20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party Set To Begin Oct. 16

The Political Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has now set Oct. 9 for the meeting of the Central Committee of the CCP, to be followed Oct. 16 by the opening of the all-important 20th Congress of the party. A new slate is expected to be brought into leadership positions at the Congress. Such congresses occur only once every five years. Given the extremely tense world situation, it is highly unlikely that General Secretary Xi Jinping will be replaced, but most of the other figures in the government are expected either to be replaced or moved to different posts. It will be a decisive moment in setting forth the program for China in the face of a crisis—as Xi, who also holds the position of President of the People’s Republic of China, likes to say—“unseen in a century.”

It is also widely reported that Xi, who has not traveled abroad since January 2020, will attend in person the Sept. 15-16 Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, where he will likely hold discussions with Russian President Vladimir Putin, their first meeting since the launch of Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. After the Party Congress, there will be in all likelihood a new flurry of international visits and travel to shore up support for China to counter the intensive campaign being waged by the U.S. to “decouple” from China and subvert its relations with other nations.

U.S. Navy in the Taiwan Strait, Again

For the first time since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s ill-advised trip to Taiwan Aug. 3, the U.S. Navy on Aug. 28 sent two warships, the guided missile cruisers USS Antietam and USS Chancellorsville, through the Taiwan Strait. The U.S. 7th Fleet called it “a routine Taiwan Strait transit.”

The Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) said on Aug. 28 that it was on high alert and ready to thwart any provocation, reported CGTN.

Two weeks earlier CNN had played up the right of the U.S. to be there, quoting Kurt Campbell, Deputy Assistant to U.S. President Joe Biden and Coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, speaking to reporters at the White House Aug. 12:

“We’ll continue to fly, sail, and operate where international law allows, consistent with our longstanding commitment to freedom of navigation, and that includes conducting standard air and maritime transits through the Taiwan Strait in the next few weeks.”

Chinese Ambassador to the U.S. Qin Gang said last week that the U.S. transits through the Strait serve only to intensify tensions, telling reporters:

“I do call on American colleagues to exercise restraint, not to do anything to escalate the tension. If there’s any move damaging China’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, China will respond.”

China Building a Large Radio Telescope Array To Study the Sun

China has an ambitious project to build the world’s largest circular radio telescope array to study the Sun. Recent updates are available from Space.com and South China Morning Post.

The Daocheng Solar Radio Telescope (DSRT) will have 313 dishes, each 6 meters across (19.7 feet), that will form a circle with a circumference of 3.14 km (1.95 miles). In multi-dish radio telescopes, simultaneous data from all of the dishes is integrated by computer to achieve a high-resolution image. It is being built on the Tibetan Plateau in Sichuan province and will be used alongside another solar telescope being assembled in Inner Mongolia. It is expected to be finished by the end of the year.

DSRT will primarily be used to study coronal mass ejections (CME), bursts of magnetized plasma from the Sun which can travel at speeds ranging from slower than 250 km per second to nearly 3,000 km per second. The fastest Earth-directed CMEs can reach our planet in as little as 15–18 hours. Slower CMEs can take several days to arrive. When directed at Earth, a CME can wreak havoc on power grids, telecommunications, orbiting satellites (such as those for GPS) and even put the safety of astronauts at risk. Less dangerous CMEs generate the breathtaking displays at the auroral ovals around the Earth’s poles.

The development of the DSRT is part of a larger project called the Chinese Meridian Project, which includes the Chinese Spectral Radioheliograph for monitoring solar activity, being constructed in Inner Mongolia. The radioheliograph will consist of 100 dishes in a three-arm spiral arrangement and will study the Sun in a wider band of frequencies than DSRT to achieve advances in solar physics and the study of space weather.

The project also includes some innovative technologies, such as a three-station incoherent scattering radar to make 3D measurements of the ionosphere, and a helium lidar (a kind of laser) to measure atmospheric density up to an altitude of 1,000 km.

The entire project aims to consist of up to 300 instruments deployed at 31 stations across China at specific longitudes and latitudes. It is led by the National Space Science Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and involves more than 10 institutions and universities in China.

China Expert Sees Financial Crisis, Dollar System Collapse Coming

The collapse of U.S. economic productivity under the Federal Reserve’s money-printing policy has dug a “grave for the dollar system,” according to Mei Xinyu, a research fellow with the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation under the Ministry of Commerce. Mei told Global Times Aug. 27: “[T]he dollar’s status as the world’s currency was based on the U.S.’ once-paramount economic productivity.” That productivity was gutted as the Fed’s “quantitative easing policy … fundamentally decimated the U.S. manufacturing sector’s competitiveness. Now, whatever policy the Federal Reserve chooses to deal with inflation is unlikely to bolster the U.S.’ real economy.… The sudden tightening after years of easing, along with the large role of the virtual economy in the U.S. economy, is very likely to cause a financial crisis…. The U.S.’s wanton sanctions against other countries have accelerated the fall of the U.S. dollar-based system.”

UN Xinjiang Report Claims Human Rights Abuses, Ignores Bachelet Findings

The UN Human Rights Commission issued its much-touted report on Xinjiang on Aug. 31. Not to anyone’s surprise, the report follows fairly closely the position of the United States, which, in its fight in the international arena for establishing its absolute role as “rules maker for the world,” was anxious to have some condemnation of China on the Xinjiang issue by a UN organization, given the support China has been receiving in its programmatic initiatives in that world body.

China had even succeeded in getting the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, twice President of Chile, to visit Xinjiang, hoping that seeing the reality would help counter the dubious reports spread by Austrian fundamentalist Adrian Zenz, George Soros’s Human Rights Watch, and other “regime change” operators. But judging from the report, Bachelet’s observations while in Xinjiang played no role whatsoever, but relied extensively on Zenz’s dubious reports from the Uighur diaspora. Undoubtedly the report could have been written before the Bachelet visit—and probably was.

While including all the extreme lies about torture, forced labor, concentration camps, etc., which are filling Western media headlines, the report does not repeat the insanity of former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s accusation of “genocide,” which was subsequently repeated ad nauseum by the same media and governments. And, most of the accusations of human rights abuses are hedged by phrases such as “could have,” “alleged,” “appears to,” and so forth.

China refuted the report immediately in the form of a lengthy clarification of the nature of the policy in Xinjiang: The U.S. is now demanding that China change its legislation regarding minorities in Xinjiang to guarantee the same “freedoms” that they would allegedly have in the United States. Following their British Imperial predecessors in that region a century earlier, especially in Tibet, the U.S. political oligarchy is focusing on provinces with large ethnic minorities to create trouble for the Chinese government.

In the 1980s, the Saudis began setting up their own mosques in Xinjiang with their own brand of Wahabi “radical Islam.” This led to the spread of terrorist activities in the province and beyond. The crackdown that followed was aimed at safeguarding the citizens of Xinjiang—of Han, Uyghur and other ethnicities—from continued terrorism. This was combined with a major development program carried out by the central government that lifted the majority of the population out of abject poverty to a higher standard of living and to moderate prosperity. Under this regime, the Uyghur population in Xinjiang is thriving. Yet many of the controls have been kept in place to monitor that the destabilization is not repeated.

The educational centers established by China in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region are aimed at giving the Uyghur population the capabilities they need for working in industry or setting up their own companies. Foreign delegations have been actively encouraged by the Chinese government to visit these centers, which they have done frequently. Their consistently positive reports have been ignored by those attempting to demonize China.