President Donald Trump has initiated a new round of tariffs on China, in response to what he has described as “economic aggression” against the United States by the Beijing regime. Meanwhile top leaders of the U.S. and global business, technology, and banking communities were in China last week celebrating with the communist aggressors. From September 18-20, the World Economic Forum (WEF) held its 12th Annual Meeting of the New Champions, under the theme, “Shaping Innovative Societies in the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” in Tianjin, China. The WEF has become a leading evangelization chorus for a New World Order, a globalist scheme for world government that has become the shared vision of billionaire elites at Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google, as well as their corporate counterparts in China. (see, for instance, here, here, and here.)
Listed as “partners” for the event were such western corporate giants as Allianz, Bain & Company, Bank of America, Barclays, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, BlackRock, BP, Chevron, Cisco, Citi, Credit Suisse, Dell Technologies, Deloitte, Deutsche Bank, Facebook, GE, Goldman Sachs, Google, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, Mitsubishi, Morgan Stanley, PayPal, PepsiCo, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Thomson Reuters, UPS, Visa, Volkswagen, and Zurich Insurance Group. Joining them in this venture were Chinese titans Alibaba, Dentsu Group, China Minsheng Investment Group, Hanwha Energy Corporation, Huawei Technologies, Tsinghua Holdings Co., and more.
The three-day confab featured dozens of presentations, speeches, and panels on a wide range of topics by some of the world’s notables in science, technology, business, finance, education, culture, and politics. Notably absent from the WEF program, however, were any presentations dealing with China’s religious persecution, imprisonment of political dissenters, torture, genocide, censorship, internet policing, Orwellian surveillance, cyber espionage and sabotage, intellectual property theft, and numerous other totalitarian features of China’s communist dictatorship. That’s not surprising. After all, we wouldn’t want unnecessary mention of such embarrassing, mundane matters to sour the melodic clink of champagne glasses and the ka-ching of cash registers, would we?
Emperor’s New Clothes
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang kicked off the conference with a keynote speech and then sat down on stage for a question and answer session with WEF founder and chairman Klaus Schwab. The questions from Schwab and other participants were beyond polite, revealing an audience of cowards and sycophants unable and/or unwilling to muster a single challenging question concerning the 800 pound gorilla in the room that everyone pretended not to see: Communist China’s relentlessly oppressive Gestapo State and its continuing horrendous violations of human rights. This was an “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment, but there was no guileless child in attendance to point out the naked truth to the willfully blind adults.
The closest Li got to a challenging question was a timid query about China’s progress on “IPR,” meaning intellectual property rights. This gave him an opportunity to launch into a rhapsody about China’s innovation, government reform and “contributions to the progress of humanity.”
“As China embraces the world with open arms,” Li Keqiang expounded grandiloquently, “we also welcome entrepreneurs, scientists and people in other sectors around the world to participate in China’s development with an open mind, so that together, we can make joint contributions to the progress of humanity. Let me reassure you that China is firmly committed to protecting IPR, as we know that innovation is supported by ideas, which generates property rights.”
That all sounds very nice and undoubtedly soothes whatever consciences the WEF elites have, but Chinese leaders have been mouthing the same nothings for decades, always promising to reform, but never delivering. As James Murphy reported for The New American on June 21 and 22, (see here and here), new reports from federal agencies and intelligence officials show that, far from reforming, Beijing is doubling down on many of its most troubling trade practices and forms of economic aggression. He quotes a recent U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report that notes “China appears to be conducting a campaign of commercial espionage against U.S. companies involving … human infiltration to systematically penetrate the information systems of U.S. companies to steal their intellectual property, devalue them and acquire them at dramatically reduced prices.” He cites also a 200-page report issued in March by the Office of the United States Trade Representative detailing the unfair and underhanded trade policies of the Chinese government.
Naturally, the American “mainstream” news media were either AWOL on the WEF summit, or were complicit in presenting it, essentially, as rip-and-read PR releases from China’s Communist Party propagandists.
Among the articles CNBC carried on the Tianjin conference, for instance, was one titled “Everyone could learn from China’s tech policies, World Economic Forum says,” by CNBC staff writer Evelyn Cheng. “The World Economic Forum is looking to China for ideas on how governments can appropriately regulate the technologies of the future,” Cheng writes. “The organization, which runs the annual conference of world leaders in Davos, Switzerland, announced Wednesday it is launching a hub in Beijing for government officials, businesses and academics to come up with suggestions for future policies on developments such as artificial intelligence.”
“The group in the communist country will mark the third location of the Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which opened in San Francisco in March 2017,” Cheng reports, noting that a WEF hub was opened in Tokyo in July, and another is scheduled to open in Mumbai, India, in October.
“We can’t use 20th century models for 21st century technology,” Murat Sonmez, head of the WEF’s Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, said in an interview with CNBC. “We have a lot to learn from China as well,” he said. “China represents a huge opportunity for the rest of the world to see what’s coming.” A lot to learn from China’s mass-murdering, genocidal, police state communist overlords? That is “what’s coming,” according to the WEF planners”? And we should happily embrace this 21st Century model?
Like most of the rest of the “journalists” reporting on the WEF event, Cheng does not reveal even the slightest glimmer of concern that the economic movers and shakers of the western world are head-over-heels in love with China’s totalitarian model of government. She makes little effort to temper this infatuation with readily available facts regarding the dystopian “future” that is already a reality in the People’s Republic of China.
Cheng, apparently, has some inkling of this reality, but any sensible inclination she might have in the direction of concern about the impact of omnipotent government on human freedom, is obviously overcome by a sense of duty to conform to the party line. “While China is one of the most controlling states in the world,” she writes, “the national government has let some sectors such as internet companies thrive relatively unrestricted.”
China is indeed “one of the most controlling states in the world,” but the remainder of the sentence following that clause is doubly deceptive. First of all, for the many uninformed readers who are unfamiliar with life in China, it seems to imply that internet usage there is “relatively unrestricted.” However, surely Ms. Cheng is fully aware of the draconian internet censorship imposed by the Great Firewall of China.
The Communist Party-run government allows certain internet companies to “thrive relatively unrestricted” because they are “National Champions” that are given special treatment in order to serve the state. Many of these privileged corporations are state owned enterprises (SOEs), which means they are literally extensions of the communist government. Besides being shielded from competition, they are lavishly funded, exempted from many taxes and regulations, and assisted by all the agencies of government. Other Chinese companies may officially not be SOEs and may advertise themselves as “private,” but have close ties, nonetheless, to the Communist Party power structure and enjoy assistance, exemptions, and privileges not available to truly private companies in a genuine free market. Besides, in China’s opaque economy, it is impossible to know what the actual relationships are among corporate leaders and government officials. Thus, Chinese internet giants Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, Sina, QQ, and Taobao — all ostensibly private companies –are protected from foreign competitors, who are blocked from operation in China. Tencent’s Pony Ma Huateng, Alibaba’s Jack Ma, Baidu’s Robin Li Yanhong and other Chinese tech billionaires will continue to enjoy their privileged status as long as they continue to serve the Party. Should they step out of line, they would soon learn the truth of the old adage, “Today’s peacock, tomorrow’s feather duster.” Over the past several years, a string of princelings and peacocks have disappeared into Chinese prisons. Some have even been executed. Such are the perils that go with being a “National Champion” in Communist China. Heedless of these perils, the corporate elites of the WEF continue to eagerly embrace the ideas of central planning and government-corporate collaboration at the heart of China’s despotic system.
In 2017, President Xi Jinping became the first Chinese head of state to attend the World Economic Forum’s annual big bash in Davos, Switzerland. This year, in its pivot to Asia, the WEF also held a conference in Hanoi with ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) September 11-13. The extravaganza was hosted by the Communist government of Vietnam, which rivals China both in repressive prowess and in its eagerness to have western companies and governments build the economic and technical bases that they are already using against us, and that they intend to weaponize against us even further in the future.
Next week, the WEF will be holding its Sustainable Development Impact Summit in New York City, September 24-25. The WEF summit has been deliberately timed to promote the United Nations schemes for global control and to undercut President Trump’s agenda when he addresses the UN General Assembly. According to the WEF website, “The second annual Sustainable Development Impact Summit takes place in New York on 24-25 September to drive solutions for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and Paris Agreement on climate change.” It has also announced it will be using the event to push for the UN Global Compacts for Migration and on Refugees.
President Trump, of course, is out of step with the WEF elites on all of these issues. So, expect the WEF to use the two-day event as an opportunity to marshal a huge contingent of “experts” who will flood the Fake News channels and op-ed pages with condemnations of Trump’s America First agenda, and propaganda in favor of the UN’s program for “global governance.”
Photo: AP Images
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