Xi Jinping Declares China the Leading World Power at Communist Party Congress

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Dictator Xi Jinping opened the 20th Chinese Communist Party National Congress on Sunday with a “report” to the Central Committee, which he nominally serves, that claimed China has ascended to global leadership in economics, diplomacy, clean government, and military power.

Xi’s address was triumphant as expected, with little concern for how it might sound to a world still coping with fallout from the coronavirus pandemic China unleashed. The pandemic was old news for Xi, who had no interest in conceding the smallest error in how China handled the crisis.

Instead, Xi’s theme was China’s overwhelming success at creating a “modern socialist country” with “high-quality development,” a slogan that seems designed to sweep aside concerns that China’s economy is in more trouble than the Communist Party wants to admit.

“We must fully and faithfully apply the new development philosophy on all fronts, continue reforms to develop the socialist market economy, promote high-standard opening-up, and accelerate efforts to foster a new pattern of development that is focused on the domestic economy and features positive interplay between domestic and international economic flows,” the dictator said.

Xi seemed at pains to reassure observers who thought China would use the 20th five-year National Congress, and his own claim of an unprecedented third term in power, to pivot away from growth and modernization to deal with internal issues and intensify its focus on militarization. (Read more from “Xi Jinping Declares China the Leading World Power at Communist Party Congress” HERE)

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Tesla Wins Tax Breaks From China After Elon Musk’s Taiwan Comments: Report

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Elon Musk’s electric car maker Tesla has been granted tax exemptions from China just days after the tech mogul was praised by Beijing for saying that Taiwan should become a “special administrative zone” ruled by the Chinese Communist Party.

The Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology unveiled its latest list of electric vehicles that are eligible for purchase tax exemption.

The list includes the latest Tesla Model S and Model X units with 100 kWh battery packs, according to the Teslarati news site. The site reported that two Model S variants — the MSP2P and the MSP2LR — as well as the Model X variants MXP2P and MXP2LR were on the list of exempt vehicles.

Their inclusion on the list suggests that Tesla could soon begin delivering the cars to China soon, according to Teslarati.

Last Friday, Musk generated headlines and controversy after he told Financial Times that he thought Taiwan, the self-ruling island and US ally which China sees as a part of its country, should cede control to Beijing to avoid a broader conflict that would have global economic ramifications. (Read more from “Tesla Wins Tax Breaks From China After Elon Musk’s Taiwan Comments: Report” HERE)

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‘Dangerously Depleted’: The US Is Sending So Many Weapons to Ukraine That Experts Are Starting to Worry

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The U.S. needs to seriously invest more in weapons and ammunition if it wants to continue supporting Ukraine and brace for conflict with other great powers, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Global efforts to support Ukraine’s resistance to the Russian invasion have triggered billions in spending to bolster Ukraine’s military, depleting U.S. stocks and raising concerns that the West may cripple its military opposite the rising threat from China. The U.S. will have to dramatically ramp up production, or otherwise risk further weakening the U.S. arsenal and adversely affecting America’s ability to react to dangers from China and other potential foes, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“For U.S. policy makers, the critical question regarding our policy towards Ukraine is quickly becoming more a what we can do for Ukraine, not necessarily what we should do,” Dan Caldwell, a senior advisor to Concerned Veterans for America and vice president for foreign policy at Stand Together, told the DCNF. “U.S. stockpiles of munitions are becoming dangerously depleted and it will take years for U.S. production capacity to catch up.” (Read more from “‘Dangerously Depleted’: The US Is Sending So Many Weapons to Ukraine That Experts Are Starting to Worry” HERE)

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China’s Xi Issues Dark Warning on Taiwan as He Prepares to Consolidate Power Over CCP

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Chinese leader Xi Jinping, poised to seize a third term in full control of his nation, signaled a pending move on Taiwan, did a victory lap over Bejing’s defeat of Hong Kong’s democracy aspirations and vowed to defeat COVID in a Sunday speech.

The 69-year-old Xi, who became the head of the Chinese Communist Party 10 years ago, struck a stridently nationalistic tone at the opening of the 20th Party Congress, which appears set to affirm him as its leader for life. He seemed to embrace that his muscular government is on a collision course with the West and intends to take over Taiwan.

Xi referred to “rapid changes in the international situation,” which experts inferred meant China’s increasing alienation from the West and burgeoning alliance with Russia.

Xi claimed victory over both Hong Kong’s stalled independence movement and COVID, crediting his government with having “protected people’s lives and health.” Mentioning Taiwan as the third of three major challenges met by his regime was deemed a signal that Beijing may be closer than ever to make a move on Taiwan, a self-governing democracy Beijing claims as its own.

The speech was delivered inside Beijing’s Great Hall of the People to 2,300 of the CCP’s most powerful members. They cheered wildly when the president mentioned “reunification” with Taiwan. Although he pledged to try to achieve the goal peacefully, he issued a dark warning. (Read more from “China’s Xi Issues Dark Warning on Taiwan as He Prepares to Consolidate Power Over CCP” HERE)

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Russia to Hold Large-Scale Nuclear Weapons Exercise: A Drill or Real?

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Russia is expected to hold large-scale exercises of its nuclear forces soon, leaving the West hard-pressed to spot whether Moscow is just carrying drills or an actual nuclear attack, according to a report.

Every year, Russia holds nuclear exercises around October. However, this year’s drills come just weeks after President Vladimir Putin threatened to use nuclear weapons “if the territorial integrity of our country is threatened.” His statement, coupled with the upcoming drills, have some Western officials worried as Russia continues to post losses in Ukraine.

“This is why you don’t want to have extraordinarily overheated rhetoric at the same time you’re going to do a nuclear exercise,” a Western official told Reuters. “Because then we do have an additional challenge to really be sure that the actions that we see, the things that are occurring, are actually an exercise and not something else.”

White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby vowed that the United States would monitor Russia’s so-called “Grom” drills, adding that they expect Moscow to include live missile launches during the exercise.

“While Russia probably believes this exercise will help it project power, particularly in light of recent events, we know that Russian nuclear units train extensively at this time of year, again, routine, and obviously, we’re going to continue to monitor that accordingly,” Kirby told reporters on Thursday. (Read more from “Russia to Hold Large-Scale Nuclear Weapons Exercise: A Drill or Real?” HERE)

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China, Russia Could Launch ‘Space Pearl Harbor’ on Aging US Satellites: Expert

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The United States is not prepared for strategic space competition against a united China and Russia, according to one expert.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is nearing technological parity with the United States in key space domains, according to Brandon Weichert, an independent geopolitical analy
st. That means that it will soon threaten the United States’ ability to project power in space.

“You’re already seeing China being able to catch up to us in certain areas,” Weichert said during an Oct. 13 interview with NTD, a sister media outlet of the Epoch Times.

“They are still able to do things that we were not anticipating that they would be able to do, such as getting this new space station of theirs in orbit as quickly as they did and getting many of our key allies to sign on in support of the new China space station. And that’s just the beginning.”

Weichert said that the United States was not ready to face the combined aggression of the CCP and Vladimir Putin’s Russia simultaneously because the nation had failed to capitalize on its dominance in space following the end of the Cold War. (Read more from “China, Russia Could Launch ‘Space Pearl Harbor’ on Aging US Satellites: Expert” HERE)

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Empowering Mexican Cartels With Biden’s Open Border Is Even Worse Than You Think

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Mexico is a war zone again. But anyone who believes that’s just Mexico’s problem, think again; American national interests are at unprecedented risk.

Cartels’ smuggling syndicates are at each other’s throats along Mexico’s northern border and in Pacific states known as the Tierra Caliente (Hot Zone) as Mexico sends in its military. The warfare has left hundreds dead and whole city blocks scorched, vehicles burning, and citizens taking shelter from hours-long gun-battles. Millions of Mexicans are readying for worse to come.

But so too should Americans. Because, unlike past drug war conflicts in Mexico, the paramilitary armies are swollen like never before with military-grade weaponry bought and paid for by millions of foreign nationals who answered the siren call of President Joe Biden’s open-doors border over the last 20 months, paying cartels huge amounts of money to cross into the United States. The cartels’ growing arsenals and Mount Everest-sized piles of new cash may inalterably compromise Mexico’s central and state governments like never before.

The very real prospect that America would lose even its current imperfect, wanting partnership with Mexico’s government portends serious security, public safety, and even wide-ranging economic impacts on the American people. (Read more from “Empowering Mexican Cartels With Biden’s Open Border Is Even Worse Than You Think” HERE)

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China Trashes Biden National Security Strategy as ‘Outdated’

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China’s state-run Global Times did not think highly of the Biden administration’s latest National Security Strategy (NSS) document, hyperbolically claiming the entire world was immediately gripped by “a strong sense of unease and concern” because American national security will “come at the expense of the security of other countries.”

The Global Times accused the document of strengthening “the camp confrontation and binary opposition mindset that led to the outbreak of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.” This seems like a cheeky observation coming from the state media of a brutal authoritarian regime that has yet to condemn Russia for invading Ukraine.

Most of the Global Times’ critique boiled down to the latest repetition of the Chinese Communist Party’s favorite geopolitical talking point: the U.S. allegedly adopting a “Cold War mentality” by treating China as a menace to be contained, as the Western world confronted the Soviet Union.

The Global Times lost its marbles when the NSS described China and Russia as “powers that layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy,” combining a taste for “wars of aggression” with “actively undermining the democratic political processes of other countries, leveraging technology and supply chains for coercion and repression, and exporting an illiberal model of international order.”

That is a very accurate description of Chinese and Russian policy so, of course, the Chinese state editorialists did not like it one little bit, not even after the White House gave them a break by describing Russia as more of an “immediate threat to the free and open international system” and emphasizing “competition” with China over confrontation. (Read more from “China Trashes Biden National Security Strategy as ‘Outdated’” HERE)

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Entrepreneur: Same Companies That Pulled Out of Russia ‘Will Not Say a Peep’ When China Invades Taiwan

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Strive Asset Management Executive Chairman Vivek Ramaswamy argued on Wednesday that the same American companies which left Russia after the invasion of Ukraine are too financially dependent on China to do the same if the nation attacks Taiwan.

More than 1,000 companies in the Western world have decreased operations within Russia beyond the extent required by international sanctions, according to an analysis from the Yale School of Management. During an interview with Fox Business, Ramaswamy predicted that economic conditions will bar companies from leaving China in the way that did not apply to firms leaving Russia.

“It’s easy for multinational corporations to shun Russia. Multinational corporations are not going to shun China in the same way,” Ramaswamy commented. “Many of them depend on China for their growth. So I think the same multinational corporations that condemned Russia for taking action against Ukraine will not say a peep — I think you can mark my words on this — will not say a peep as China makes its move on Taiwan.”

China has heightened aggression toward Taiwan in recent months. As the United States pursued trade talks with the island nation, the Chinese military sent a “readiness patrol” near Taiwanese sea and airspace. As Russia began the invasion of Ukraine, China likewise sent squadrons of jets into Taiwanese airspace following a similar incursion one month earlier. (Read more from “Entrepreneur: Same Companies That Pulled Out of Russia ‘Will Not Say a Peep’ When China Invades Taiwan” HERE)

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Russia Invites U.S. States to Secede and Join Country

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A senior Russian lawmaker has seemingly invited American states to secede and instead join the Russian Federation, amid polling showing support amongst Americans for their states to break away.

Alexander Tomalchev, a senior member of Russia’s parliament (the Duma) told Russian news website Podmoskovye Segodnya that any US state wanting to secede from the US would be welcome to apply to join his country, Newsweek reported on Monday.

He cited polls showing Americans wanting their states to break away from the US, before calling for any such US state wanting to join Russia to hold elections on the matter.

“It is important that voting takes place not on social networks, but officially and legitimately,” Mr Tomalchev said in apparent reference to online polling in the US and elections in regions of Ukraine annexed by Russia this month.

Mr Tomalchev reportedly added that Moscow would consider any US state wanting to join the Russian Federation should any such election be held, and that United States was beginning “to decay”. (Read more from “Russia Invites U.S. States to Secede and Join Country” HERE)

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