China Takes the Gloves Off

After the US threatens sanctions, China publishes “US Hegemony and Its Perils” on its government website. [The Rude Awakening] February 24, 2023 [WEBSITE]( | [UNSUBSCRIBE]( China Takes the Gloves Off - The US has doubled down on its China position. - It’s now threatened sanctions if the Chinese help Russians with war materiel. - In turn, the Chinese government published a damning “pamphlet” on its website. [A $557 credit has been applied to your account.]( [Please click here to learn how to claim it.]( — Customer Service, Paradigm Press [Click Here To Learn More]( [Sean Ring] SEAN RING Happy Friday! We made it. Grab your cup of coffee and sit down for this one. I had thought of doing a light Rude as it’s a Friday. But China tossed me a grapefruit I had to swing at. It’s staggering from a diplomatic standpoint. Extra! Extra! The Chinese government isn’t taking America’s shit anymore. And China has made its displeasure known publicly and loudly, something they’re not known for. Oh, and they did it in English. That’s what blew me away. Before I continue, please understand I’m in no way a proponent of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Or any other damn commies, for that matter. Truth be told, a far more accurate way to describe China’s governmental system is totalitarian fascism. That is, the state and business work together and suffer no opposition. Whatever they call their system, the Chinese people aren’t free. To be fair, they don’t complain much about that, either. Let me tell you what happened. Byron King Writes Yesterday, I wrote about [how China and Russia went public](. In that piece, I wrote the following: There’s one playbook everyone needs to have read before dealing with the Chinese. It’s The Art of War. I’ll summarize it in one word: Lie. Here are a few more: Subterfuge. Deception. Misdirection. That’s how they do things. This straightforward stuff is a Western invention they want no part of. Because as a Western diplomat scolds a Chinese one, you can rest assured that the Chinese diplomat is working out how to screw his opposite number behind his smile. Now, I love nothing more than getting an email from my good friend and colleague Byron King. As a former US Naval aviator, geologist, and lawyer, Byron may be the best guy in the world to bounce ideas off of. Byron wrote me this: What were you saying about doing diplomacy w China??? Something about Sun Tzu and lying? About not placing them in a position to lose face? You mean like this? Threats of more sanctions??? And he sent me a link to this Epoch Times article: [SJN] Credit: [The Epoch Times]( I saw the headline and shook my head, once again. The usual bluster started off the piece. US State Department Spokesman Ned Price said: We have been clear with the PRC that consequences would befall them if they were to provide lethal assistance. We have been clear. We will not hesitate to target Chinese companies or individuals who violate sanctions. The usual blah blah. But then the spokesman unintentionally steered into comedy. [Breaking: Did Biden Really Blow Up Nord Stream?!]( [Click here to learn more]( New evidence has just been released the all but PROVES a shocking truth… President Biden gave the green light to blow up Russia’s Nord Stream Pipeline! According to [this shocking new expose]( Crippling fuel shortages… widespread “Biden blackouts”… and energy bills rocketing to $1000… Are about to hit American shores as a result. [Click here to learn the TRUTH about Nord Stream and how it will impact YOU](. [Click Here To Learn More]( Rules-Based International Order In its purest sense, the term “rules-based international order” refers to the post-WW2 world and is centered around the UN. Cynically speaking, you now hear the term all the time because the US and the EU are trying to maintain a facade that doesn’t exist. And every time the Chinese hear the term, they probably visualize something like this: [SJN] The reason is that the US bends, fractures, and outright breaks those rules whenever it damn well pleases. And the Chinese must have been shocked when Price said of them and the Russians: We are concerned because these two countries share a vision, they share an intent. It is not a vision of a rules-based order, of a liberal order of democracies living peacefully side by side. It is a vision that hearkens back to a previous era. An era in which big countries could bully small countries, borders could be redrawn by force. An era in which might could make right. Reports indicate Price said this with a straight face. Reports also noted Price failed to mention Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Yemen. That’s ok, because the CCP didn’t forget to mention them at all. The Chinese Response Again, please don’t mistake my giddiness for a love of the CCP. But this is the biggest guffaw-inducing bird-flipping in the history of diplomacy. [pub] Credit: [USAmbChina]( The Chinese had had enough of the US’s impoliteness a few days ago. So they published an online pamphlet titled “[US Hegemony and Its Perils]( Here is its table of contents: Introduction I. Political Hegemony—Throwing Its Weight Around II. Military Hegemony—Wanton Use of Force  III. Economic Hegemony—Looting and Exploitation IV. Technological Hegemony—Monopoly and Suppression V. Cultural Hegemony—Spreading False Narratives Conclusion And here’s the thing: it’s in English…. grammatically perfect English. That means they put a lot of effort into the document. It’s a clean, short, and easy read. Here’s the Introduction in full: Since becoming the world's most powerful country after the two world wars and the Cold War, the United States has acted more boldly to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, pursue, maintain, and abuse hegemony, advance subversion, and infiltration, and willfully wage wars, bringing harm to the international community. The United States has developed a hegemonic playbook to stage "color revolutions," instigate regional disputes, and even directly launch wars under the guise of promoting democracy, freedom, and human rights. Clinging to the Cold War mentality, the United States has ramped up bloc politics and stoked conflict and confrontation. It has overstretched the concept of national security, abused export controls, and forced unilateral sanctions upon others. It has taken a selective approach to international law and rules, utilizing or discarding them as it sees fit, and has sought to impose rules that serve its own interests in the name of upholding a "rules-based international order." This report, by presenting the relevant facts, seeks to expose the U.S. abuse of hegemony in the political, military, economic, financial, technological, and cultural fields, and to draw greater international attention to the perils of the U.S. practices to world peace and stability and the well-being of all peoples. Here’s what the report had to say about the War in Afghanistan: The two-decade-long war in Afghanistan devastated the country. A total of 47,000 Afghan civilians and 66,000 to 69,000 Afghan soldiers and police officers unrelated to the September 11 attacks were killed in U.S. military operations, and more than 10 million people were displaced. The war in Afghanistan destroyed the foundation of economic development there and plunged the Afghan people into destitution. After the "Kabul debacle" in 2021, the United States announced that it would freeze some 9.5 billion dollars in assets belonging to the Afghan central bank, a move considered as "pure looting." Here’s what it says about USD hegemony: The hegemony of U.S. dollar is the main source of instability and uncertainty in the world economy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States abused its global financial hegemony and injected trillions of dollars into the global market, leaving other countries, especially emerging economies, to pay the price. In 2022, the Fed ended its ultra-easy monetary policy and turned to aggressive interest rate hike, causing turmoil in the international financial market and substantial depreciation of other currencies such as the Euro, many of which dropped to a 20-year low. As a result, a large number of developing countries were challenged by high inflation, currency depreciation and capital outflows. This was exactly what Nixon's secretary of the treasury, John Connally, once remarked, with self-satisfaction yet sharp precision, "the dollar is our currency, but it is your problem." There are many more nuggets in the report. I highly recommend you read it. You can easily do it in one sitting. Wrap Up This kind of diplomatic rebuke is staggering. Again, this isn’t a country the US can just throw over. It must deal with China. But the Chinese have, in the strongest possible terms, told the US it’s no longer taking its bad behavior. Have a wonderful weekend! All the best, [Sean Ring] Sean Ring Editor, Rude Awakening In Case You Missed It… The Lesser Rewriters of Greater Authors [Sean Ring] SEAN RING Hello Reader, Good morning on this fine Thursday. I bring news from my other adopted country, the United Kingdom. You may know I lived in London for nearly ten years and consider myself a cultural Anglophile. (But not a political one; the British polity lost the plot ages ago.) The UK is the home of European Woke, especially London. If you think Prince Harry (that ginger idiot) is a one-off, you’d be wrong. He was just easy pickings for a C-list actress with ambition. England suffers from what I call “Empire Regret.” It obnoxiously bends the knee to any group, whether they’re rightly offended or not. In short, it presents solutions to problems that don’t exist. So this insane happening fits right in with the demolition of once great British values. Let me explain… “Put it back on the wall.” Old London Business School classmates Aussie Trav, English Will, and The Yank (that’s me) decided to take a weekend trip to Oslo in 2004, two years after we graduated. We had flown from London, hopping the North Sea, and landing in Oslo on a Friday night. It was late August. Oslo is gorgeous, pleasant, and temperate at that time of year. We loved it. We couldn't believe how expensive beer was, though. It was 10 – that’s British pounds, not dollars – for a drink that was smaller than a pint. But I must say… we didn't care! We decided to live it up a little bit and enjoyed wonderful nights out on the town. To excess, per usual. So Sunday, before we were due to leave, we decided to walk around the museums to get rid of our hangovers – looking at pretty paintings at least lessens the thumping in your head. There I was, staring at The Scream by Edvard Munch. Honestly, I wasn’t all that impressed… just a couple of swirls of paint. But then I received a fateful text message. In those days, texts came in on my trusty Nokia. My buddy, Malcolm, wrote from London: "Put it back on the wall." I thought nothing of it as I was wandering around aimlessly in the museum, trying to get rid of my headache. We left Oslo that night. The following day, I had to get up early to go to work. On the Tube, I read that morning’s newspaper. And as I was thumbing through it, one headline read “The Scream Stolen in Oslo.” I was shocked. I was standing right in front of it! Suddenly, Malcolm's text made sense. At the time, I didn’t know there were four Screams in existence; Munch had painted two and did two of them in pastel. That Sunday, armed robbers stole the version in the Munch Museum as I stared at another one in the National Museum! I often think of what I’d have done if the pilferers tried to take the one I was looking at. If I close my eyes, I can still feel that hangover. I’d like to think I was in such a bad mood, I would’ve beaten the stuffing out of them. But who knows? The real question I’ve always had for these people is, “Who the f*ck do you think you are?” Before I expand on that, let me give you some advice on collecting that some smart old men gave me. Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary, by Nassim Taleb There’s nothing I love more than strolling around old bookshops. In Europe, there are some that’ve been around for hundreds of years. Whether it’s Shakespeare and Company in Paris, Hatchard’s in London, or Libreria Luxembourg in Turin, there’s nothing that connects me with the past better than they do. I always try to buy something whenever I go. I feel it’s partly my responsibility to spend the money to best make sure those book stores remain open. Of course, that’s led me to accumulate quite a library, most of which is still in Cebu waiting for us to ship to Italy. I haven’t read all the books. But luckily, the polymath and philosopher Nassim Taleb gave me some fantastic confirmation bias in his classic, The Black Swan: The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Here's the important part: Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary. Oh, I was never going to stop buying books. But from the time I read that, I’ve never felt guilty for leaving them on the shelf. Roaming Around Ayala Cebu Alas, the Philippines doesn’t have as many old bookshops. So when I was roaming the National Bookstore as a new father, I was thrilled to find a complete set of Roald Dahl books. I bought the lot of them, though I knew it’d be years until Micah could read them. I’d simply add them to our antilibrary, waiting for the right moment to get Micah to pick them up and read. Unbeknownst to me, there was a far more important reason to stock up on Old Dahl. [Warning: Will “Bidenflation” Destroy Your Retirement?]( [Click here to learn more]( If you’re like most Americans, you’ve worked hard for decades to build your financial legacy. And now, as a result of Biden’s disastrous money printing policies, that’s all at risk. According to one top retirement expert, “Bidenflation” threatens to destroy your retirement and make your hard-earned savings worthless. That’s why you must take action right away to protect yourself… [Click here now to get the simple, step-by-step actions to survive “Bidenflation.”]( [Click Here To Learn More]( How Dare You? The Daily Telegraph broke the story with the headline “The Rewriting of Roald Dahl.” I thought it was a joke. But according to [The New York Post]( “Words matter,” begins the notice at the bottom of the copyright page of Puffin’s latest editions of Roald Dahl’s books. “The wonderful words of Roald Dahl can transport you to different worlds and introduce you to the most marvelous characters. This book was written many years ago, and so we regularly review the language to ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today.” Perhaps because I write, I find it more offensive. Or maybe because I live within spitting distance of objet d’art, which I wouldn’t even touch with gloves on. It’s not theirs to change, regardless of intellectual property laws. And I can’t imagine Dahl, were he alive, would have agreed with this. [The Telegraph]( followed up with an article today where Puffin, a publisher with whom I will never deal, stated they have a “significant responsibility” to protect young readers. No, you don’t. You have a responsibility to get your merchandise out, unspoiled. I’d prefer they be honest and say, “Well, we think we’ll lose business keeping the old language, so we’re trying this out.” Loathsome though it is, it’s still better than dressing this absurd censorship up as a caring activity. As HL Mencken once said, “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. This is true even of the pious brethren who carry the gospel to foreign parts.” Here are some of the changes, courtesy of the [National Review]( In the original James and the Giant Peach, a character rhymes, “Aunt Sponge was terrifically fat / And tremendously flabby at that,” and, “Aunt Spiker was thin as a wire / And dry as a bone, only drier.” With the new changes, the old verses now read: “Aunt Sponge was a nasty old brute / And deserved to be squashed by the fruit,” and, “Aunt Spiker was much of the same / And deserves half of the blame.” The famous glutton Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is no longer introduced as “fat” but rather as “enormous.” In The Twits, Mrs. Twit used to be described as “ugly and beastly” but is now only “beastly.” Gendered references have also been weakened so as not to be deemed offensive to women or the transgender community. In The Witches, a section musing that witches are bald beneath their wigs has the new disclaimer: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.” Matilda‘s Miss Trunchbull, the ferocious fictional headmistress of a school, formerly a “most formidable female” is now a “most formidable woman.” In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Oompa Loompas, once called “small men,” are now “small people”. The Cloud-Men in James and the Giant Peach are now Cloud-People. Prose that might be tangentially misconstrued as being culturally insensitive also appears to have been removed. In The BFG, the main character giant no longer wears a “black” coat and characters don’t turn “white with fear” anymore. I’m turning red with rage! You Can’t Even Blame the Government The worst part is that His Majesty’s Government slammed the changes. I can’t even blame the State! Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company worked with some company called Inclusive Minds, which is dedicated to “inclusion and accessibility in children’s literature.” How about we get the kids to actually read first? There’s nothing more regrettable than private censorship. Theseus’ Ship Am I being paranoid? I don’t think so. Let’s talk about Theseus' Ship. From The Life of Theseus by Plutarch, via [Britannica]( The ship wherein Theseus…returned [from Crete] had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus [died c. 280 BCE], for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question as to things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same. If you replace enough of Dahl’s words, when do the works cease to be Dahl’s? That’s why I am so thrilled the reaction to this incredible breach of trust has been nothing short of nuclear. It seems both the left and the right are outraged. And that’s an excellent thing. As for me, I’m so glad I bought Micah’s copies before they violated Dahl’s works. He’ll get the farm-fresh, free range, organic Dahl… as all children should. Oh, and the stolen version of The Scream found its way back home in 2009. For all to see, for the price of a ticket to Oslo. If you have any feedback or topics you want covered, be sure to click [here](mailto:feedback@dailyreckoning.com) and drop me a line. Until next week! All the best, [Sean Ring] Sean Ring Contributing Editor, The Morning Reckoning feedback@dailyreckoning.com [Paradigm]( ☰ ⊗ [ARCHIVE]( [ABOUT]( [Contact Us]( © 2023 Paradigm Press, LLC. 808 Saint Paul Street, Baltimore MD 21202. By submitting your email address, you consent to Paradigm Press, LLC. delivering daily email issues and advertisements. 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