Saturday, February 26, 2011

Cai Xia

22-3-28 China's Economic Rise—End of the Road - cfr > .
22-2-14 Arrogant Bullying Punishment of China's Enemies - VP > . skip ad > .
21-12-17 How the World Stopped Fearing Xina - laowhy86 > .
Belt & Raid [sic] - Present Tense >> .
China's Secretive Economy - enDürer >> .
Taiwan - Between a ROC and a PRC place - Present Tense >> .


Strengthening food and energy reserves, accelerating the nuclear arms race, decreeing "non-war military operations", even the "zero covid" policy... a series of the CCP’s activities in the past short time, making observers around the world can not help but wonder about the real purpose behind it. And a scenario that many experts have been thinking about: Most likely, China is preparing for WAR.

"[T]he engagement policy that had been so painstakingly maintained for a long time was just wishful thinking of the two political parties and the government of the United States. The CCP has merely been using the engagement policy for its own needs. The CCP just used and took advantage of the goodwill and benign intentions of the Americans. The reason why the engagement policy ended sadly is due to the fundamental misjudgment by the United States about the nature of the Chinese Communist Party and regime, which in turn has made the US a victim of its own policy. The consequences of misjudging the nature of the CCP regime can be described in a Chinese idiom: “leaving a carbuncle unchecked will lead to endless troubles.” [养痈贻患] —Cai Xia, 2021

Cai Xia (born October 1952) is a Chinese dissident and scholar of political theory. She has taught high-ranking members and officials of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), including leading provincial and municipal administrators and cabinet-level ministers, and is a retired professor of the CCP Central Party School. She is an advocate for political liberalisation in China and has been critical of CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping. She was expelled from the CCP in August 2020 for criticising the CCP under Xi's rule. Since 2019 she has resided in the United States in exile.

Cai Xia was born in October 1952 in Changzhou, Jiangsu province and was raised in a family with close ties to the military, in which she served from 1969 to 1978 before joining the CCP in 1982. In 1980, Cai Xia became vice president of the factory's labor union and director of the family planning office. In 1984 she participated in a two-year program in Marxist theory and CCP history at the Suzhou Municipal Party School. Eventually she turned to work in academia, earning a doctorate in law at the Central Party School in 1998. Specializing in the fields of party ideology and party building of the party state (with "party" referring to the CCP), she published over 60 scholarly papers between 1989 and 2020. As of 2012, she was a professor at the Party-building Center of the Central Party School, retiring the same year after 15 years of service.

According to an August 2020 article in The Guardian, Cai began doubting the party orthodoxy in the early 2000s, when she assisted then-CCP general secretary Jiang Zemin with the drafting of his Three Represents theory. By that time she was frequently present in Chinese news media, advocating for liberal views including the opening of the CCP to more businesspeople and professionals. Her faith in the Communist Party was shaken considerably after a trip to Spain where she studied the Spanish transition to democracy and comparing it to China, noting that Mao and Franco had died at similar times yet Franco's successors had quickly and successfully transitioned to a stable democracy while Mao's successors had created a muddled hybrid economy and completely ignored political reform.

For some years she continued to believe in the ability of the CCP to solve its problems through reform, but her hopes gradually evaporated after Xi Jinping came to power in 2012 and implemented measures that Cai saw as going in the wrong direction. In 2013, she wrote an essay defending Charles Xue (Xue Manzi) after Xue was arrested on charges of soliciting a prostitute and forced to make televised confessions. In the piece, which widely circulated on the microblogging site Weibo, Cai opined that the offence was a private matter of no consequence to the public, and called for a discussion of the protection of individual rights. In 2016, she wrote an article in defence of Ren Zhiqiang, who was put on probation after the latter's heavy criticism of the statements by CCP leader Xi Jinping about the role of Chinese media. These and other essays were later removed by internet censors. In an August 2020 interview, after her move to the United States, Cai said that the incident that had erased all her remaining faith in the party was the Chinese authorities' handling of the death of environmentalist Lei Yang in police custody. In an essay dated 25 July 2020, published by Radio Free Asia, she denounced the treatment of Xu Zhangrun, who had been detained earlier that month, as "openly intimidating all in the Chinese scholarly community".

On 17 August 2020, Cai's membership in the CCP was rescinded and her retirement benefits were stripped. This was presumed to be in relation to a deliberately leaked audio recording in which she denounced CCP general secretary Xi Jinping as a "mafia boss" who ought to be replaced slamming the CCP as a "political zombie". Cai, who was residing in the United States at the time of the expulsion, told The New York Times that she had contemplated resigning from the CCP since much earlier, and welcomed no longer being a party member, saying that it had allowed her to regain freedom.

On 23 August 2020, in an interview with CNN, Cai Xia expressed support for the U.S. government's ban on Huawei and proposed that the U.S. government impose sanctions on CCP officials, while asking the international community to prevent the CCP from infiltrating international organizations.

Cai Xia has urged the U.S. to abandon "naive" hopes to engage with Beijing, while warning that China's leadership is more fragile than what appears. In June 2021, Cai published a long paper about Sino-US relationship at the Hoover Institution, arguing that "Wishful thinking about 'engagement' must be replaced by hardheaded defensive measures to protect the United States from the CCP's aggression—while bringing offensive pressures to bear on it, as the Chinese Communist Party is much more fragile than Americans assume."

Hoover senior fellow Larry Diamond commented that Cai's paper is "of great historical and policy significance", adding, "For the first time, we have an important figure from within the Chinese Communist Party system courageously confirming what many US scholars of China have recently been arguing: CCP leaders have never viewed cooperative engagement with the US as anything more than a temporary tactic to enable them to accumulate the strength to pursue regional and global dominance."

Censored Dear Emperor

22-8-1 Mocking Dangerous Deified Dictator - cfc > .
23-12-16 Censoring negative (accurate) remarks on Xinese economy - Update > .
23-9-29 Decoding P00ti-PooXi blueprint for NoXious World Order | DW > .
23-9-25 Xi's Transforming Xina [for the worse] - Xina's Changing Trajectory - Dig > .
23-1-23 Xina’s Two-Year Tech Crackdown Winds Up | WSJ > .
23-1-20 Xi's Biggest Errors - Kevin Rudd | Update > .
22-12-7 Stories of Chinese leader Jiang Zemin - known not discussed - Lei > .
22-11-29 Censorship in Xina Has Reached New Levels of Ridiculousness! - cfc > .
22-11-19 Splinternet - Xina 1st of 35+ Countries Leaving Global Internet - Tech > .
21-10-14 China exporting Censorship to rest of World? - VisualPol > .


Central Control or Collapse

22-4-21 Fake data re Chinese economy: GDP, import-export, unemployment - Lei > .
22-4-6 How the world would change if Xina attacked Taiwan - Binkov > .
22-3-31 Breaking - Mass Uprisings Erupt in China - laowhy86 > .
22-3-28 China's Economic Rise—End of the Road - cfr > .
22-1-23 China’s Domestic Drivers | Kevin Rudd - geopop > .
21-12-17 How the World Stopped Fearing Xina - laowhy86 > .
2021 Russia China Alliance | Professor Paul Dibb - geopop > .Russian Federal Subjects Explained - Mad Mac > .

Kotkin > .
10:09 Historical landscape of post-communism > . = xenophobic, ultra-nationalist, authoritarian, wrong-wing regime (Putin's Russia, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, Southeastern Europe)




Chekism

22-8-21 Special services dragged Russia into a suicidal war (English subtitles) - MK > .
24-5-14 Calder Walton's "Spies": Century-long East-West Espionage War - SiCu > .
24-1-25 NKVD: Worst of the Worst - Hx Sadistic State Security Body - Front > .
23-1-4 Myths about Russia and Russians | We have a chance (subs) - Katz > .
22-10-31 The KGB is not dead, it simply has a new name...(FSB) - Enforcer Matt > .

Autocratic lies, cultural myths, endemic corruption

Chekism ..

Chekism (Чекизм; from Cheka, a colloquial name of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission the first Soviet secret police organization) is a term to describe the situation in the Soviet Union where the secret police strongly controlled all spheres of society. It is also used by critics of the current Kremlin authorities to describe the power enjoyed by law-enforcement agencies in contemporary Russia.

According to former Russian Duma member Konstantin Borovoi, "Putin's appointment is the culmination of the KGB's crusade for power. This is its finale. Now the KGB runs the country." Olga Kryshtanovskaya, director of the Moscow-based Center for the Study of Elites, has found that up to 78% of 1,016 leading political figures in Russia have served previously in organizations affiliated with the KGB or FSB. She said: "If in the Soviet period and the first post-Soviet period, the KGB and FSB people were mainly involved in security issues, now half are still involved in security but the other half are involved in business, political parties, NGOs, regional governments, even culture... They started to use all political institutions."

The KGB or FSB members usually remain in the "acting reserve" even if they formally leave the organization ("acting reserve" members receive a second FSB salary, follow FSB instructions, and remain "above the law" being protected by the organization, according to Kryshtanovskaya). As Vladimir Putin said, "There is no such thing as a former KGB man". Soon after becoming prime minister of Russia, Putin also perhaps somewhat jokingly claimed that "A group of FSB colleagues dispatched to work undercover in the government has successfully completed its first mission." Moreover, the FSB has formal membership, military discipline, and an extensive network of civilian informants, hardcore ideology, and support of population (60% of Russians trust FSB), which according to Yevgenia Albats and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick makes it a perfect totalitarian political party.

Some observers note that the current Russian state security organization FSB is even more powerful than KGB was, because it does not operate under the control of the Communist Party as the KGB in the past. Moreover, the FSB leadership and their partners own the most important economic assets in the country and control the Russian government and the State Duma. According to Ion Mihai Pacepa,
"In the Soviet Union, the KGB was a state within a state. Now former KGB officers are running the state. They have custody of the country’s 6,000 nuclear weapons, entrusted to the KGB in the 1950s, and they now also manage the strategic oil industry renationalized by Putin. The KGB successor, rechristened FSB, still has the right to electronically monitor the population, control political groups, search homes and businesses, infiltrate the federal government, create its own front enterprises, investigate cases, and run its own prison system. The Soviet Union had one KGB officer for every 428 citizens. Putin’s Russia has one FSB-ist for every 297 citizens."
However, the number of FSB staff is a state secret in Russia, and the staff of Russian Strategic Rocket Forces is not officially subordinate to the FSB, although FSB might be interested in monitoring these structures, as they inherently involve state secrets and various degrees of access to them.[20] The Law on the Federal Security Service[21] which defines the FSB's functions and establishes its structure does not specify such tasks as managing strategic branches of national industry, controlling political groups, or infiltrating the federal government.

A political scientist, Stanislav Belkovsky also defines Chekism to be an "imperial ideology" that includes aggressive anti-Americanism.

Andrei Illarionov, a former advisor of Vladimir Putin, describes contemporary Chekism as a new corporatism system, "distinct from any seen in our country before". In this model, members of the Corporation of Intelligence Service Collaborators [Russian abbreviation KSSS] took over the entire body of state power, follow an omerta-like behavior code, and "are given instruments conferring power over others – membership “perks”, such as the right to carry and use weapons". According to Illarionov, this "Corporation has seized key government agencies – the Tax Service, Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Parliament, and the government-controlled mass media – which are now used to advance the interests of KSSS members. Through these agencies, every significant resource of the country – security/intelligence, political, economic, informational and financial – is being monopolized in the hands of Corporation members." The ideology of "Chekists" is "Nashism (“ours-ism”), the selective application of rights", he said.

Chekists perceive themselves as a ruling class, with political powers transferred from one generation to another. A source cited that chekism created "mafiocracy" in Russia since it is part of corruption and criminality from the outset. Criminals were able to use the Chekist machinery to expand its power. According to a former FSB general, "A Chekist is a breed. ... A good KGB heritage—a father or grandfather, say, who worked for the service—is highly valued by today's siloviki. Marriages between siloviki clans are also encouraged".

The head of the Russian Drug Enforcement Administration Viktor Cherkesov said that all Russian siloviks must act as a united front: "We [Chekists] must stay together. We did not rush to power, we did not wish to appropriate the role of the ruling class. But the history commanded so that the weight of sustaining the Russian statehood fell to the large extent on our shoulders... There were no alternatives". Cherkesov also emphasized the importance of Chekism as a "hook" that keeps the entire country from falling apart: "Falling into the abyss the post-Soviet society caught the Chekist hook. And hanged on it.”

Political scientist Yevgenia Albats found such attitudes deplorable: "Throughout the country, without investigation or trial, the Chekists [of an earlier generation] raged. They tortured old men and raped schoolgirls and killed parents before the eyes of their children. They impaled people, beat them with an iron glove, put wet leather 'crowns' on their heads, buried them alive, locked them in cells where the floor was covered with corpses. Amazing, isn't it that today's agents do not blanch to call themselves Chekists, and proudly claim Dzerzhinsky's legacy?"


Combatting Authoritarian Regimes

> PLA > 
Xina

0:00 Policy analysis 
2:08 Definition
Policy dimensions:
3:40 1. Coercive mechanisms 
4:40 2. Revenue streams (cash flow), where natural resources are optimal
6:52 3. Control over citizens' opportunities ("life chances")
8:50 4. National myths & narratives (humanistic "stories" past glory, traditional enemies) 
10:43 5. International environment (conducive +/- corrosive); anti-Western ideology as convenient scapegoat targeting
13:01 Interplay of policy dimensions
15:27 Role of technology transfer & export controls
17:40 Authoritarian diffusion, indoctrination 
18:39 Xina story
19:29 Successful East Asian economies 
22:27 Mainland Xina 
25:19 Communist ideological trap

sī vīs pācem, parā bellum

igitur quī dēsīderat pācem praeparet bellum    therefore, he who desires peace, let him prepare for war sī vīs pācem, parā bellum if you wan...