Interview with Prof. Warwick Powell: The Rise of China: Economic & Industrial Development, West Asia Geopolitics, BRICS Blockchain Launch 2024
I had a wonderful conversation with Prof. Warwick Powell. This was a truly insightful interview about the shifting power dynamic in Asia and, undeniably, worldwide.
Among other things, Prof. Powell and I discussed:
- China's economic rise
- the changing geopolitical landscape in West Asia
- the outcomes of China/ Arab States Cooperation Forum took place in Beijing
- US-China trade wars and the gradual decline of the US as a hegemon on the global arena
- mBridge
- BRICS blockchain payment system launch and expectations
Watch the interview on YouTube or Rumble:
China is the Laboratory for Globalism:
From: James Corbett
The rise of China to its position of economic, geopolitical and military prominence did not happen overnight and it did not happen as the result of a handful of bought-and-paid for politicians. Rather, China has been carefully and intentionally built up as a major player in the emerging multipolar New World Order by the same gaggle of globalists who have overseen the global financial and geopolitical for the past 50 years.
But why?
To get a handle on this question, it's fruitful to take a look at what it is that the globalists see in China. We can gain insight into the answer by looking at a curious, recurring theme in the controlled establishment media propaganda about China. I call it: "China Is Horrible! . . . But Wouldn't It Be Nice?"
This theme can be seen in just about every piece in the controlled corporate media about the evils of the Chinese government and its treatment of its citizens. In a nutshell, they expose the unbelievably Orwellian control that the ChiComs assert over every aspect of citizens' lives, decry it as tyrannical . . . and then point out how effective this autocratic system is in managing the Chinese economy and building Chinese military might and geopolitical clout. The effect of such propaganda is always to remind the reader that China is The Enemy and deserves our Two Minutes Hate—but that it would be nice if our loving, Western, "democratic" governments assumed some of those powers, too.
Trudeau's now infamous expression of "admiration" for the Chinese dictatorship is one example of this theme, but the propagandists over at The New York Times provided perhaps the quintessential expression of this idea in a recent article, "Living by the Code: In China, Covid-Era Controls May Outlast the Virus."
The piece opens by noting the plight of Xie Yang, a human rights lawyer who decided to travel to Shanghai to visit the mother of a dissident even after local authorities warned him against taking the trip. On his way to the airport, officials changed Xie's health status on his government-mandated health code app from "green," meaning that he was free to travel, to "red," prompting airport security to attempt to put him in quarantine.
The rest of the article walks a delicate line: it accurately documents the egregious abuses of human rights enabled by the biosecurity surveillance grid erected by the Chinese government, but it is peppered with constant reminders about how effective this grid is at "containing" the scamdemic. The Chinese government, it tells us, has become "emboldened by their successes in stamping out Covid." And, we are told, the government-mandated health code app is "key to China’s goal of stamping out the virus entirely within its borders." These controls "have really produced great results, because they can monitor down to every individual," the article quotes a Chinese dental worker as saying. The Times even asserts that the government's "success in limiting infections" has led to "widespread support" for the measures.
In other words: China's tyranny is horrible! . . . But wouldn't it be nice?
Once you notice this particular propaganda ploy, you will see it everywhere in mainstream discussions about the Chinese "menace" that is supposedly the greatest "threat" to the free world. And once you do notice this trick, you will begin to understand the real reason that the globalists have worked so closely with China for decades: not because they are adherents of communism, but because they see China as an experimental laboratory in which to perfect a new form of governance for the planet.
This is precisely what David Rockefeller meant when he wrote his infamous ode to Chairman Mao in an August 1973 New York Times op-ed, "From a China Traveler":
The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao's leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history.
It is not that Rockefeller was a secret (or not-so-secret) communist. In fact, it turns out that the Chinese system of governance isn't really communism at all.
So if China isn't communist, what is it?
The answer is simple: China is a technocracy.
Technocracy is not the benevolent rule of an enlightened scientific class, but the use of that class by the ruling oligarchy to more effectively manage the human population.
The technocratic mindset is everywhere apparent in the Chinese system, where the citizenry is treated as unruly variables in an otherwise harmonious equation, variables that can only be tamed by rigorous logic and ruthless algorithmic strictures. Hence the laundry list of heartless, inhuman, but doubtless "efficient" techniques for managing the population. The techniques, spearheaded by the Chinese, range from the world's most pervasive facial recognition network to the vast social credit system, which regulates citizens' behaviour by barring them from public transit or by blocking their access to higher education or well-paying jobs if they do not comply with government dictates.
Is it any wonder, then, that China was the first country to roll out the QR code-driven, smartphone-hosted "health pass" that enables the government, if it chooses, to prevent any individual from passing any government checkpoint at any time? Or that the Western media—let alone (mis)leaders like Trudeau—would so openly lust after those powers?
https://www.corbettreport.com/its-confirmed-tyrants-love-china-but-why/?fbclid=IwAR2DZyFBjV3i73xKPvTHnyzVebMZIF5R2dLjojj_3KNd88aga18CDha6eRA_aem_AaTl6PWKH_fG7kdb-wEn77etNiq_OtSkJBLlkG6Zu19kjJT3Grn-aBy52vhCmXK6XtM&mibextid=Zxz2cZ
In a day or two, I shall be posting (on Substack) a multi-part 10,000 word article on BRICS, in general, but specifically a historical and current financial analysis on international trade, currency, and related thereto States (and governments).
There are several reasons for the work. Among which (a) to make up for what BRICS has been unwillingly to do, namely the absence of any official attempt to detail explanations of its agenda or provide clear directions. The primary cause for that is the Chinese cultural reticent to lay out rules and guides because by their very existence they would invariably draw boundaries on which to act. And, (b) as a response to this episode program, to you and to Warwick Powell, especially at time-marker 48:00 onwards when your conversation with him veered to trade accounting.
The coming essay is not a substitute for an official layout of BRICS purpose and intent, though it reflects a Chinese view of the same, written in the English.
Below is a general introduction into the coming essay, now completed but awaiting re-reading and revision where necessary. Once the essay is up, you are welcome to reproduce it as you see fit.
INTRODUCTION
An international political economy under construction at BRICS is, the Chinese hope, will be a future system of relationships. Hope because relationships aren't, by their nature and as is self-evident, a one way street, one side dictating the direction and scope. Future because relationships aren't in themselves a new phenomenon in whatever form they now take, whether these forms are transactional or familial or at inter-state levels.
Relationships define and determine the course of different civilizations as these emerge across time and space. In their turn, these civilizations vary the quality of relationships such as between the individual and family, between citizenry and State, society and government, and among persons and among States. Nobody has the last word on an ideal set of relationships, which the western White bundle as “values”. If indeed that ideal exist then the Rest of the World is witnessing what those decrepit western values are made of and what they truly look like in actual and tangible ways in Palestine.
The term “system” suggests deliberate, conscious efforts to put in place, that is, to construct a raised platform for inter-state conduct. Platform because this holds up the State as an exemplar and as representative of national conduct. It very naturally, if a person is not to fall off a platform, sets the boundaries or limits of State or human conduct without bearing any set of rules other that the platform itself which can be expanded or shrunk as necessity requires. The platform that is BRICS eschew “rules” which presume a higher authority, divinity and a higher human specie over the Rest. It is this rules-based (western, biblical) system that needs to be torn up and replaced, a system imposed on the world for centuries and its barbarity demonstrated most lately in Gaza. In BRICS, there are no Chosen Ones.
The economic component, specifically money and trade, is a natural starting point in the BRICS system. Natural because the first contact between two societies or two nations, as represented in two persons, is an exchange. That initial exchange may be oral, greetings exchanged, involving no intermediation or money but with gifts of goods. Regardless, it's the start of a relationship journey. An exchange of the sort conducted in a market, for example, feels transactional, producing hence the Chinese idiom yulai youqu 有来有去 (literal transaction: has/come/has/go), that is, an intentional, deliberate, two way flow of things that carry in their flow a human sentiment.
Social exchanges between persons are like that. It requires cultivation. It begins, invariably, with a transaction, such as over a bar counter, a vendor's vegetable cart, a butcher's stand, or a bank window. That is, human relationships typically thrives at the marketplace where goods or merchandise once transacted creates a two-way relationship in an instant. Thus, the well-spring of any relationship is, on the one part, the act of a human exchange (denoted by) 化 which, long ago, had used as currency cowry shells 贝. The two script combined produces huo 货, which translates as goods or merchandise, whereas huobi 货币 means currency, the second character bi 币 standing for a bale of silk that, in the old days, was the medium of exchange. An item of goods is, therefore, the basis for, as well as the fruit of, an exchange relationship.
It is to economics, trade and money in particular, that the BRICS system launches this essay.