“But this is even more ridiculous than the traditional Chinese war of “killing a thousand enemies and injuring oneself”, because it has become a self-inflicted wound of “killing 800 enemies and injuring oneself”, which brings more serious damage to China.
Recently, Beijing is practicing the folk saying “you can’t surrender a child to a wolf” and is “surrendering a child”, which is the normal life of the Chinese people. Now, many provinces and regions to the existence of crack gaps in electricity as a reason, one after another to pull the switch to limit power shutdown and production, the State Grid Hunan Electricity to enter a full “war time state”, from the early morning of the 21st, the power limit plate extended to Guangdong Province, even Shanghai Minhang also began to limit electricity. Many parts of the country are closed to dark markets at night, and even high-speed trains have been pulled to restrict electricity, and more than 20 trips on the Hohang high-speed railway have been suspended.
The “wolf” that Beijing wants to trap is the hope that through economic sanctions such as the coal embargo, Australia will unconditionally submit and acquiesce to the Communist Party’s establishment of a military base in its “backyard” (Vanuatu).
There is a time window for the CCP’s calculation
Australia is the world’s largest coal exporter and China is Australia’s second largest coal market (Japan tops the list). But what makes Beijing make a decision to shut down its own factories, partially shut down its high-speed rail and disappear the normal life of its people, a one-way costing of economic sanctions that only calculates the damage to other countries is hardly a decision that a normal country can make?
Or is it related to the US election.
In the CCP’s Asia-Pacific strategy, Australia has been seen as a thorn in the side of the CCP because of its measured resistance to CCP infiltration in recent years; at the same time, Australia is also seen by the CCP as a weaker link among Western countries, and the CCP has been trying to take advantage of the change in the US White House to put pressure on Australia. But now that the U.S. election has turned into a pot of “raw rice,” Beijing wants to seize the window of opportunity before Jan. 20 to make Australia bow down and acquiesce to the establishment of a Chinese military base in Vanuatu. If you understand this, you will understand why the Chinese government is in such a hurry.
Why does a “Biden administration” in the White House mean that the CCP no longer needs to worry about pressure from the United States? Just look at the members of Biden’s cabinet.
The team currently waiting to join the cabinet and lead the Biden administration’s foreign policy is WestExec Advisors, a strategic advisory firm founded by Blinken in 2017. Biden’s nominee for Secretary of State Blinken and White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, along with national security advisers and the top defense secretary pick, all came from this firm. The background of the four founders of this company: former Deputy Secretary of State, former Deputy Secretary of Defense, former Chief of Staff of the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, former Director of the White House National Security Council, former Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense and former Director of the White House National Security Council, key members of the former Director of the CIA, former Director of the Counterterrorism Center, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, etc., are all former government officials. They have gone through this “revolving door” in 2017 after Hillary’s defeat was determined, from public to private, waiting for a comeback.
The firm is not shy about its political intentions, and the West Executive Consulting website features a map of West Executive Avenue, the secure road between the West Wing of the White House and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, showing what the firm can do for clients who are ready to walk from there to the White House.
One of the strengths that Blinken’s firm has demonstrated to its clients is helping them “break into the Chinese market. In the “Market Entry and Expansion Support” section of the WestExec website, the pharmaceutical company case illustrates that they can “develop strategies to expand market access in China while preventing trade tensions between the U.S. and China,” and WestExec developed a strategy that identified Chinese and US stakeholders for engagement” and “With respect to market entry in Asia, WestExec designed an engagement plan that facilitated contact with key senior local stakeholders.
Apparently, the Chinese Communist Party only counted on Australia’s economy being severely damaged by this sanction, and the damage to itself was counted as such: the people will put up with it for a while and survive through January 20.
The real question is whether the Chinese Communist Party can achieve its goal with this stupid sanction.
Can China stop importing from Australia?
The world is now advocating the gradual replacement of fossil fuels by green energy, and the radical wing of the US Democratic Party has even launched a “green plan”, but with the plight of Germany, a pioneer of green energy, ahead (and the state of California, which has in fact been in trouble several times with such green energy plans), this energy replacement plan is destined to be a very slow and The issue is a very slow and challenging one. According to the BP (Britain Petroleum) 2019 Energy Report, China is not a major source of raw coal, with much lower recoverable reserves than the United States and Russia, but it is a major producer of coal-fired electricity, with 10,100.5 TWh of global coal-fired electricity generated in 2018, led by China at 4,732.4 TWh, accounting for 46.8% of the global total. The second largest coal-fired countries were the United States at 1245.8 TWh, Germany at 229.0 TWh, South Africa at 225.0 TWh, Russia at 177.5 TWh, Poland at 134.7 TWh, and South Korea at 133.5 TWh.
Coal-fired generation dominates the global share of electricity generation with an average of 38.0%. Countries above the average are South Africa 87.9%, Poland 79.2%, India 75.4%, China 66.5%, Kazakhstan 65.5%, Australia 59.9%, and Indonesia 58.4%. Asia Pacific is the region with the highest share of coal-fired generation, which accounts for 59.4% of the region’s electricity generation.
With such a global energy mix, meaning that a significant reduction in demand is unlikely in the near term, the CCP’s Development and Reform Commission’s recent embargo on Australian coal was justified on the grounds of stabilizing domestic coal prices, which would strategically reduce purchases of high-priced coal to less than $97.80 per ton, with Australian coal prices above $100-plus. -This policy means that domestic power plants will no longer import overpriced Australian coal and will prefer to import from Mongolia, Indonesia and Russia, disguising sanctions against Australian coal. The New York Times recently argued that the Chinese Communist Party’s refusal to buy Australian coal means the world’s energy sources will say goodbye to petrochemicals, a fallacy that is far from the truth.
China is an important market for Australian coal, importing A$14 billion (about $10 billion) worth of coal in 2019, making it Australia’s second-largest coal customer after Japan. The Chinese Communist Party’s ban on Australian coal imports will hit Australia very hard indeed in the short term. Australian coal, although slightly more expensive, has a higher calorific value and lower carbon emissions than other regional coal sources, meaning that the Chinese Communist Party will need to buy more coal from elsewhere and increase emissions if it wants to maintain the same level of energy production. Because of the environmental effects, demand for Australian coal has been growing in countries such as Japan, South Korea and India, and demand from Vietnam has grown strongly in recent years; meanwhile, the European Union has seen an increase in demand for power coal due to its troubled green energy policy. 2019 to 2020, Australian power and coking coal exports total A$54.6 billion, with China accounting for only A$10 billion. At least $2 billion or so of this could easily be obtained by expanding supplies from other countries.
Finally, a small summary of this Chinese Communist Party approach to Australian sanctions.
- The Chinese Communist Party’s economic sanctions against Australia are a political retaliation against Australia during the special turbulent period of the U.S. election, which is even more ridiculous than the traditional Chinese war of “killing a thousand enemies and injuring oneself” because it has become “killing 800 enemies and injuring oneself”. “The self-inflicted damage to China is more serious. As we enter the traditional Chinese Spring Festival, the above situation will continue and cause even more harm to China.
- The Chinese Communist Party has found in recent years that its own success in converting countries’ dependence on the Chinese market and Chinese demand into political obedience, playing this trick again and again, is actually related to the compromising attitude of countries. The development of Australia-China relations to the present state has something to do with the policies of successive Australian governments towards the Chinese Communist Party. But there is a first time for everything, and if Australia can grit its teeth and survive this period, it should find that it is entirely possible to get Australia-China relations back on a relatively normal track. This will of course come at a price, but in the long run it is a price that should be paid. Time will tell that the price Australia pays at this point is worth it.
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