1. Taiwan remains a flashpoint …

2. Xi shows willingness to help Trump on Iran [not with the war, but with keeping the Strait open] …

3. Trump teases trade deals and investment — though the summit was light on specifics …

4. Xi ‘open’ to opening up China for US business …

5. Pomp and pageantry reign supreme …

6. Trump and Xi built on their personal connections – but the US-China relationship could still go south

Points 5 and 6 are really just fillers. And of course, there may have been discussions behind the scenes that are not being revealed.

NOTE: Here is the perspective of Larry Kudlow:

Mr. Xi is bluffing [on Taiwan].

In recent weeks he has watched America end his influence in Venezuela, the Panama Canal, soon it will be Cuba, and of course Iran. I mean Communist China’s buying 90 percent of Iran’s oil and gas exports.

But with Mr. Trump’s air-tight blockade of Iranian ports, China is starving for energy. They might make a deal with us, but that too remains to be seen if it comes under Treasury Man Scott Bessent’s investment board idea.

And on top of all that, China’s economy has never recovered from the real estate property crash of a couple years ago. …

My point here is that while China has invested substantially in a strong military, their economy is malfunctioning and their political standing in the world is slipping badly.

All this reminds me of President Reagan and Gorbachev. The American economy was booming in the Reagan 1980s.

This seems somewhat optimistic to me. But, who knows?

And of course, if a Democrat president takes the helm, it all can change. Xi may be trying to wait it out while simultaneously trying to influence US elections in that direction.

The post So, what went on between Trump and Xi during the China visit? appeared first on The New Neo.

The post Trump goes to China appeared first on The New Neo.

… EurAsia Times, an Indian publication that is no friend of Trump, reported, “Boasting one of the strongest militaries in Latin America, Venezuela possessed a variety of advanced radars, including the [Chinese-made] JY-27, whose capabilities have now been called into question by observers.

“These radars were integrated into Venezuela’s air defense network alongside Russian systems like the S-300VM surface-to-air missiles, forming a layered defense around key sites, including Caracas.”

America stuffed both systems.

The publication said, “Designed to detect low-observable aircraft like the US F-22 and F-35 by operating at meter-wave frequencies that, in theory, exploit resonance effects on stealth designs, the JY-27 has been marketed by Beijing as an anti-stealth or stealth hunter radar.”

The only person in their showroom now is Wile E. Coyote.

I haven’t a clue how this was done. But it seems that neither Russia nor China have a clue either, which is more important.

More:

Zona Militar said, “From a military standpoint, analysts agree that the outcome cannot be explained by the failure of a single system, but rather by the inability of a Chinese-designed command-and-control framework to operate under intense interference and multidomain attacks. The U.S. operation exposed the limitations of these architectures when confronted by forces capable of integrating intelligence, electronic warfare, combat aviation, and special operations within a single operational cycle, confirming that superiority lies not solely in hardware, but in the coherence and resilience of the system as a whole.”

In other words, a lot of things must have been operating to make this occur.

It also seems that something similar happened during the Israeli and US attacks on Iran last summer.

The post The Russians and Chinese can’t be all that happy about the performance of their defense systems in Venezuela appeared first on The New Neo.

Now, four and a half years later, we have this news (which never would have come out without the election of Trump and the changing of the leadership of the FBI, as well as GOP control of the Senate):

FBI Director Kash Patel on Monday evening turned over to Congress an intelligence report raising concerns that China had mass-produced fake U.S. driver’s licenses to carry out a scheme to hijack the 2020 election with fake mail-in ballots for Democrat Joe Biden.

The newly declassified intelligence reports from August 2020 weren’t corroborated or fully investigated and instead were recalled from intelligence agencies at about the time that then-FBI Director Chris Wray testified there were no known plots of foreign interference ahead of the 2020 election in which Biden defeated Donald Trump, officials told Just the News.

The new documents were turned over to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa …

Officials who have seen the documents told Just the News the FBI had a relatively new confidential source who provided information in summer 2020 that the Chinese government was manufacturing and exporting fake U.S. driver’s licenses as part of a plot to create voter identities for Chinese residents living in the United States so they could vote with fake mail-in ballots. …

They also said the intelligence report was recalled within a few weeks and the allegations never fully investigated, on the grounds that the source needed to be re-interviewed.

But, in fact, another agency, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, had intercepted nearly 20,000 fake licenses around the time the intelligence came in a possible corroboration of the report, officials said.

More here:

China had collected private US user data from millions of TikTok accounts, to include name, ID and address, which would allow the Chinese government to use real US persons’ information to create the fraudulent driver’s license. The fraudulent driver’s licenses were to include true ID number and true address of US citizens, making them difficult to detect. China planned to use the fraudulent driver’s licenses to account for tens of thousands of mail-in votes.

We don’t know how many such fake votes actually were recorded. What we do know is that – and I know I repeat myself – the expansion of mail-in voting gave them a golden opportunity for such a fraud scheme, as well as other schemes by other groups we might know nothing about. Mail-in voting is inherently insecure and very stringent safeguards must be in place to use it widely, and such safeguards were not in place in the US in 2020 (or now, for that matter).

NOTE: I’ve written many previous posts on the subject of vote security – for example, this and this.

The post 2020 election fraud, revisited appeared first on The New Neo.

“Our deal with China is done, subject to final approval with President Xi and me,” Trump revealed in an all-caps post on Truth Social. “Full magnets, and any necessary rare earths, will be supplied, up front, by China.”

“Likewise, we will provide to China what was agreed to, including Chinese students using our colleges and universities (which has always been good with me!). We are getting a total of 55% tariffs, China is getting 10%. The relationship is excellent! Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

“President XI and I are going to work closely together to open up China to American Trade,” the president added. “This would be a great WIN for both countries!!”

The rare earth licenses are temporary, due to last for 6 months and then they can be renegotiated.

The post The art of the China deal appeared first on The New Neo.

The United States and China agreed Monday to drastically roll back tariffs on each other’s goods for an initial 90-day period, in a surprise breakthrough that has de-escalated a punishing trade war and buoyed global markets.

The announcement, which was made in a joint statement, comes after a weekend of marathon trade negotiations in Geneva, Switzerland by officials from the world’s two largest economies, during which both sides touted “substantial progress.”

Both sides recognize “the importance of a sustainable, long-term, and mutually beneficial economic and trade relationship,” they said in the statement.

Global investors are cheering a thaw in the trade war sparked by US President Donald Trump’s massive tariffs, which have roiled financial markets, disrupted supply chains and stoked recession fears.

A “surprise breakthrough”? Most people on the right are not the least bit surprised, having considered the “punishing trade war” an opening move from Trump. In fact, I don’t even think that CNN is surprised – they might be disappointed, perhaps, because I believe they’d rather “stoke” more “recession fears.”

At any rate, this is probably still early on in the jockeying for position between the US and China. It’s a good sign, however.

Some details:

The mutual tariff revisions will be imposed by May 14. Trump’s 20% fentanyl-related levies on China, imposed in February and March, will stay. However, each side has agreed to lower “reciprocal” tariffs on the other by 115 percentage points for 90 days.

That effectively means the US will temporarily lower its overall tariffs on Chinese goods from 145% to 30%, while China will cut its levies on American imports from 125% to 10%, according to the joint statement.

Under the agreement, China will also suspend or cancel its non-tariff countermeasures imposed on the US since April 2.

And here’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent:

The consensus from both delegations is neither side wants to be decoupled, and what have occurred with these very high tariffs … was an equivalent of an embargo, and neither side wants that. We do want trade. We want more balance in trade. And I think both sides are committed to achieving that.

Statements by the Chinese were similarly positive.

The post The China deal – for now appeared first on The New Neo.

China has long been over-reporting its population, over 100 million people fewer than officially claimed, a Chinese scientist told Newsweek, a claim met with strong resistance from demography circles.

Yi Fuxian, an obstetrician at University of Wisconsin-Madison who conducts demography research, said the censuses China carries out every 10 years are “seriously overestimated” in an effort to match official estimates. The annual data should be corrected with the census data, he said. …

… [A] closer look at demographics showed a glaring disparity, Yi said. Around 164.24 million babies were born between 1991 and 2000. After accounting for these births and subtracting deaths and net migration, there were about 40 million fewer Chinese than reported.

However, Yi is apparently pretty much alone among scientists in thinking that.

What is not disputed is China’s very low birthrate, shared by other Asian nations such as South Korea and Japan. Here’s a handy chart in which countries around the world are listed by birthrates in descending order. It’s readily apparent that different areas of the world have very different birthrates, with Africa the highest (for example Niger, number one, has a rate of 6.7), then countries in the Arab world and Latin America, as well as places like Tajikistan. Then come the nations of the West, with the US fairly high in that category (1.7). Bringing up the rear is some of Asia, minus Laos (2.36), Cambodia (2.51), and Vietnam (1.88). Here are the large countries in Asia with the very low birthrates: China at 1.02, Japan at 1.23, and South Korea at .75.

One of the outliers is Israel, a highly developed country with a birthrate of 2.9. This is not due, as most people might assume, to very high birthrates among the very religious. Although the latter phenomenon does exist, there are not enough ultra-Orthodox people in Israel to account for the highrate, which exists in all groups to varying degrees. Nor is it due to the 20% of Israel’s population that is Arab. See this:

… [I]n recent years, Muslim women in Israel have almost the same number of children, on average, as Jewish women in Israel do. In contrast, fertility remains very high among the Haredi Jewish population, who are at the same 6.5 rate of pre-Revolution Iran. Even Jewish Israelis outside the Haredi community have higher fertility than their counterparts in other countries. …

… [E]ven though Haredi [ultra-Orthodox] fertility is high, it is far below maximal levels observed in other populations (10 children per woman on average), and it is consciously limited and controlled by married couples, implying that family planning and family limitation in this population is widespread.

Beyond the wide disparities in fertility among various Jewish subpopulations, Israel is also unique in the value placed on having children among self-described secular Jews, who most commonly have three children by the time they complete their families, a markedly higher rate than their Diaspora counterparts. Why?

It’s that phenomenon – the secular Jewish birthrate in Israel – that is unusual. Here’s the explanation the article gives (in addition to a generally “pro-natalist” policy by the government):

The collectivist and communitarian core of Israel’s social philosophy places a family-shaped framework around its mores at all levels of society. Individuals rely to a great extent on their families within and across generations, strengthening family bonds and engendering a broad and expanded conception of the family: in size, relational lines, and responsibility. Put another way, cultural codes for family behavior and commitment are rather extensive because familial feeling extends beyond the boundaries of the nuclear family. Taking this into account, we can understand Israel’s high fertility in part as springing from the institution that serves as the foundation of family life: marriage.

The author points out that over time there’s been a slow and slight reduction in the Israeli birthrate among secular Jews, and that may or may not continue. But what I don’t see emphasized in the article, and what I think are also large factors, are two other things. The first is that about half of Israel’s Jewish population is descended from Jews from Arab and/or North African countries, and they may be following their own cultural heritage that somewhat resembles that of those countries. The second is that much of the other half of Israel’s Jewish population descended from Holocaust survivors, for whom every Jewish child born represents a triumph over the forces – then and now – which would destroy the Jews. Therefore I don’t think the Israeli experience can speak to that of other Western or Asian countries; it’s significantly different.

I’ve put up other posts – including videos focusing on China – about the falling birthrates in Asia and around the developed world, so I won’t go into a huge analysis of that now. This post just scratches the surface. But it’s a very important topic that I’ll probably revisit, one that doesn’t seem to be going away.

The post Birthrates large and small appeared first on The New Neo.

China’s Government has just outlawed foreigners, aka people who aren’t from China- from doing missionary works (inside China).

That includes missionaries of: the Christian religion, the Muslim religion, and the Hindu religion, + all other religions.

The Chinese government doesn’t trust [any religion], or [any group], that is not approved by, or controlled by, the Chinese govt..

If you aren’t a Chinese citizen, + maybe even if you are one, you CAN’T talk to people about: your religious beliefs, your church, your religious group, your religion, or how people can join a religion.

If you do any of those things, China’s govt. might arrest you for, in its mind, [being a danger to China, + the Chinese govt..]

I don’t use this term often, but- these are 100%: Nazi party tactics, [Nazi police tactics], Third Reich tactics, totally oppressive tactics, and bad tactics, that are being used by China’s government.

China’s government doesn’t trust anyone that it can’t control.

In my opinion, these things are human rights, and all people should be given + guaranteed these rights, because they are [their] rights …

TR is referring to this recent news:

China has officially outlawed foreign missionaries from sharing their faith in the country without pre-state approval.

It will come into effect from 1st May, marking a further tightening of restrictions by the ruling Chinese Communist Party on those who operate outside the state-controlled churches.

Christianity is not banned in China. It is estimated that there are between 70 to 100 million believers amongst the country’s 1.4bn people. …

Authorities now require all religious groups to register with the state and limit their activities to government-approved locations, making independent evangelism nearly impossible.

Under President Xi Jinping there has been a ‘sinicization of religion’ – a term which seeks to make religious faith adhere to Chinese socialist values and culture.

To me, the issue isn’t about missionaries from foreign countries practicing in China. Any country has the right to ban or regulate foreign visitors who come into that country. The issue is actually religious freedom in general in China, which is highly restricted even if no foreigners are involved. And that issue is a subset of another issue: liberty in China, which exists barely if at all.

The “sinicization of religion” reminds me somewhat of something I learned in school – which is that the periodic conquerors of China in ancient eras found that, over time, it was they who became Chinese rather than the Chinese becoming more like them. At this point, although China is not exactly Communist (although it’s run by the Communist Party, it describes itself as socialist), it retains enormous elements of totalitarian control over its population, and that includes over religion.

If you want to learn more about China’s religious policies, see this from October of 2023. Here’s an excerpt:

Earlier this year, China issued new rules on religious activity that tighten oversight of clergy and congregations.

The rules are part of a long-standing strategy by the Chinese government to align religion with communism and ensure loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which espouses and promotes atheism.

So that’s the overview. A few details:

… [T]he government officially recognizes five religions: Buddhism, Catholicism, Islam, Protestantism and Daoism (also called Taoism). But authorities closely police religious activity. China has ranked among the world’s most restrictive governments every year since Pew Research Center began tracking restrictions on religion in 2007. …

China is pursuing a policy of “Sinicization” that requires religious groups to align their doctrines, customs and morality with Chinese culture. …

China’s restrictive policies toward Muslims – particularly Uyghurs in Xinjiang province – have been documented widely over the past decade. Human rights groups accuse China of subjecting Uyghurs to mass internment, surveillance and torture. …

Christians are allowed to worship in “official churches” registered with supervisory government agencies responsible for Protestantism and Catholicism. However, many Christians refuse this oversight and worship in underground churches.

Since Xi came to power in 2013, the government has banned evangelization online, tightened control over Christian activities outside of registered venues, and shut down churches that refuse to register. Authorities have also arrested prominent church leaders and some Christians reportedly have been held in internment camps. …

China treats Buddhism – particularly Han Buddhism, the most widespread branch in the country – more leniently than Christianity or Islam. …

Religious activity that falls outside of the five officially recognized religions and does not meet the government’s approval as a form of cultural heritage is often categorized by authorities as “superstition” or “evil cult.” …

Children under 18 are constitutionally prohibited from having any formal religious affiliation in China. There is also a ban on religious education, including Sunday schools, religious summer camps and other forms of youth religious groups. Schools focus on promoting non-religion and atheism, and many children join CCP-affiliated youth groups, where they must pledge commitment to atheism.

I think it’s pretty clear that the Chinese leaders want to stamp out religion and/or make it conform strictly to their party line.

[NOTE: And what of Jews? Yes, there are indeed Jews in China, and although their numbers are minuscule they have a lengthy history there. Judaism – unlike Christianity and Islam – is a non-proselytizing religion. But it nevertheless is being suppressed by the Chinese authorities:

Kaifeng’s Jewish community has reported increasing suppression by the authorities since 2015, reversing the modest revival it experienced in the 1990s. The observance of public religious services and the celebration of religious festivals like Passover and Sukkot have been prohibited, and Jewish community groups have been shut down. Signs have been removed from the Kaifeng Synagogue, a historical site located on Teaching the Torah Lane that is now under strict surveillance.

A small number of Chinese Jews have succeeded in making aliyah and immigrating to Israel with the help of private organisations such as Shavei Israel.

Antisemitism in the People’s Republic of China is mostly a 21st-century phenomenon and it is complicated by the fact that there is little ground for antisemitism in China in historical sources. In the 2020s, antisemitic conspiracy theories in China began to spread and intensify. While there is not a large Jewish diaspora in China, much of the antisemitism come from Chinese nationalists and anti-Israel leftists, as part of a reaction against supposed foreign encirclement and influence. Some Chinese people believe in antisemitic tropes that Jews secretly rule the world. Academics have also noted the spread of philosemitism, which depicts Jews as naturally intelligent and financially savvy, also gained traction in light of the Chinese economic reform.

The post “Religious freedom” in China: an oxymoron appeared first on The New Neo.

A description:

China announced on Friday that it will raise tariffs on U.S. imports from 84% to 125%, further escalating the trade war between Washington and Beijing.

The move is largely symbolic. As former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told Fox News host Larry Kudlow on Thursday night, once tariffs hit 50%, further increases have limited practical impact. At that point, Ross explained, leaders effectively signal that they no longer seek a trade relationship. …

China expert Gordon Chang joined Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo on Thursday morning to discuss the mounting conflict between China and the U.S. Chinese President Xi Jinping, he claims, is in an increasingly difficult political position because he can’t do what “absolutely” must be done which is to open up the lines of communication.

“Picking up the phone and calling President Trump would be the economically rational thing to do,” Chang said, “but Xi Jinping has configured the Chinese political system so that only the most hostile answers are considered to be acceptable, which means he’s boxed himself in.” …

“The Chinese don’t have any cards in this,” he explained. “They’re only holding a pair of twos and Trump has a royal straight flush. The Chinese think they can intimidate Trump, they can coerce him into surrendering preemptively.” But Trump is not backing down. …

According to the report, the U.S. and Panama have formally entered into a new defense and security agreement designed to strengthen oversight of the Panama Canal—an initiative Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described as essential for countering China’s expanding influence in the region.

Is Chang correct? I don’t know. This is not my field of expertise, as I’ve often stated. But it makes sense to me that the goal – or at least one big goal – is to put the squeeze on China. Much of what we get from them is shoddy consumer goods, but there’s also rare earths (do I hear Greenland? Australia? or even the US itself see this) and pharmaceuticals (do I hear India?).

NOTE: See also this.

And our resident condescending British friend has been talking about the bond market. For those who might be curious about that, please see this for some background in terms of the Trump/Vance administration.

The post So at the moment, the trade war seems to be with China appeared first on The New Neo.

The story, according to Minnesota Public Radio and the Walz campaign:

Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz “was so proud of his extensive experience” traveling to China that he “occasionally used to exaggerate it” by claiming to have visited the communist country twice as often as he actually did, Minnesota Public Radio reported on Monday.

Walz went on around 15 trips to China in the 1990s and early 2000s—rather than over 30, as he stated earlier in his political career—his campaign told Minnesota Public Radio this week.

Why is Walz pulling back on his “old China hand” credentials? Because the House Oversight Committee is investigating the nature of his longtime ties to China.

I guess that what appeals to the voters of Minnesota doesn’t sound so great on the national stage. So Tim adjusts the story accordingly.

The post Tim Walz on China: lying then, or lying now? appeared first on The New Neo.