Line of Actual Control since the last week of April. The violent face-off between the troops of the neighbouring countries in Pangong Tso on 15 June left 20 Indian army soldiers dead, resulting in a series of disengagement talks at the diplomatic and military level.

The Indian Army has revealed that fresh clashes erupted between the troops of China and India during the night, on 29-30 August, when the People's Liberation Army carried out "provocative military movements" in the eastern Ladakh region.

"On the night of 29/30 August, People's Liberation Army troops violated the previous consensus arrived at during military and diplomatic engagements during an ongoing standoff in Eastern Ladakh and carried out provocative military movements to change the status quo," said Colonel Aman Anand, PRO, Army.

Authored by Lawrence Franklin via The Gatestone Institute,

Chinese Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping's signature foreign policy proposal has been the "Belt and Road Initiative" (BRI) commercial and strategic program. At first, the network was pitched as a restoration of the ancient overland trade route, the "Silk Road," that linked China to Europe. This "New Silk Road," like its predecessor, would traverse the vast steppes of Central Asia -- but the contemporary BRI is allegedly meant to serve also as an economic boon for all the countries along the route.

Xi quickly followed the overland BRI with a maritime version, presumably to connect Chinese ports on the South China Sea to seaports in the Indian Ocean, continuing on to the Middle East states and ultimately reaching European ports. Initially, these proposals had only involved countries along BRI routes.

The guided-missile destroyer the USS Mustin has entered the South China Sea and is sailing near the Paracel Islands. The islands are claimed by China, though the US does not recognize that claim. China objected that they didn’t authorize the US to sail there.

National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien called China’s claims in the South China Sea ‘ridiculous,’ saying they’ve been rejected by all the major countries. Most countries in the region have conflicting claims in the South China Sea, and to the extent they overlap with Chinese claims, the US backs everyone else’s claims.

In rejecting their claims, the US has repeatedly carried out “freedom of navigation” exercises near Chinese claims just to prove that they can’t enforce those claims. China is objecting to those incursions, and earlier this week fired anti-ship missiles into contested waters to prove they could challenge those ships if they have to.

In a rare comment about potentially boycotting American products, China's foreign ministry spokesman warned Friday if the Trump administration goes ahead with a ban on the popular messaging app WeChat, from mid-September on, then it would result in Chinese consumers ditching iPhones and other Apple products.

"If WeChat is banned, then there will be no reason why Chinese shall keep iPhone and apple products," Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijan tweeted.

In a bizarre exchange of what may or may not be fake news, today China's Global Times claimed that the Chinese People's Liberation Army "expelled a US warship that trespassed into China's territorial waters in the Xisha Islands in the South China Sea on Thursday, near an ongoing Chinese military exercise zone that reportedly featured live-fire anti-ship ballistic missile launches."

The USS Mustin, a US Navy guided missile destroyer, trespassed into the China's territorial waters in the Xisha Islands on Thursday, and the PLA Southern Theater Command dispatched naval and air forces to track, identify and warn it leave, said Senior Colonel Li Huamin, a spokesperson for the PLA Southern Theater Command on early Friday.

Beijing has cautioned against further US naval operations in the South China Sea, claiming that recent activities by the American side create conditions for an unintentional military confrontation.
A spokesman for the People's Liberation Army (PLA) said on Friday that a US warship entered Chinese territorial waters without permission.

“We urge the US to stop such provocative behavior and restrict its maritime actions to avoid possible military accidents,” Senior Colonel Li Huamin said, adding that PLA naval and aerial forces monitored the vessel as it traveled through the South China Sea.

The US Navy said that the USS Martin carried out a “routine” operation in the region. Washington has cited the so-called “freedom of navigation” principle to defend its regular activity in the sea.

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Saker blog (originally posted at The Asia Times),

Beijing-Moscow is already on; Berlin-Beijing is a work in progress; the missing but not distant link is Berlin-Moscow..

We have seen how China is meticulously planning all its crucial geopolitical and geoeconomic moves all the way to 2030 and beyond.

What you are about to read next comes from a series of private, multilateral discussions among intel analysts, and may helpfully design the contours of the Big Picture.

In China, it’s clear the path ahead points to boosting internal demand, and shifting monetary policy towards the creation of credit to consolidate the building of world-class domestic industries.

The Pentagon revealed Thursday that China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) "warning" to the US on Wednesday involved the firing of “four medium-range missiles into [an] area between Hainan and the Paracel Islands,” a defense official was quoted in FT.

Among them included nuclear-capable DF-26 missile and the anti-ship DF-21D ballistic missile. Beijing said they demonstrated the PLA's ability to deny outside military access to the South China Sea.

The missiles were fired in response to the major incident from Tuesday, wherein China's PLA military angrily charged that a US U-2 spy plane entered a 'no-fly zone' off China's coast while the PLA conducted live-fire military drills.

The PLA has since ratcheted up its drills, with FT reporting Thursday the military "announced it was conducting another live fire exercise in waters off the eastern city of Taizhou, bringing the number of drills off its coast this week to five."

For the past months the Peoples’ Republic of China has been subject to one after the other devastating shocks to its agriculture sector. A deadly outbreak of African Swine Fever that halved China’s huge pig herds in 2019, was followed by infestation from a plague of fall armyworms (FAW) which reached China in December, 2018 and now threaten China’s corn belt. Now the worst floods in some 60 years is wiping out major rice and other crops in central China along the Yangtze and other rivers. Food Security is one of six national priorities for national security. President Xi Jinping has just issued a call to citizens not to waste food or face penalties, a sign that the depth of the food security threat is far worse than thought.

China’s food supplies remain stable and consumers should not be “overly anxious” or even resort to “panic buying”, a senior agriculture ministry official said on Wednesday, following recent uncertainty caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Still, farmers and traders should prevent food waste caused by improper storage, while farmers who stockpile in the hope of later gains should be wary that prices could turn against them, ministry official Tang Ke told a briefing.

President Xi Jinping raised the issue of food security earlier this month when he spoke about “shameful” food wastage, while a government think tank has warned about a looming food supply gap by 2025.

Let’s start with the story of an incredibly disappearing summit.

Every August, the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) converges to the town of Beidaihe, a seaside resort some two hours away from Beijing, to discuss serious policies that then coalesce into key planning strategies to be approved at the CCP Central Committee plenary session in October.

The Beidaihe ritual was established by none other than Great Helmsman Mao, who loved the town where, not by accident, Emperor Qin, the unifier of China in the 3rd century B.C., kept a palace.

2020 being, so far, a notorious Year of Living Dangerously, it’s no surprise that in the end Beidaihe was nowhere to be seen. Yet Beidaihe’s invisibility does not mean it did not happen.

In the latest tit-for-tat South China Sea saga, China has denounced the United States, lodging "stern representations" with the US embassy, over Pentagon attempts to spy on live-fire military drills over what Beijing claims is its sovereign airspace.

Specifically, according to Reuters, the US is charged with "sending a U.S. U-2 reconnaissance plane into a no-fly zone over Chinese live-fire military drills on Tuesday, further ratcheting up tensions between Beijing and Washington."

As the Trump Administration works to keep the flow of aggressive China-related headlines flowing across social media, Politico reported on Tuesday that the administration is weighing the possibility of labeling Beijing's treatment of Muslim minority Uighurs a “genocide".

Of course, for this label to have any real power or affect, it would have to be backed by the UN Security Council. And seeing as China has a permanent seat and veto power, the odds of this ever flying at the UN are virtual impossible.

A Texas A&M University professor and NASA researcher has been charged with conspiracy and accused of collaborating with several Chinese entities, while his grant explicitly prohibited him from doing so.

Zhengdong Cheng, a professor in the College of Engineering at Texas A&M who also worked on projects for NASA, was arrested by the FBI over the weekend, the Department of Justice said Monday.

Well, that on again, off again between the US and China to discuss the "progress" on the Phase 1 of the trade deal finally took place tonight, with the US Trade Representative office announcing tonight that Ambassador Lighthizer and Secretary Mnuchin participated in "a regularly scheduled call this evening" with China's Vice Premier Liu Hu to discuss implementation of the historic Phase One Agreement between the United States and China.

According to the USTR, the parties addressed steps that China has taken to effectuate structural changes called for by the Agreement that will ensure greater protection for intellectual property rights, remove impediments to American companies in the areas of financial services and agriculture, and eliminate forced technology transfer.

Considering that China has done virtually nothing so far, we can only imagine that this was the shortest US-China call in history.

When the Trump administration withheld billions of dollars in security aid to Pakistan in 2018, the logic then was that the Pakistani military would be forced to form greater ties with the US and surrounding allies to reclaim lost aid.

Fast forward today, the new reality, Pakistan abandoned the West and its allies for China.

Pakistan quickly bolstered ties with China via billions of dollars in Belt and Road projects over the last two years. China has also provided the Pakistani military with aircraft, weaponry, and other advanced hardware. The cooperation between both countries has taken another giant leap as China just delivered the first of four "most advanced" warships to the Pakistani Navy, a move that will clearly upset India and the US.

As the world’s second largest economy recovers from the coronavirus pandemic, its steel sector reached record high output last month, according to fresh industry data.

China produced 93.36 million tons of crude steel in July, or 3.05 million tons a day, which is over nine percent more than it did over the same period last year, Chinese media reported on Monday citing the China Iron and Steel Association (CISA). The figures coincide with data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), released earlier this month.

July crude steel output exceeded the previous monthly record of 92.27 tons set in May. From January to July, China churned out 593.17 million tons of crude steel, with production rising 2.8 percent year-on-year, the NBS data showed.

A new bill introduced in Washington seeks to change the way the federal government refers to the leader of China, prohibiting the use of the term "president", and will - if passed - lead to a dramatic escalation in already tense relations between the two superpowers. According to the SCMP, the "Name the Enemy Act" would require that official US government documents instead refer to the head of state according to his or her role as head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, holds three official titles, none of which is “president”: head of state (guojia zhuxi, literally “state chairman”); chairman of the central military commission; and general secretary of the CCP. However, in the English-speaking world, Xi has generally opted for “president”, which critics say "offers unwarranted legitimacy" to an unelected leader.

It was a year ago that the Pentagon first announced it would move forward with plans to deploy intermediate range ballistic missiles to Asia "within months" — an ambitious timeline which of course never materialized, nevertheless a prospect that's remained on the table ever since, driving tensions higher as part of what Beijing has slammed repeatedly as Washington's "Cold War mentality".

In a new statement China's Foreign Ministry has vowed it will take "countermeasures" should any US ally in the region agree to host American missiles.

On Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo vowed that the United Nations Security Council snapback sanctions on Iran will resume and if China, Russia, or any other country does not follow them, the United States will respond by imposing sanctions on them.

Pompeo said, “30 days from now, all the sanctions that were in place will resume. They have been temporarily paused because of the ridiculous nuclear deal, and the world will be a safer place. The Iranians won’t have the chance to have Russian air-defense systems, Chinese tanks, all the things that pose risk and instability in the Middle East. The Gulf states are all excited about — Israel is excited about it. It’ll reduce their risk, and it’ll make Americans safer too.”

Host Bret Baier then asked, “So when China or Russia refuse, is the administration going to hold them accountable with sanctions too?”

Perhaps much belatedly, but hugely significant following Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Germany, France and Britain doing the same, the US on Wednesday formally halted its extradition treaty with Hong Kong in protest of Beijing's previously imposed national security law and amid soaring tensions with China more broadly.

The US State Department announced that it's part of a total of three US bilateral agreements with Hong Kong being permanently dropped.

“These agreements covered the surrender of fugitive offenders, the transfer of sentenced persons, and reciprocal tax exemptions on income derived from the international operation of ships,” State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said.

A recent satellite photo managed to capture a Chinese submarine entering a cave base on Hainan Island, at the northern end of the South China Sea.

On Tuesday, a photograph of the sea outside of Yulin Naval Base by private Earth-imaging company Planet Labs captured an unusual scene: a large submarine positioned just outside the mouth of the cavernous Chinese citadel.

The photo was first posted on social media by Radio Free Asia, a US government-funded media outlet that is part of the US Agency for Global Media. In the image, a submarine flanked by two small surface vessels sits just outside the mouth of the cave leading to the base, facing toward it.

On Thursday (China time), on the same day as Joe Biden’s much anticipated Democrat Party convention speech, the Chinese Communist newspaper endorsed Joe Biden for President of the United States.

The Global Times says Joe Biden may reactivate the job-killing TPP and the Iran nuclear deals pushed by the Obama administration.

China is rooting for a weak America. Trump is rooting for a strong America.

This was quite an endorsement.

In an implicit message to China, the Japanese and U.S. militaries teamed up this week for a number of joint exercises involving warships, heavy bombers, advanced fighter jets and an aircraft carrier in the waters and airspace near Japan.

The scale and tempo of the multiple joint exercises was noticeably large and came as Sino-U.S. tensions continued to spiral over security, economic and human rights concerns.

Israel concerned Saudis might get nuclear arms with 'China's help'

Following reports that this is a specific concern of Israel, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says he believes it is a “real risk” that Saudi Arabia will get nukes, and that the US views it as a “top priority” to try to prevent the Saudis from getting such arms.

Recent reports, all centering on the Israeli narrative, claim the Saudis are processing yellowcake uranium, and that they are getting secret help from China that could lead to the acquisition of nuclear arms in the future.

This is an unusual place for the administration to be in, as they general support arming the Saudis to the teeth, and Pompeo has repeatedly gone to bat for the idea that the Saudis need more arms for their “emergency” state. Those are US-made arms, of course.

Since early summer, devastating floods have wreaked havoc in southern China due to torrential rains caused by the rainy season, with most of the flooding observed around the Yangtze basin and its tributaries.

China's largest river, the Yangtze, continues to rise to dangerous levels after another round of rainfall. More than 100,000 people on Tuesday, in the Sichuan province, were evacuated from their homes, reported Reuters.

Some 63 million people have been affected by the floods, with economic damage totaling $26 billion.

A red alert was issued late Tuesday by the water commission, who said some monitoring stations along the river were expected to rise above flood protection levels. The ministry also warned about the Three Gorges Dam, indicating water inflow levels continued to increase, with water inflows registering 74,000 cubic meters per second on Wednesday, the highest ever.

By Edward Curtin

The French writer Guy Debord called this The Society of the Spectacle.

For many months now, all eyes have been directed to the Covid-19 propaganda show with Fauci and Gates, and their mainstream corporate media mouthpieces, striking thunderbolts in the storm to scare the unknowing audience into submission so the transformation of the Great Global Reset, led by the World Economic Forum, Wall Street, the International Monetary Fund, et al can proceed smoothly.

Meanwhile, as the circus rolls along, far away and out of mind, shit happens:

With more than 400 military bases equipped with nuclear weapons surrounding China, the United States military continues its encirclement of China and China enters a “state of siege.”

King Joe and the Round Table: Biden’s America in a Multipolar World

The US government is rapidly pushing China out of the US financial system. They may even default on the US debt that is owned by China.

Doing so will compel China to simply create its own, competing financial system.

And suddenly every country that China does business with would start using the Chinese system and increasing their holdings of Chinese renminbi.

As a result, China’s currency would essentially take global reserve ‘market share’ away from the US dollar. And even a small portion would have a huge impact.

A smaller share of global reserves would mean that the US could no longer get away with printing trillions of dollars, or piling up its endless mountain of debt.

One day after Trump activated what Bloomberg described as the "nuclear option" when the US announced that Huawei can’t access US technology directly or indirectly, an action which leaves it in extremely difficult circumstances, the U.S. State Department has escalated the Cold War with China yet again, with Bloomberg reporting that the US is now asking colleges and universities to divest from Chinese holdings in their endowments, "warning schools in a letter Tuesday to get ahead of potentially more onerous measures on holding the shares."

The iShares MSCI China ETF, the MSCI sold off on the news.

The US would lose a war with China fought in the Pacific, is unable to defend Taiwan from an invasion and fears the Guam military base is at risk now, US defense sources have warned.

'Eye-opening' Pentagon war games have revealed growing fears the US is vulnerable to threats from China and that any attack would lead to the US 'suffering capital losses', the sources said.

The worrying analysis is expected to come to light in the Pentagon's 2020 China military power report this summer.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar visited Taiwan for high level meetings last week in a move that angered Beijing. As Statista's Niall McCarthy notes, Azar's unprecedented trip prompted China to send J-10 and J-11 fighter jets into the Taiwan Strait where they briefly crossed the sensitive median line which unofficially separates airspace between the mainland and the island.

China considers Taiwan a rogue province and maintains that reunification is inevitable, reserving its right to use all necessary measures, including military force.

Around a large table with a map and icons representing ships, submarines, planes, missile batteries, land-based forces, space-based sensors, and other apparatuses of modern warfare, officials from the Pentagon and the Rand Corp. fight a thus far unimaginable conflict.

The Red Team, composed of experts on the Chinese military, aims to use all available forces to capture Taiwan, the island 90 miles off the coast that China regards as a renegade province and that it has repeatedly vowed to retake, by force if necessary.

China's strategy would be to get an invasion fleet across the Taiwan Strait before the U.S. could come to its tiny ally’s aid. “And once that happens we'd face an Iwo Jima situation,” says a defense analyst, referring to a costly campaign to dislodge occupying Japanese in World War II.

An Iranian official says enhancing cooperation and investments in the tourism sector constitutes a key component of a 25-year partnership agreement under discussion between Iran and China.

Deputy of Minister of Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicraft Vali Taymouri said Monday that a major component of the draft agreement — known as the Sino-Iran Comprehensive Strategic Partnership — is seeking avenues of “expert cooperation” within the tourism sector and attracting Chinese tourists.

He said the draft agreement, which Tehran and Beijing are working to finalize, takes into account the views of experts at Iran’s tourism ministry.

The official added that the agreement would address investments in the construction by China of facilities meant to promote tourism.

Taymouri said that the possibility of Chinese or joint investments in the tourism sector and training tour leaders to further accommodate Chinese travelers has been considered in the pact.

On behalf of the Powers That Be (PTB), World War II was orchestrated by the circles of the City of London and of Wall Street to maneuver two great obstacles—Russia and Germany—to wage a war to the death against each other, in order that those Anglo-Saxon PTB could reorganize the world geopolitical chess board to their advantage. It largely succeeded, but for the small detail that after 1945, Wall Street and the Rockefeller brothers were determined that England play the junior partner to Washington. London and Washington then entered the period of their global domination known as the Cold War.

That Anglo-American global condominium ended, by design, in 1989 with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union by 1991.

The world has entered the era of fourth-generation fighter jets (fifth gen for Russian and Chinese standards), but only four countries – China, the United States, Russia and Japan can produce such jets. Among them, China, the United States and Russia have developed their own fourth-generation fighters, and Japanese has got production lines of F-35 fighters from the United States.

According to experts, the performance of China’s J-31 fighter jet in the future can be comparable to that of the typical fourth-generation carrier-based fighter F-35C from the United States, and J-31 fighter’s speed of super-fast 1.8 Mach is even more advantageous.

On this episode of Going Underground, we speak to legendary journalist and filmmaker John Pilger. He discusses the coronavirus pandemic and its damage to the UK, the scandal of some of the most vulnerable patients being thrown out of hospitals during the Covid-19 crisis, resulting in tens of thousands of excess deaths, the ongoing privatization of the NHS, and the continuous deterioration of the NHS before the pandemic, Matt Hancock’s performance as health secretary, the ongoing persecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, new charges against him, efforts to extradite him to the US, and the silence of mainstream journalists on his persecution. Finally, John Pilger discusses rising tensions between the US and its allies and China, the hypocrisy of Western foreign policy against Beijing, the Hong Kong National Security Law, the US military encirclement of China, and how the country is entering a ‘state of siege,’ rising tensions with Australia, and more!

Taiwan finalized the purchase of F-16 fighter jets from US aircraft manufacturer Lockheed Martin on Friday, a source confirmed to AFP, in a $62 billion, 10-year deal sure to anger Beijing.

The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) used social media on Wednesday to publish a short video clip of Hong Kong air defense drills.

A military analyst told the island’s leading dissident newspaper, Apple Daily, that the incongruous 48-second video was meant as a warning to the United States against interfering with China’s oppression of Hong Kong.

The analyst, Anthony Wong of the International Military Association in Macau, noted that the video was labeled with Hong Kong’s name in English instead of Mandarin, a sign that its intended audience was the United States, along with Beijing loyalists in Hong Kong who want to see the PLA sending belligerent messages to the U.S.

“There’s no question about it, it’s to show the U.S. and to show the ‘blue ribbons’ in Hong Kong,” said Wong.

Update: Adding fuel to the fire that Coughlin describes below, Global Times Editor Hu Xijin tweeted the following earlier today:

The more US aircraft carriers come to the South China Sea and exert pressure on China, the more it will prompt the PLA to develop complete and reliable methods against them. Once a war begins, these aircraft carriers are more likely to become vulnerable targets.

Authored by Con Coughlin via The Gatestone Institute,

China's decision to launch a fresh round of military exercises close to the disputed territory of Taiwan demonstrates that Beijing's communist rulers have little intention of backing down in their increasingly provocative confrontation with America and its allies.

Two Chinese jets briefly flew across the Taiwan Strait "median line" - the de facto border between China and Taiwan - on Monday morning in what has been a busy year in cross-Strait military exercises.

While the jets were signalling Beijing's displeasure with US Health Secretary Alex Azar's ongoing visit to Taipei, similar missions have entered Taiwanese airspace and waters at least 20 times this year, according to local media.

While Taipei is not required to publicly disclose every military encounter with the People's Liberation Army (PLA), Taiwan's Foreign Minister Joseph Wu warned in July that Beijing might be preparing to "solve the Taiwan issue" - a euphemism for taking control of the island.

The Western media was quick to decry the arrest of 34 year-old lawyer Anon Nampa who has been leading recent anti-government protests in Thailand.

Articles like, “Two protesters arrested, more sought,” noted Anon Nampa faces charges including sedition. The Western media cites an organization – Thai Lawyers for Human Rights (TLHR) – noting its role in advocating for Anon Nampa’s release, but never notes that Anon Nampa himself works for TLHR or who funds and supports TLHR.

TLHR and the Protests it Leads Are US-Funded – Funding the Media Refuses to Mention

TLHR was created out of the US Embassy in 2014 just two days after a coup ousted the US-backed client regime of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra – sister of fugitive billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra. TLHR has since protested both the coup and reforms enacted to ensure such a client regime could no longer take power.

The long-awaited cross-border railway bridge linking Russia and China across the Amur river is scheduled to be commissioned in the first quarter of 2022, authorities in Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region announced on Wednesday.

The 2,209-meter-long (1.4 mile) structure will link Russia’s Far East with China’s northernmost Heilongjiang province. The Nizhneleninskoye (Jewish Autonomous Region) to Tongjiang (Heilongjiang province) bridge will be the first railway bridge between the two countries. It is expected to bring bilateral trade to new highs.

China has already completed the construction of its part of the structure. As for the Russian side, the region’s acting governor Rostislav Goldstein said earlier it “would be preferable to complete all the work on time, which is the first quarter of 2021.”

As the US-centralized empire’s slow-motion third world war against unabsorbed governments continues to accelerate, narrative management campaigns are getting more and more frenzied.

We see this exemplified in two recent smear pieces published by imperial spinmeisters about critics of the establishment-authorized narratives about what’s happening in China.

The oligarch-funded Axios has published a new article titled“The American blog pushing Xinjiang denialism” about the alternative media outlet The Grayzone.

A photo circulating on Chinese social media seems to show one of China’s most advanced bombers, the H-6J, on the airfield on tiny Woody Island, a growing Chinese settlement in the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea.

The photo, which originated on Sina Weibo before making its way to Twitter, shows a Xian H-6J, China’s updated version of its H-6 bomber based on the Soviet Tu-16 Badger, sitting on the tarmac of what is purported to be Woody Island, called Yongxing Island by Beijing.

SOURCE: ZEROHEDGE

SOURCE: F. WILLIAM ENGDAHL VIA GLOBALRESEARCH.CA
If we step back from the details of daily headlines around the world and try to make sense of larger patterns, the dominant dynamic defining world geopolitics in the past three years or more is the appearance of a genuine irregular conflict between the two most formidable powers on the planet - The Peoples’ Republic of China and the United States of America. Increasingly it’s beginning to look as if some very dark global networks are orchestrating what looks to be an updated rerun of their 1939-1945 World War. Only this time the stakes are total, and aim at creation a universal global totalitarian system, what David Rockefeller once called a “one world government.” The powers that be periodically use war to gain major policy shifts.

Attempts to meddle with Taiwan, which Beijing considers its territory, may cost the US dearly, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said. He advised its health chief to focus on the Covid-19 crisis at home instead of making foreign trips.
US Health Secretary Alex Azar landed in Taiwan on Sunday for a three-day trip, becoming the highest-ranking American official to visit the self-governed island, which has shown no desire in four decades to reunite with mainland China.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian has condemned the visit and warned Washington against making advances towards Taiwan.

On issues involving China’s core interests … the US must not harbor illusions. Those who play with fire will get burned.

After severe flooding in the Yangtze River drainage area in July, heavy rain has now hit another major waterway in China, the Yellow River.

A 646-year-old building in Xi’an city, located in western China and midstream of the Yellow River, partially collapsed on Aug. 8, injuring at least four people.

Floodwaters inundated cities and villages in Shaanxi, Shanxi, and Henan provinces located midstream of the Yellow River. At the same time, authorities discharged floodwaters from the river’s downstream to rural areas of Shandong Province on the eastern coast.

China’s Ministry of Emergency Management (MEM) announced on Aug. 9 that the river’s upper stream region and northeastern China would experience heavy rain and storms from Aug. 9 to Aug. 11.

The country’s southwestern regions of Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, and Tibet were also forecasted to have heavy rain in the coming days, the MEM warned.

At a moment of increasingly dangerous military flexing both over Taiwan and in the South China Sea, the People's Liberation Army has reportedly been ordered “not to fire the first shot” in any potential confrontation with the United States. It suggests this emerging 'new Cold War' scenario could turn hot at any moment.

The South China Morning Post broke news of the standing military orders on Tuesday based on unnamed sources: China has told its service personnel “not to fire the first shot” as Beijing looks to de-escalate tensions with the United States in the South China Sea, it reports.

Further SCMP cites that "The sources said Beijing had ordered pilots and naval officers to exercise restraint in the increasingly frequent stand-offs with US planes and warships."