China Gears Up to Weaponize Rare Earths in Trade War

As previously documented several times and warned about in the past, the threat of China’s rare earth monopol is being weaponized. This wasn’t suddenly an issue that popped up under Trump because Trump happens to be the current U.S. President. It was one threat of many in the making by China used as a means to an end, with the end game being a United States defeat — eventually militarily.

For further information, see the following previous posts:

Rare Earths Rouse Pentagon Fears

China Is Beating the US in the Rare-Earths Game

China warns of backlash if U.S. presses rare-earths case with WTO

Rare-Earth Market

Rare Earths, Oil, Gas, Other Commodities Up For Grabs As Arctic States Grants China, India, Japan, Other Select Nations ‘Observer Status’

Report: US military too reliant on foreign suppliers

China Threatens to Pull Pin on Global Economic Hand Grenade

 

The U.S. shouldn’t underestimate China’s ability to fight the trade war, the People’s Daily, a flagship newspaper of the ruling Communist Party, said in an editorial Wednesday that used some historically significant language on the weight of China’s intent.

The newspaper’s commentary included a rare Chinese phrase that means “don’t say I didn’t warn you.” The specific wording was used by the paper in 1962 before China went to war with India, and “those familiar with Chinese diplomatic language know the weight of this phrase,” the Global Times, a newspaper affiliated with the Communist Party, said in an article last April. It was also used before conflict broke out between China and Vietnam in 1979.

Photos puts China’s ‘galloping military buildup’ on vivid display

Aerial image of the Jiangnan Shipyard in Shanghai

 

China’s military spending for 2019 will increase by 7.5 percent to about $177.61 billion, as revealed on March 3, 2019 by an official at Chinese Communist Party’s annual National People’s Consultative Congress.

In Unprecedented Speech, President Xi Warns Of “Serious Dangers” To Communist Party Rule

 

Since the days of Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese Communist Party has maintained its absolute authority over China’s roughly 1.4 billion people via an explicit social contract: the CCP would engineer an economic miracle that would lift hundreds of millions of people into the middle class, and in return, the Chinese people would accept the limitations on political freedoms demanded by the CCP.

But with China’s economy growing at its slowest pace in three decades and private sector businesses struggling with an unprecedented credit squeeze, President Xi Jinping must scramble to find a way to stabilize the country’s economy in the face of the US’s trade war escalation threats in order to ensure his legitimacy in the eyes of the public.

Pentagon Reports: Chinese Engaged in Global Power Play

(Photo Credit: Petty Officer 1st Class Chad McNeeley/U.S. Navy)

 

Defense Department warns One Belt One Road favors military and civilian projects that are a direct challenge to U.S. strategic interests.

A pair of reports this week from the Pentagon have sounded alarm bells for Washington, D.C., over China’s use of its ever-growing military, trade, and infrastructure networks, which they assert are being used to pursue a goal of global domination and direct confrontation with American interests around the world.

China Mobilizes DF-26 Missiles in Response to Warship Passage

 

Nuclear, intermediate-range anti-ship missiles shown on television after Navy warship sails S. China Sea

China has mobilized nuclear-capable intermediate-range missiles in response to the passage of a Navy warship near disputed islands in the South China Sea this week, according to state-run Chinese media.

The long-range, anti-ship ballistic missile known as the DF-26—dubbed the “Guam-killer” because of its ability to strike targets on the U.S. western Pacific island—was moved in northwestern China, China Central Television reported Wednesday.

China Unveils New ‘Sky Hawk’ Stealth Drone

(Photo Credit: Chinese Internet)

 

Video of the unmanned aircraft conducting test flights aired on CCTV.

The Chinese government has provided the world with the first glimpse of its new state-of-the-art stealth drone, the “Sky Hawk,” which was shown Saturday for the first time on China Central Television.

President Xi Orders Chinese Army To “Prepare For War”

 

In just a few short days, China has proved that investors who have been underestimating the geopolitical risks stemming from the simmering tensions between the US and China over the latter’s territorial claims in the South China Sea and paranoia over the fate of Taiwan – a de facto independent state that President Xi Jinping is aggressively seeking to bring under the heel of Beijing – have done so at their own peril.

Earlier this week Xi Jinping, the Chinese emperor for life president provoked an angry rebuke from Taiwan’s pro-independence president when he demanded during a landmark speech earlier this week that Taiwan submit to “reunification” with Beijing.

And as if tensions between China and the international community weren’t already high enough amid a worsening economic slowdown that’s hurting global economic growth and a tenuous trade “truce” with the US,  in another speech delivered on Friday during a meeting of top officials from China’s Central Military Commission which he leads, Xi took his belligerent rhetoric one step further by issuing his first military command of 2019: that “all military units must correctly understand major national security and development trends, and strengthen their sense of unexpected hardship, crisis and battle.”

How arrest of Chinese ‘princess’ exposes regime’s world domination plot

Getty Images; Shutterstock

 

Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou’s arrest in Vancouver on Dec. 6 led to immediate blowback.

Furious Chinese Communists have begun arresting innocent Canadians in retaliation. So far, three of these “revenge hostages” have been taken and are being held in secret jails on vague charges. Beijing hints that the hostage count may grow if Meng is not freed and fast.

Even for a thuggish regime like China’s, this kind of action is almost unprecedented.

So who is Meng Wanzhou?

China Press Warns To “Prepare For Escalation Of Conflict With Canada”

 

Days after revealing that businessman Michael Spavor – who became the second Canadian citizen detained in China since Beijing warned it would retaliate against Canada for the arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver earlier this month – had been arrested for “threatening national security”, the Communist Party made clear that this is only the beginning, and that Canada should expect “further escalation” as Beijing has no intentions of backing down – and every intention of sending a message to US allies that they should stay out of the still-simmering dispute between the world’s two largest economies.

Will China Rule The World?

(Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)

China’s worldwide influence campaign requires a coordinated response from all segments of American society—not just politicians and policy-makers.

No bilateral relationship in the world is more important than that between the United States and China, and it is now undergoing an epochal transformation. For three and half decades after Deng Xiaoping put an end to the Maoist nightmare and opened up China to markets and modernization in the late 1970s, American policymakers and scholars believed that engagement with China would lead that system to become at least a little more like us. Economically, China would become more of an open, market economy. Politically, China would become more of an open and pluralistic (if not democratic) society. Internationally, China would become what Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick urged it to be in a famous 2005 speech: a “responsible stakeholder” in international affairs.

Report Details China’s ‘Informatized’ Military Expansion

Chinese People’s Liberation Army troops practice marching as they arrive at Tiananmen Gate for a military parade on Sept. 3, 2015 in Beijing, China. (Andy Wong/Getty Images)

 

China’s economic advancement is allowing it to develop a powerful, and threatening military force

China’s People Liberation Army (PLA) has expanded significantly under Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who demands for the Chinese military to be “accelerating toward informatization.” The annual Department of Defense report regarding China detailed the PLA’s recent developments.

Xi says that now is a “period of strategic opportunity,” while military officials set the objective of winning “informatized local wars.” The word “informatize” is similar to the word “industrialize,” means that all aspects of warfare must be computerized.

China Intensifies Efforts to Topple U.S. Dollar

China Photos/Getty Images

 

‘The pace of expansion has been explosive’ for China’s new yuan-denominated oil futures contract.

Less than a year after China launched an oil futures contract denominated in the Chinese currency, the contract is beginning to be embraced by global commodities traders.

The Chinese Communist Party has long desired to see the United States dollar sidelined and the Chinese currency, the yuan, take on a more central role in global finance. The latest major push toward that goal came on March 26 when China launched a new oil futures contract on the Shanghai International Energy Exchange denominated in yuan. Now the contract is finding increasing acceptance among multinational commodity traders, which could threaten the dollar’s position.

Panic in Beijing: Caught off guard by Trump trade tactics, CCP courts Pentagon

Chinese supreme leader Xi Jinping with U.S. President Donald Trump. / Getty Images

 

As its relationship with other U.S. agencies sours amid President Donald Trump’s trade and twitter offensive, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has worked to maintain close ties to the Pentagon, U.S. defense officials said.

Beijing has stepped up contacts with the Pentagon in recent weeks as Defense Minister Wei Fenghe prepares to meet U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in Washington before the end of the year.

“The Chinese are definitely eager to stay connected to the department,” a senior official said, according to Breitbart News.

China’s Drug War—Against America

A book that couldn’t be more highly recommended on this subject, which also pinpointed the source decades ago:

 

iStock.com/jamesmcq24

 

The shocking story of China’s strategy to use America’s drug addiction as a weapon against itself

Americans are exposing themselves to a chemical attack. This ongoing assault has killed more than 700,000 people since 2000. The weapon is illicit drug use, and Americans are killing themselves with it.

In addition to these overdose deaths, roughly 100,000 Americans have been killed in drug-related homicides. This epidemic of illegal drug use is costing the economy over $1 trillion per year and destroying the willpower of the millions of people who use these chemical weapons on themselves. Since 1 in 6 Americans under age 34 use illicit drugs on a monthly basis, America’s self-inflicted damage is going to get worse and worse.

If a foreign enemy wanted to undermine America from within, facilitating the flow of illicit drugs into the country would be an effective way to do it. The People’s Republic of China has adopted just such a strategy.

Vatican’s deal with Beijing could end Taiwan’s ties with its last European ally

The Wanchin Basilica in Pingtung County, Taiwan was built in 1870. / Wikipedia

 

A deal between the Vatican and China, which would grant China the right to nominate future bishops, would likely end the diplomatic relationship between the Holy See and Taiwan that began in 1942.

Reports of the pending agreement come amid other reports of the suppression of religious expression throughout China.

A Human Rights Watch report estimates that over a million Muslim Uighurs are currently detained in re-education camps in the western province of Xinjiang. AP reported last week that reported that China’s government is seeking to drive citizens away from organized religion and toward the atheist Communist Party through scare tactics such as Bible-burning, shuttering churches, destroying crosses and forcing individuals to renounce their faith on paper.