Blinken cancels Beijing ChinaDiction #75
Blinken cancels Beijing ChinaDiction #75
US Department of State confirms Secretary of State Antony Blinken will not be visiting Beijing to meet CPC General Secretary Xi Jinping tomorrow amid furor over a Chinese surveillance balloon.
Balloon over Montana. Photo: TSchlitt-Photography.
China’s Foreign Ministry on Friday denied that a high-altitude balloon sighted hovering in the stratosphere over Montana was engaged in surveillance.
The ministry maintained it is a “civilian airship” carrying out “meteorological research,” according to numerous reports, such as this one from The Daily Beast.
The Pentagon is not buying it, and according to a Department of State readout of a phone call by Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Blinken confirmed he would not be traveling to the People’s Republic of China:
The Secretary noted the PRC’s statement of regret but conveyed that this is an irresponsible act and a clear violation of U.S. sovereignty and international law that undermined the purpose of the trip. The Secretary explained that in light of this ongoing issue, it would not be appropriate to visit Beijing at this time. He underscored that the United States is committed to diplomatic engagement and maintaining open lines of communication, and that he would be prepared to visit Beijing as soon as conditions allow.
Had the trip not been canceled at the last minute, Blinken would have been the first US secretary of state to sit down with Xi in nearly six years and the first of President Joe Biden’s cabinet secretaries to visit China.
The trip was initiated after President Joe Biden and Xi agreed in Bali in November that they should find ways to stabilize the turbulent US-China relationship.
If there are now many uncertainties – there are, at the time of writing, unverified reports of another balloon over Canada and yet another over Latin America – one thing that is certain is that the turbulence that Biden and Xi were seeking to recalibrate has been significantly – if not dangerously – ramped up.
Blinken’s trip to Beijing would have come as relations between the two powers are mired in their worst state since the US and China established diplomatic relations in 1979.
The New York Times (paywall) had earlier reported that, according to a senior defense official who was not authorized to speak publicly, President Biden chose not to shoot down the balloon “after a recommendation from Pentagon officials that doing so would risk debris hitting people on the ground.
The truth may be otherwise – as in it’s difficult to shoot down very high-altitude balloons – but we will have to make do with the official explanation for the moment, at least until the conspiracy cliques come up with something more exciting.
In the meantime, obviously, we all need to become balloon experts and so here’s Reuters on everything you need to know about high-altitude balloons.
But the link below, a Twitter thread (by William "Balloon Guy" Kim @TheKimulation) on how balloons are the weapons of the future – prophetically written before the Montana incident – has some “sexier” details, such as:
Unlike satellites or aircraft, balloons will just go where the wind takes them. Unless they're tethered but as we saw with JLENS the tether can break. Now modern ML algorithms allow balloons to control where they go using the wind.
In the stratosphere there's always a wind going in the direction you want it's just a matter of adjusting altitude. Sounds simple but it wasn't possible until recently. It's pretty amazing what these algorithms can do.
For readers who are now even more intrigued, the BBC has a report on “Google's now-defunct Project Loon venture,” in which AI-controlled balloons designed to bring internet access to remote parts of the world started to come up with their own navigational techniques …
‘We quickly realised we'd been outsmarted when the first balloon … set a flight time record from Puerto Rico to Peru,’ [wrote one of the Google project participants] in a blog post about the project.
Perhaps Beijing can blame the entire incident on “rogue AI,” but it’s very unlikely that the PRC would admit it’s playing with technology it can’t control, and in the meantime US-China relations have reached a new nadir that will be very difficult for the two parties to extricate themselves from.
China had appeared to be on a charm offensive, backing off from the “wolf-warrior” diplomacy that has somewhat rattled the non-Chinese world, but the conclusion under the current state of near media hysteria is, “Well, they may be talking nice, but nothing else has changed.”
How China out-networked the world with EV chargers
Photo: Evnerd; WikiCommons.
In 2022, despite the lockdowns and the moribund economy, nearly 4 million electric vehicles (EVs) – that’s fourfold the number sold in the US – were sold in China, and with them came the installation of some 37,000 new charging stations nationwide, reports The Grid.
As with airports, roads and high-speed rail lines, China has been able to build this new wave of infrastructure at lightning speed. The charging station boom has helped assuage drivers’ “range anxiety” — the concern about dying batteries ruining long trips.
‘Aside from the number of products and the competition in China, the fact that people don’t think about where they need to charge … that’s done so much,’ Tu Le, the managing director of Sino Auto Insights, told Grid. ‘The anxiety or the doubt is one of the big hurdles that the U.S. automakers need to help buyers overcome.’
China now reportedly (Chinese language) has a total of 1.8 million public chargers for EVs and 2.6 million private home chargers.
The Grid adds:
Within China’s public charging fleet, 40 percent are “fast chargers” — well above the share in other countries. The speed varies, but at the top end, these chargers allow you to be on your way again after just 20 minutes, as opposed to charging overnight on a slow charger.
Baidu and AI and self-driving cars
Photo: Xuejc1988; WikiCommons.
The highly recommended Pekingnology Substack has a guest post progress report on the Baidu (China’s Google) AI-meets-mobility quest.
Writes Pekingnology:
In August 2022, two big cities gave Baidu approval to operate ride-hailing services without a driver or a person overseeing safety in the vehicle. At the end of the year, Baid [sic] and Toyota Motor Corp-backed startup pony.ai were granted the first licenses to test fully autonomous vehicles without safety operators as a backup in the Chinese capital of Beijing.
Pekingnology also cites a Bloomberg (paywall) report that Baidu plans “to roll out an artificial intelligence chatbot service similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT …
… China’s largest search engine company plans to debut a ChatGPT-style application in March, initially embedding it into its main search services, said the person, asking to remain unidentified discussing private information. The tool, whose name hasn’t been decided, will allow users to get conversation-style search results much like OpenAI’s popular platform.
Hopefully, if AI is behind the current Balloon-gate crisis, the problem will not be duplicated in China’s self-driving car revolution.
Can China’s entrepreneurs make a comeback?
Tom Mitchell at the Financial Times is calling it “the Jack Ma test.”
When Liu He, China’s economy sage, told the World Economic Forum in Davos that China was back and eager to grow wealth because without it there could be no “common prosperity” the news was splashed on headlines world wide.
The problem, as the FT notes, was that it was Vice Premier Liu lighting up Western media with uplifting, good-for-business words and not General Secretary Xi Jinping.
Xi’s transformation of party politics has been such that policy pronouncements by anyone other than the president do not carry as much weight as they once did.
And even then, what Xi says matters less than what Xi does. In November of 2018, at a hastily assembled meeting with Chinese entrepreneurs, Xi said that “all private companies and private entrepreneurs should feel totally reassured and devote themselves to seeking development — private enterprises and private entrepreneurs belong to our own family”.
Within two years China’s best known entrepreneur, Jack Ma, the Alibaba founder who was once a ubiquitous presence on the international conference circuit, had all but disappeared from public view. Xi’s crackdown on the tech sector damaged one of the country’s most important economic motors.
So, where is Ma, asks Mitchell in his op-ed? Well, he certainly was not at Davos with the rest of the global business elites and he’s not back in business in China.
Pandemic front-line ‘Big Whites’ abandoned
Photo: Shengpengpeng Cai; Unsplash.
The Financial Times (paywall) reports that China’s pandemic frontline workers, the so-called “Big Whites” – most of them migrant workers – who oversaw the biggest lockdown in human history are now suddenly down on their luck and looking for new jobs.
Once praised by President Xi Jinping for having ‘braved hardships and courageously persevered’ in the face of the pandemic, workers … [have been] left jobless, disillusioned and angry by the abrupt end of China’s zero-Covid policy last month.
Many of the workers – millions in number – claim they discovered they were out of work from media reports.
‘The government sees migrant workers as easily jettisoned, they have so few rights,’ said Mary Gallagher, an expert in Chinese law and labour politics at the University of Michigan. ‘It’s hard for these types of workers to coalesce into a labour movement.’
Replace the word “hard” with “impossible” for a more realistic evaluation of the situation for millions employed to do a rotten job that next to nobody wanted them doing.
The Greater Sinosphere
Philippines
US expands military presence
US military and Philippine Military Police carry out joint training. Photo: Tech. Sgt. Michael Holzworth; WikiCommons.
On Thursday, the US military announced it was expanding its presence in the Philippines in a strategic move that few doubt is aimed at enhancing its ability to defend Taiwan reports the New York Times.
The announcement, made in Manila by Lloyd J. Austin III, the U.S. defense secretary, was only the latest in a series of moves by the Biden administration to strengthen military alliances and partnerships across the Asia-Pacific region.
A congressional mandate requires every presidential administration to give weapons of a defensive nature to Taiwan, and Mr. Biden’s team is intent on accelerating that and shaping the sales packages so that Taiwan becomes a “porcupine” that China would fear attacking.
A greater U.S. military presence in the Philippines would go beyond that — it would make rapid American troop movement to the Taiwan Strait much easier. The archipelago of the Philippines lies in an arc south of Taiwan, and the bases there would be critical launch and resupply points in a war with China. The Philippines’ northernmost island of Itbayat is less than 100 miles from Taiwan.
The United States is relying on Japan, which, like the Philippines, is a military treaty ally, to be the bulwark on the northern flank of Taiwan. Mr. Biden promised Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan last month that the Americans would help build up the Japanese military.
Singapore
Hell hath no fury
Photo: Pixabay.
A Singaporean man is suing a woman for more than S$3 million (US$227 million) for spurning his romantic advances and calling him “just a friend,” causing him “trauma” and damaging his “stellar reputation,” according to a Guardian report.
The lawsuit, to be heard next week, accuses the woman of “allegedly defamatory remarks and negligent conduct”, according to court papers.
A second case filed by Kawshigan at a magistrates court, which claimed the woman breached an agreement to improve their relationship, was recently dismissed as “manifestly groundless and without foundation” – a verdict that was welcomed by gender equality activists.
Taiwan
Local politics shine on gender equality
In contrast to our Singapore report above, Focus Taiwan reports that “female local government heads in Taiwan reached a historic high of 56.3 percent after the 2022 local elections, with the number of women with Cabinet positions also rising by almost 10 percent.
In particular, women now account for at least one-third of the seats on city and county councils nationwide, while the percentage of female judges and members of the Control Yuan, Taiwan's government watchdog, has passed 40 percent, the Cabinet said.
Referring to the 2023 Gender at a Glance report published on Tuesday, the Cabinet said the percentage of female lawmakers reached an all-time high of 42.5 percent in Jan. 2022 following a legislative by-election that month.
Coda
Jogger doctor mauled by pet macaw
‘You’ve been warned.’ Photo: Ilona Frey; Unsplash.
Focus Taiwan reports that a macaw pet-owner in Tainan, southern Taiwan, has been ordered to pay NT$3.04 million (US$91,350) in damages to a doctor for injuries caused by his pet in 2020.
The doctor suffered a hip joint dislocation and an acetabulum bone fracture on his right hip on the evening of July 13, 2020, when he was ‘attacked’ by the macaw while jogging on an access road in Gueiren District after Huang released the bird to soar into the sky without taking any precautions.
Although Huang immediately called an ambulance to take Lin to a hospital, Lin had to undergo one week of treatment there, and then had to rest at home for more than half a year and be looked after by a care provider.