The Duran Podcast
China prepares for Collective West sanctions attack
All right, Alexander, let's talk about what is happening in China. We have the third plenum of the Chinese Communist Party, and it's not getting much coverage, but this is a big event, and it looks like China is continuing its economic policies that we've seen them initiating over the past couple of years, and they are continuing their support of BRICS, their support of Russia. And I also, from my understanding there, they're working with India as well to try and fix the issues that they have with India. So anyway, what is happening in China, a big event? This event has attracted almost zero attention from the international media, there's been one rather sniffy editorial about it in the financial times, but mostly people are ignoring it. And I think this is extremely unwise, because China has the world's biggest manufacturing economy. By far, according to the World Bank and the IMF, on a purchasing power parity basis, it is now the world's biggest economy bigger than the United States. It is becoming a major power. What the Chinese Communist Party, which remains the governing party in China decides, and how it's going to try to develop and direct China for the future, well, that ought to be a major news or ought to be at least there with, say, the US President's State of the Union address. But of course, nobody is paying any attention. And well, we've had this meeting, technically, it is the third plenary session of the Central Committee, the 20th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, 20th in the sense that it's the 20th time that the Central Committee has itself been elected. We don't need to go into the enormous details of exactly which bodies it was that have announced this. Suffice to say, this is the CPC's economic and political program for the next 10 years going all the way up to 2035. That we can see that they're doubling and tripling down on the economic and political policies that they've already outlined. So there's been constant pressure on China to change its economic model, to emphasize more consumer spending, open up its economy more, to imports of Western goods. That sort of thing, the Chinese Communist Party is going in exactly the opposite direction. They want to increase investment. They want to focus more on manufacturing, still more on manufacturing. They want to focus on building up the China's high technology base, its infrastructure base. They're going to be investing heavily on developing computer chips and all of those things. They're going to be heavily, very heavily focused on all of that. And on top of that, and beyond that, they continue to stockpile commodities, wheat, oil, grain, gold. They're buying that in vast quantities. They're going to focus on building up the bricks as the major economic and global system that they're going to develop as the alternative to that, which is still led by the US. And of course, they're going to continue to develop their relationship with Russia. That's the direction China is taking. And already, it is creating major effects in the global system. It means that China is now running trade surpluses of just short of a trillion dollars a year, the Chinese trade surpluses ballooning, and the Chinese are using all this money that they're making through their trade surpluses to import commodities from around the world to stockpile. And you can see that they're preparing for a long-term economic struggle with the United States and that they're stockpiling in preparation of it. Yeah, there have been a lot of articles on the Chinese stockpiling. They haven't really talked about the actual event that has taken place, the third plan that has taken place, but they are talking about the stockpiling and why. Why is China stockpiling? What are they up to? And I think we now know what they're anticipating a smash with the collective West, right? Yes, yes. I mean, I think that we mustn't discount the economic side of this. China does absolutely want to be a high-tech, high-industry economy. It wants to be, if you like, Germany on a Chinese scale. Germany with an even much bigger high-tech sector, so very, very high-quality manufactured goods built on a colossal scale, based upon very, very high-tech industry as well, a very, very strong scientific base. This is very much the way in which the CPC envisages China's economic future. And I think that they really do believe that this is the way that China should develop. They don't want China to become a more consumer-led economy. They look at what happened to Japan in the 1980s when Japan did follow this change of course that many people had urged it to follow and the Chinese feel, and there's many other people do, that that did not lend and end well with Japan. But these Chinese economic policies, they may make absolute economic sense for China, but they will inevitably see, be seen as a challenge, by the collective West. They will be seen by the collective, West as China, seeking scientific and technological leadership, China seeking to establish itself as the world's biggest manufacturer, which of course it already is, but on an even more upgraded level, and China running these vast surpluses in terms of manufactured goods, with which Western industry cannot compete. And that of course will result in a pushback, and of course that goes beyond even the geopolitical tensions, which already exist between China and the West. The West seeing Taiwan, as you know many people in the West seeing Taiwan as the key point, the South China Sea, all of those things. So it is, we're heading towards a smash, exactly as you said, with the Chinese seeing that, perceiving that for themselves, and engaging in all of this big stockpiling of commodities, because clearly they anticipate a sanctions war against themselves at some point, and potentially an economic blockade also, the US has talked about this, a naval blockade, the closing of the Straits of Malacca and all of that, and of course the Chinese, in addition to this, are going to deepen their relationship with Russia, the great commodities supplier, the country that can provide them with oil, gas, food, strategic minerals, all of those kinds of things, certain types of high technology as well. And we've seen the Chinese and the Russian air forces conducting, more exercises recently, the Chinese and Russian navies conducting, more exercises still. That relationship is clearly absolutely crucial from the perception of the Communist Party of China for China's economic fusion. Yeah, the question is, is this just going to be contained to an economic war, a trade war, an economic smash? I mean, I think that's the big question, are we going to see some sort of a hot war like what we saw in Ukraine, what we're seeing in Ukraine, because you could make the argument that China right now is at the stage where Russia was, say, after the Maidan, where they're now starting to prepare, for what's about to come. Exactly. Exactly. It's something that we can't answer, maybe we can predict, we can try to predict whether this is just going to be confined to an economic war, or a hot war, and I guess a lot of it depends on who wins in November, but no doubt China is looking past a four-year Trump term or a four-year Kamala term, I mean, is it 10-year planning? So anyway, what are your thoughts? Well, I think that's a close out of the video. And I think you're absolutely right, by the way, that China is exactly where Russia was in 2014. Now, in 2014, that was the point where the Russians began to reorient their entire economy towards moving more towards economic self-sufficiency, manufacturing, that sort of thing. Of course, the trends have accelerated hugely since 2022. But already, the first steps were being made then in 2014, that was when the Russians started to start part to build up their financial reserves, sort out the issues in their banking system, work out them into bank, the messaging system, do all of those things, start to upgrade their factories with new machine tools, which have been central in the production miracle that they've achieved over the last three years. So China is doing that, but on a collosally bigger scale. And I think the Chinese are saying to themselves exactly the same thing that the Russians were saying to themselves in 2014. Maybe the political future will change, that the Americans, because it has to be the Americans, will change their stance. But we can't assume that they will. All the signals for the last few couple of years, this is two for the Russians in 2014, and it's even more for the Chinese now, all the signals coming out of the United States for the last 10 years or so, have been of growing hostility and confrontation towards us. The Chinese media, even as we're doing this program, is complaining, for example, about more statements made by Ursula von der Leyen in support of Taiwan. So the Chinese are saying, it looks as if we have to prepare for a confrontation with the Western powers. Maybe a new administration of the United States will try to change direction, but we can't rely on it. And even if it wants to change direction, it could very well turn out that the institutional pressure within the United States to go for a full-scale confrontation with us is now too strong. So China is preparing for the confrontation with the US that I think deep down it believes will come. Whatever the next administration chooses to do, even if Trump vans want to improve relations with China, even if Kamala Harris wants to improve relations with China. It will be like, remember, Obama's reset, it will be something of that kind, it will not be real or sincere, it will be ephemeral, sooner or later, the smash will come and China is making sure that he's ready for it. One has to say that it's a long-sighted policy, it again shows that the Chinese do engage in something, which in the West we don't, they do engage in strategic planning. And what has to contrast, again, the very thorough industrial and technological planning that the Chinese do with the chaotic way in which the United States, in the Biden era, has tried to undertake economic planning of its own, industrial planning of its own. The contrast between the CHIP Act, the Green Development, the Inflation Reduction Act and all of that, and the things that the Chinese are doing, he's very, very stark. We will end the video there at the Duran.local.com. We are on Rumble Odyssey, put your Telegram rock fan in Twitter, X and go to the Duran shop, pick up some limited edition merch. The link is in the description box down below, take care. [MUSIC] (upbeat music) (upbeat music)