Chinese Peasants ordered to turn forests into grain fields as threat of food crisis looms
A video circulated on China’s social media showed that local authorities in Weifang, Shandong Province, ordered peasants to “remove trees” to make the land available for grain production. This comes as many in China fear food shortages will soon become a serious problem. In the video, a peasant, who recorded it as a selfie, said, “We just received a notice that we are required to cut down these trees and grow grains instead, even if financially it ends up being a loss. Commodity prices are so high nowadays—fertilizers, pesticides, and prices are ridiculously high.” In the background, many trees had already been chopped down, some with roots exposed. Other peasants had removed a large area of mature trees. At the same time, a speaker in the village was making an announcement, saying that trees are not allowed to be planted in farmland, and land cannot be used for fish ponds or fruit trees. The trees must be cut down within a limited timeframe, otherwise, they will be forcibly “killed” by the authorities.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-peasants-ordered-to-turn-forests-into-grain-fields-as-threat-of-food-crisis-looms_4350230.html
This company owns the world (and it’s our fault) – BlackRock
BlackRock: the company that owns the world. You may have never heard of them, but I guarantee they’re having some kind of impact on your life, your debt, the cost of things in the world around you, and even our environment. I wanted to create a little bit of a different video here, to shine some light on some of the reasons the world is the way it is, especially in regards to the economic state of things. Sometimes, you might think that debt, credit, ownership, and prices are just the way they are by accident. But here, I’ll show you that due to the way the world is owned, a lot of this is on purpose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghP7kImI9WM
Inflation, De-dollarization, and Russia’s Ultimate Goal for War in Ukraine – Was Ukraine only a pawn in the way of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping’s grand ambitions?
What did Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping think Western Nations would do in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? The United States and the European Union would most likely refuse to join a kinetic war against the world’s greatest nuclear power. Therefore, they would be limited to sending military aid, imposing economic sanctions, and at the very most, excluding Russia from the SWIFT financial system. These types of economic sanctions were predictable because this is exactly how the West responded when Russia took the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014. Strategically, Putin chose to invade now because the U.S. and E.U. would be incapable of mounting a more serious response at the end of the global long-term debt cycle when their economies faced record high-debt levels, the highest inflation in 40-years, and supply chain shortages fomented by lockdown policies implemented in response to covid-19.
https://kanekoa.substack.com/p/inflation-de-dollarization-and-russias
8 Joe Biden Scandals Inside Hunter Biden’s MacBook That Corporate Media Just Admitted Is Legit
Ukraine is but a patch on the influence-peddling undertaken by Hunter on behalf of “the big guy,” as the younger Biden referred to his dad. China also played a large role in the family enterprise, as demonstrated by, again, passing coverage in November 2021. Then, the Times reported, in brief, that Hunter Biden’s joint global equity firm, the Bohai Harvest Equity Investment Fund, had helped coordinate the purchase by a Chinese mining company of the world’s largest cobalt source in the Congo. That deal gave China control over a huge chunk of the world’s known cobalt supplies — an ingredient necessary to make electric car batteries. And the role of Hunter Biden’s company, Bohai, in the transaction again connects directly to Joe Biden, as Hunter reportedly launched that new joint enterprise with Chinese business partners less than two weeks after he traveled to China on Air Force Two with his then-vice president father.
https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/22/8-joe-biden-scandals-inside-hunter-bidens-macbook-that-corporate-media-just-admitted-is-legit/
Biden DOJ: Hunter Laptop REAL, Investigation Underway
Krystal and Saagar cover the long awaited confirmation that the laptop containing financial and personal information about Hunter Biden is real and currently being investigated by the Justice Department of his father, President Joe Biden
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia6JO2owH0s
How One Ukrainian Billionaire Funded Hunter Biden, President Volodymyr Zelensky, And The Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion
The real person who was the benefactor to, and the boss of, Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, at the Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings, was not the CEO of Burisma Holdings, Mykola Zlochevsky, but it was instead Ihor Kolomoysky, who was part of the newly installed Ukrainian Government, which the Obama Administration itself had actually just installed in Ukraine, in what the head of the “private CIA” firm Stratfor correctly called “the most blatant coup in history.” Igor Kolomoysky has been a top funder of the Azov Battalion since it was formed in 2014. He has also bankrolled private militias like the Dnipro and Aidar Battalions and has personally deployed them to protect his financial interests. Text messages found on Hunter Biden’s laptop, show Hunter Biden asking Hallie Biden, his brother’s widow and his mistress, if she believed that he had “children burned alive in DONETSK” or “children killed in donetsk, Ukraine” or “that I had people murdered in Beijing”.
https://kanekoa.substack.com/p/how-one-ukrainian-billionaire-funded
How Chinese Companies Linked to Hunter Biden Could Bail Out Putin
Sinopec and China National Petroleum Corporation are in discussions with Beijing to invest in Russian gas giant Gazprom, Bloomberg reported Tuesday. Biden has done business with both Chinese firms, which hope to take advantage of deep discounts in the company’s shares in order to shore up their energy and commodity stockpiles. He may still hold an indirect investment in Sinopec. The connections highlight longstanding concerns that Biden’s foreign entanglements help America’s adversaries. Biden met in 2011 with an executive from China National Petroleum Corporation to discuss the potential purchase of an oil field in Africa, the Washington Free Beacon reported. Biden met with the executive, Ge Aiji, even after he was told that the company had helped Iran, Sudan, and others evade U.S. sanctions.
https://freebeacon.com/national-security/how-chinese-companies-linked-to-hunter-biden-could-bail-out-putin/
China Lures the Saudis Into Its Orbit
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is considering a major defection from its long-standing economic alliance with the United States. The likely winner would be China.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/china-lures-the-saudis-into-its-orbit_4347865.html
CCP Locks Down China’s “Steel City” As Frustrated Citizens Lash Out In Shanghai
Just as economists were breathing a sigh of relief as the policymakers in Beijing ordered Shenzhen to swiftly reopen following a punishing omicron-inspired lockdown, the CCP on Tuesday announced plans to temporarily lock down in Tangshan, in China’s northeastern Hebei Province. The city of roughly 7.7 million is known as China’s “steel city” and is responsible for roughly 10% of the country’s steel production.
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/ccp-locks-down-chinas-steel-city-frustrated-citizens-lash-out-shanghai
Chinese Foreign Minister meets SCO Secretary-General, urges more active role of SCO in maintaining security and stability
Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with the Secretary-General of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Zhang Ming in Beijing on Thursday. This was the first meeting between the two since Zhang Ming – a Chinese career diplomat, took up his new post on 1st January this year. The meeting assumes importance as it comes in the backdrop of the Ukraine crisis which has entered the fourth week. According to a press release issued by the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Wang Yi said, as the international organization covering the vastest territory and the largest population, the SCO, facing various impacts brought by the Ukraine crisis, should play a more active role in maintaining security and stability in the region and beyond.
https://newsonair.com/2022/03/20/chinese-foreign-minister-meets-sco-secretary-general-urges-more-active-role-of-sco-in-maintaining-security-and-stability/
The End of Globalization?
The democratic world’s response to Moscow’s aggression and war crimes is right, both ethically and on national security grounds. This is more important than economic efficiency. But these actions do have negative economic consequences that will go far beyond Russia’s financial collapse, that will persist, and that are not pretty. Over the last 20 years, two trends have already been corroding globalization in the face of its supposedly relentless onward march. First, populists and nationalists have erected barriers to free trade, investment, immigration, and the spread of ideas—especially in the United States. Second, Beijing’s challenge to the rules-based international economic system and to longstanding security arrangements in Asia has encouraged the West to erect barriers to Chinese economic integration. The Russian invasion and resulting sanctions will now make this corrosion even worse.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2022-03-17/end-globalization
Coming Food Shortages
The world is facing a potential food crisis because of the Russo-Ukraine conflict. As I discussed before, the impact of this conflict is global and long-term. A few of us geopolitical commentators have examined the potentially lasting effects on global commodities. Africa will especially feel the impact of this war, where food imports are critical. French President Emmanuel Macron gave a timeline earlier mid, last week that he expects Africa to face a “deep food crisis in 12-18 months.” I don’t know where the timeframe comes from, but the crisis may occur sooner, judging from US production and Chinese food purchases in the first half of 2022. The population of Africa continues to explode. The world is also facing a rapidly approaching fertilizer shortage because of the war in Ukraine. These knock-on effects cause a perfect storm of a rapid decline in available food and the ability to produce more food.
https://muzzlevelocity.substack.com/p/coming-food-shortages
The End of Russian Oil
The Western supermajors have left. All of them. Just as the Ukraine War began, Exxon and BP and Shell have walked away from projects they’ve sunk tens of billions of dollars into, knowing full well they won’t get a cent of compensation. Halliburton and Schlumberger’s operations today are a shadow of what they were before Russia’s previous invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Between future sanctions or the inability of the Russians to pay them with hard currency, those operations now risk winding down to zero. The result is as inevitable as it is damning: at least a 50% reduction in the ability of Russia to produce crude. (No. Chinese oilmen cannot hope to keep things flowing. The Chinese are worse in this space than the Russians.) The outstanding question is how soon? Sooner than you think. It’s an issue of infrastructure and climate.
https://us11.campaign-archive.com/?u=de2bc41f8324e6955ef65e0c9&id=f2872d6332
US Expands Travel Bans on Chinese Officials for Persecution
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement that the sanctions are being applied to Chinese officials who “are believed to be responsible for, or complicit in, policies or actions aimed at repressing religious and spiritual practitioners, members of ethnic minority groups, dissidents, human rights defenders, journalists, labor organizers, civil society organizers, and peaceful protestors in China and beyond.”
https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2022-03-21/us-expands-travel-bans-on-chinese-officials-for-persecution
Xi Jinping’s Faltering Foreign Policy
Regardless of whether Beijing had advance warning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s decision to issue a statement last month outlining a “no limits” partnership with Moscow was arguably the single biggest foreign policy blunder of his nearly ten years in power. Russian President Vladimir Putin will receive the overwhelming share of the blowback for his unprovoked assault on Ukraine, but Xi’s public declaration, coupled with Beijing’s continued diplomatic support for Moscow, has undermined China’s reputation and provoked renewed concerns over its global ambitions. Indeed, the intensifying war in Ukraine has already prompted calls for Taiwan to improve its defense capabilities and has given security partnerships such as NATO, the Quad, and AUKUS a renewed sense of purpose.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2022-03-16/xi-jinpings-faltering-foreign-policy
China Announces 1 Million Internships to Tackle Unemployment
China is likely to see a record number of about 11 million students graduate by June, a year-on-year increase of 1.67 million. However, the country’s job market has been affected by the pandemic, with the “zero COVID” strategy leading to frequent lockdowns and travel restrictions. The number of job openings dropped 4.5% year-over-year immediately after the Lunar New Year holidays — a prime time for university seniors to apply for jobs — with each job post receiving about twice as many résumés as last year, according to a report by recruitment platform Zhaopin. Massive layoffs at several companies last year and reports of possible dismissals at several top tech firms have shaken the employment sector.
https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1009939/ChinaAnnounces1MillionInternshipstoTackleUnemployment