Shakedown: Timeline of America’s 21stC war on China – 2

Page 3: Shakedown Timeline 2020 – Present. Covid, Joe Biden’s presidency to Trump’s 2nd term

Page 2: (This page) Shakedown Timeline 2010-2020. Obama’s Pivot-to-Asia to Donald Trump’s first presidency

Page 1: Shakedown Timeline 1997-2010. Hong Kong handover and WTO entry to President Barack Obama’s Pivot-to-Asia

An epic contemporaneous timeline charting more than twenty years of the relationship between China and the West. Unique live commentary and analysis of US and UK-China political relations.

Documenting events as they happened, in articles and radio broadcasts strung on a historical through-line.

***To get the full chronological picture of the West’s growing hostility towards a developing China, read these extracts from the bottom to the top. This online publication features extracts of Anna’s BBC programmes and published articles (indented) with links. A pdf or eBook with full articles will shortly be available for download.

“Nip troubles in the bud. Sow the great in the small. Difficult things of the world can only be tackled when they are easy. Big things of the world can only be achieved by attending to their small beginnings. … Tackle things before they have appeared. Cultivate peace and order before confusion and disorder have set in. … A journey of a thousand leagues starts from where your feet stand” 
Tao Te Ching

30-31 December 2019, Wuhan, China: The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission notifies its medical institutions about a “strange pneumonia” and on the 31st posts a public warning on its Weibo account about the novel coronavirus that is not SARS. The news is picked up by the agencies and the WHO and reverberates around the world. This is Day Zero for the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Later, samples in France, Barcelona, Italy, Brazil and Red Cross blood samples in the US show Covid has been quietly circulating in 2019 but is first identified in China.

December 2019, Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison holidays at a US military resort in Hawaii during the devastating bush fires. Morrison goes AWOL as firefighters die, koalas and kangaroos fry, in one of the worst ever bush fire seasons. Turns out he was in Hawaii. On a military resort. On an American military resort in US territory. Not taking instructions or anything. A few months later, his Home Affairs minister Peter Dutton & Foreign Affairs minister Marisa Payne join in US Covid accusations against China in April 2020 in parallel with the release of America’s 57-page “blame China” document. Some might think this dirty pool considering China kept Australia safe from America’s 2008 Great Crash as it shook the rest of the world.

KEY DATE 18 October 2019, Event 201 and the Wuhan Military Games:
The Event 201 tabletop pandemic showcase, backed by Bill Gates, Johns Hopkins University and WEF, takes place in New York, the same day as the opening of the international Military Games in Wuhan. The following month, in November 2019, US intelligence briefs NATO and Israel about the pandemic in China but doesn’t warn China. Although the Pentagon later denies this, Israel insists it happened, the “assessment” culminating in the President’s Daily Brief January 2020 which Trump admits to in a recorded interview with Bob Woodward (pub 9 September 2020).

Saturday, 5 October 2019
China: scapegoat and diversion from what ails western capitalism
We all know the United States of America was built on an ancient Native American burial ground, courtesy of European immigrants. Another original sin was slavery; kidnapping men, women and children from Africa for the brute workforce that built so much of America’s wealth. 
Then there’s the 1 per cent ripping off the American people for decades, failing to invest in infrastructure, education, housing, healthcare while the richest 26 individuals took as much as the bottom half of humanity.
And now the US teeters on the edge of the worst economic recession since 1929. The national debt increased to $22 trillion with Trump adding over $2 trillion so far and China’s new wealth is expected to pick up the declining superpower’s tab as a result of Trump’s trade war shakedown.
Like Trump and Brexit, the Hong Kong protest is a revolution from the right. … All of this happening now just as America is hitting the buffers and China’s economy and 1.4 billion-strong market presents a juicy prize. “I believe in the ultimate partition of China—I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.” – Winston Churchill. … continues
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June 2019 THE HONG KONG PROTESTS – National Endowment for Democracy (NED) implicated: As China fails to buckle under Trump’s renewed onslaught, anti-China protests break out in Hong Kong when Carrie Lam proposes an extradition agreement with Taiwan in order to bring to justice Chan Tongkai, a Hong Kong resident who has murdered his pregnant girlfriend on holiday in Taiwan.
Initially peaceful and attracting large numbers, the protesters claim to be demanding “democracy”. They gain sympathy at first as freedom fighters who are wary about the proposed law allowing Hong Kong resident and visitors to be extradited to the mainland. This author expects them to take over the transport system and run it for free to get Hong Kongers on board. Instead, they trash the transport and the city and begin a campaign of beating and maiming mainland Chinese, Mandarin speakers and anyone who disagrees with them, as can be seen from the numerous videos posted online. They claim police brutality but no deaths occur in the same year that US cops kill 1,004 Americans.
However, the protesters’ own brutality results in crippling injuries of civilians, the petrol burning of a 54-year old worker, attempts on police lives and a 70 year old janitor who is bricked to death. Little of this is reported in the western mainstream media except for the relentless hatchet job on the Chinese government and the Hong Kong police force whose top British officers are doxxed and threatened. Westerners are videoed directing the violence and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) emerges as supporting the protesters. The leaders are feted and flattered in Washington. Former Governor Chris Patten (also ex-chair of the BBC Trust) writes the foreword to protester Joshua Wong’s book. Western journalists video themselves cooing over petrol bomb factories in the university. 
The difference between what is seen in the videos and what is reported in the press is probably the biggest factor in widespread change of consciousness since the Iraq War and Gaza. Many commentators cite the Hong Kong protests as the moment that cemented their support for China.

Saturday, 11 May 2019
Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the Chinese economy continues
Donald Trump’s attempted hostile takeover of China’s economy continues apace. The Chinese walked into an ambush when they presented their latest round of changes last week thinking they were still negotiating. Kicked off by Reuters’ “exclusive” briefing by “three U.S. government sources and three private sector sources”, the media then fell in with Trump and trade representative Lighthizer’s narrative that the Chinese “reneged” on a deal that was already sewn up. 
With two tweets on Sunday (provocatively, the 20th anniversary of the US bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade which killed three journalists) stating he was raising current tariffs on China from 10% to 25%, and planning the same for an additional $300 billion of Chinese trade, the President snapped his fingers and wiped $1.36 trillion from the world economy … continues
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March 2019 EU LABELS CHINA A “SYSTEMIC RIVAL”: Only months after a joint naval exercise with China, and on the eve of a possible end of Trump’s trade war with a deal that excludes European business interests, the EU finally buckles under Washington pressure and echoes US definition of their trade partner as an economic competitor and systemic rival. It slams Italy for joining the Belt and Road initiative (23 March 2019), a trade route running across the length of the Europe Asia landmass and beyond. Having been bailed out by China after America’s devastating 2008 crash, the EU complains about China’s subsidised economy.

Sunday, 3 February 2019
How’s it hanging in Brexitland? Politicians fiddle while Brits stare catastrophe in the face
The EU is a rich men and women’s club. But it was a partial counterweight to America’s bullying. The danger was that if Johnson et al succeeded in splitting one of the three most powerful countries in the EU away from the others, there was a real danger of pulling Britain into the US camp and under control of the Military Industrial Complex, thus making the world a more dangerous place. And we would all suffer the economic fallout … continues
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Monday, 24 December 2018
Happy New Year: Will Donald Trump’s tiny hand press the Big Red Button in 2019?
It’s fascinating (in a horror-show kind of way) to watch the United States of America write itself a new narrative. Not the one where it dominated the post-World War II liberal global order and made itself the wealthiest economy on the planet by a long chalk, but a victim narrative in which poor little America is bullied and ripped off by China, formerly one of the poorest countries in the world but which now happens to be looming in America’s rear-view mirror. 
For several years, we’ve been told by the experts that China is the exciting new economy in which the world’s investors were parking their money, while the US was in decline with failing demographics and dim long-term prospects. With China’s population of 1.4 billion, a growing middle class of over 500 million, 800 million raised out of poverty, an internet penetration rate of only 55 percent (against US 83 percent), and American companies making money hand over fist with a lot more to come, you can see how some might cast an enviable eye over such a fat, juicy market and think: I’ll have that. 
The unpalatable fact for Trump is that – taking into account in-country Chinese sales of US goods and services such as those of Starbucks, Apple, MacDonalds, Coke etc – the US has a $24bn SURPLUS with China. And as even Gary Cohn pointed out, the “deficit” represents $300bn of goods that Americans could buy cheaply and thereby feel richer than they actually were … continues
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December 2018 HUAWEI’S MENG WANZHOU ARRESTED IN CANADA: Reminiscent of what ancient Roman tyrants used to do, the daughter of the founder of the Huawei 5G tech rival to the US is arrested in Canada on suspicious charges that are never proven in court. After three years under house arrest, fighting off efforts to extradite her to the US, she is finally released 21 September 2021.

Tuesday, 13 November 2018
What’s Donald Trump’s trade war with China REALLY about?
History repeats itself: Trump’s fantasy trade-deficit is an excuse for carving up China
I’d been hoping for the press to fact-check the issue of Trump’s trade war on China, which threatens to tip parts of the world (including America) into recession. I am disappointed to see the figures of $376bn and $500bn US trade deficit with China regurgitated in the British and American media with few corrections, or any attempts to cut through the hawks’ spin.
These elevated figures are further distorted by the fact that China is still mainly a base for assembly of goods which the nation is hoping to leave far behind in favour of high-end tech. So, for example, a thousand-buck iPhone X costs around $500 to make, out of which the high-end components are made elsewhere (Taiwan and South Korea), while China’s costs amount to about 10 per cent, or around $47. And yet the entire wholesale cost of $500 is counted in the purported deficit with China — a ten-fold distortion …continues
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AUGUST 2018 The UN XINJIANG REPORT THAT IS NOT THE UN: The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) confirms that the widely-reported claim of mass incarceration of Uyghurs in internment camps was made by the one American member of the independent Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, and not by the UN or its officials. Associated Press reveals that this member “did not specify a source for that information in her remarks at the hearing” and yet it spreads far and wide in the mainstream press, ending up quoted as verification.

Friday, 4 May 2018
When is a dress just a dress? American teenager’s Chinese prom dress and cultural appropriation The Guardian
Anna Chen issues a warning in the Guardian and burns her bridges with the mainstream media (MSM): With President Trump and his acolytes pumping up yellow peril fears around China, and his trade wars threatening to slip into hot wars, the last thing we need is this trivialised pastiche of serious debate. Minorities have precious little ammunition with which to challenge tribal juggernauts. Don’t waste what little cultural and political firepower we have … continues
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April 2018: Even the bankers recognise the dangers of the threat of a trade war on our global lifeboat. Christine Lagarde of the IMF points out that the world economy is emerging in sync for the first time since America’s Great Crash of 2008, so don’t wreck it. Boris Johnson later complains in 2020 that Trump’s trade war is letting all the air out of the tyres of the global system. Lagarde nails the problem: “At the core was financial innovation that vastly outpaced regulation and supervision. Financial institutions—particularly in the United States and Europe—went on a frenzy of reckless risk-taking.” 

Jan 2018: THE GERMAN PORT OF DUISBERG BECOMES EUROPE’S MOST IMPORTANT HUB FOR CHINESE TRAINS ALONG THE BELT AND ROAD. Europe and China gravitate closer together, threatening to leave America in the cold even though US companies are making half their profits from in-China sales and services. A three-way standoff looms.

December 2017 THE START OF US SANCTIONS AGAINST HUAWEI: Congress prohibits the use of Huawei equipment in the US government in 2018. John Bolton, US National Security Advisor 2018-19, admits he knew in advance of the arrest in Canada of Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of Huawei’s founder and top executive of the tech giant, in December 2018 on the day Trump secures a trade war truce with President Xi Jinping in a personal meeting. He later claims in 2019 that Trump offers her up in exchange of a trade deal with China. Huawei is accused of criminality by the Department of Justice and added to the trade restriction Entity List by the Department of Commerce in May 2019. The Department of Justice ups the ante in February 2020, adding racketeering and theft of trade secrets to the charge sheet which is never proved in a court of law. Biden keeps Huawei on the Entity List but both admins carry on limited low key trade. Meng is finally released from Canadian house arrest on 21 September 2021.

Friday, 7 April 2017
President Trump turns on a dime and bombs Syria: deep state regains control
Lemme see … in the week when Steve Bannon is finally ousted from the National Security Council (NSC) with nary a murmer from Trump who suddenly does a dramatic reverse on Syria in the very moments when Chinese President Xi Jinping is at Mar-a-Lago … Phew! All the behind-the-scenes action finally manifesting in the public sphere with the first direct U.S. airstrike on a Syrian airbase. 
Let’s unpack this with what little info we have. Assad is winning the civil war but, just at the moment the rebels and their backers want the US smashing them into regime change, he handily provides the event most likely to bring it on and uses the banned chemical weapon sarin on his citizens leaving some 80 dead and many more horribly injured. And only weeks after 30 Yemeni civilians including “beautiful babies” and an American Navy Seal were killed in allied airstrikes in concert with those noble defenders of democracy, Saudi Arabia, and closely following over a hundred killed in Mosul. …continues
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Friday, 27 January 2017
President Trump to personally handle UK trade deal despite his nightmare record in business: Theresa May rolls over
Madam Miaow prescient yet again in 2017 …
So the Fed will have to tighten monetary control by raising interest rates to control rising inflation after years of trying to kick start it, and the US will be at, or heading back to, negative rates by next year.  
Asia might pull something positive out of a hat, especially if China fills the gap left by a protectionist USA. But then the stubby-fingered one will most likely try to bomb them back to the stone age. You can see the boys gagging to play with the toys with a blockade of the South China Sea’s Malacca Straits as the opener. … continues
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CHINESE BELT AND ROAD REACHES BARKING, EAST LONDON: A glimmer of hope for the world as the first of China’s UK-bound Belt and Road trains reaches Barking in East London, 18 January 2017. The China Railway Express left Yiwu in eastern China two weeks previously on 3 January carrying our favourite merchandise, saving on time and pollution.

Saturday, 19 November 2016
Trump’s protectionism could be midwife to prosperous Asian region — if he doesn’t nuke it first
As Europe implodes and the US goes into protectionist lock-down, the strongest potential area of growth is the Asian region (including Australasia) due to powerful demographics. Christine Lagarde of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecasts Asia to drive nearly two-thirds of global growth over 4 years. But that was BT (before Trump). 
President Barack Obama saw China as an economic rival and tried to strangle it by creating the Tran-Pacific Partnership (TPP) consisting of 12 South American and Pacific nations and the US but EXCLUDING China in its own backyard. Poking the sleeping dragon with a sharp stick, Obama also transferred military from the Middle East to the Pacific Rim and the South China Sea. 
Whether you like it or not, China saw what was coming down the pike and asserted its presence by building those islands … continues
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Monday, 7 November 2016
Zombie Punks vs Scary Clowns in the New World Order after Clinton or Trump wins POTUS election
With only one day to go before the US votes for its next president, one question remains: who is the least worst? 
Think about this. Trump, Putin and now, it appears, China, are contemplating a period summed up in the famous term of the early 20th Century economist Joseph Schumpeter as ‘creative destruction’. …
… Recession is coming to the UK thanks to inflation of at least 4 per cent headed our way. (Mark Carney is staying on at the BOE until 2019 ’cause he knows the chickens will be coming home to roost by 2018.) Employers won’t match inflation, wages will freeze or effectively fall, our spending will drop and companies will go bust. And there’s that great big global debt bubble that has to eventually go “pop” … 
But for capitalists who can hang on through the slump, there are fortunes to be made as Britain then “recovers” and stocks bought at fire sale prices rise. Same for the US where markets are at the end of a bull run that has been fuelled by easy money injected into the system by the central banks. Only the fittest survive in Trumpworld, everyone else is going to find it very hard. … continues
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Friday, 4th November 2016
BBC turns Terracotta Warriors origins into culture wars
The world is changing, the sun sets on the British empire and all that is solid melts like a Mr Whippy ice-cream in the summer heat. 
Some people can’t stand it. In terms of cultural appropriation, Dan Snow’s claim in his programme, The Greatest Tomb On Earth: Secrets Of Ancient China, that the Terracotta Warriors (made some two centuries before the Common Era), were Greek-led innovations takes the chauvinist biscuit. 
Snow dons his best Victorian colonialist demeanor to assure BBC viewers that, joy of joys, it was us who did it after all. All is right with the world. 
According to the BBC puff, “Mobilising the latest technology, delving into some of the oldest texts, enlisting world experts and employing forensic science, together the three reveal an explosive secret from the foundations of the Chinese empire”. … continues
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Friday, 21 October 2016
Global economy running on fumes: let’s have a jolly nice war
Sterling has taken a post-Brexit pounding and may even fall below parity with the dollar. The US economy is at the top of a bull run and running on fumes. The Euro is sliding and the European Union may disintegrate. Deutsche Bank may fail (it’s much, MUCH bigger than Lehman Bros) and could be the trigger for another economic meltdown … only without the safety net of a wealthy China growing at full throttle. China has the best potential to thrive but has a ticking time-bomb credit bubble of 250 per cent of GDP. … continues
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JUNE 2016, BREXIT: The UK referendum decides by 52 to 48 per cent of the total votes cast to leave the European Union in order to “take back control”. Thus only 37 per cent of the British population votes to take us out of the EU frying pan and into the US fire. Europe has been been drawn by China’s sheer size and gravity towards the rising superpower that America sees as its rival and “strategic competitor”. Obama warns Britain they are back of the queue for trade deals. Republicans such as Donald Trump and his allies like UKIP’s Nigel Farage relish the move.

Wednesday, 6 July 2016
CHILCOT REPORT confirms anti-war movement was right from the start: Tony Blair trampled over the truth for the Iraq War
The Chilcot report on the Iraq War has finally been published and all eyes are on Tony Blair. 
It’s taken seven years and 2.6 million words to confirm what anti-war voices were saying from September 2001 — do not invade Iraq on a flimsy pretext, because the results will be dire for the Iraqis and for the world. 
Chilcot says the inquiry does not accept Blair’s claim that it was impossible to predict the post-invasion problems. Those problems, he says, were indeed anticipated.
“Mr Blair had been warned, however, that military action would increase the threat from Al Qaeda to the UK and to UK interests. He had also been warned that an invasion might lead to Iraq’s weapons and capabilities being transferred into the hands of terrorists,” Chilcot said in this morning’s opening statement. … continues
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20 October 2015 UK CHINA GOLDEN ERA — PRESIDENT XI JINPING’S STATE VISIT TO BRITAIN: President Xi toasts Queen Elizabeth at the state banquet. Two days later, Prime Minister David Cameron takes Xi for a pint at his local pub. Xi urges Cameron to stay in the EU:  “China hopes to see a prosperous Europe and a united EU, and hopes Britain, as an important member of the EU, can play an even more positive and constructive role in promoting the deepening development of China-EU ties”.

5 October 2015, THE TRANS PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP: The Obama administration’s TPP agreement with 11 partnering nations is concluded. It excludes China from membership and benefits such as the elimination of 18,000 import taxes on US goods, standing as high as 70 per cent in the auto trade and covering manufacturing, agricultural, information and communication products.

24 September 2015 THE THUCYDIDES TRAP: Graham Allison raises the spectre of the Trap in The Atlantic the week Xi Jinping make his first visit to the US to meet President Obama. Xi offers not to militarise China’s reclaimed islands as Vietnam has been doing. Obama’s response is to pile in even more military. Allison publishes his thoughts on the dangers of competing superpowers stumbling into catastrophic war in his 2017 book, Destined for War, whose Thucydides Trap model uses the classic example of ancient Sparta feeling threatened by upcoming rival Athens and the ensuing war that cripples both states.

May 2015 MADE IN CHINA 2025: President Xi announces the national strategic plan to lift the country out of its lowly status as the “world’s factory” making our cheap tat and turn themselves into a technological powerhouse.

30 August 2014
South China Morning Post magazine: The Chinese Labour Corps by Anna Chen
This month, the world commemorated the centenary of the outbreak of the first world war. Notably absent in the British ceremonies was any mention of the 140,000 or more Chinese workers, including 96,000 in the Chinese Labour Corps (CLC), who provided the support system for frontline Allied troops. Thousands of these men died in service.
The Chinese did the heavy support work – digging trenches, hauling ammunition and supplies, and retrieving bodies. Yet none of Britain’s 43,000 first world war memorials acknowledge the participation of the CLC, despite the battlefields of France and Belgium being littered with the remains of these men. … continues
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15 April 2014
CHINA AND ITS INVENTIONS: ANNA CHEN RESONANCE FM RADIO 2014
Anna Chen presented her groundbreaking radio series on China’s scientific and cultural inventions for Resonance FM in 2014.
While Boris Johnson was insisting Chinese can’t innovate, Anna took audiences on a journey from China’s world firsts to European domination and the Opium Wars.
Replayed here in the week of the Shenzhou 18 & 19 handover on the Tiangong Space Station.
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1 March 2014 XINJIANG: A terrorist attack at Kunming rail station in Yunnan Province kills 31 and injures 143. As in the US and the UK, China is subjected to a renewed wave of terrorism, 2009 to 2017.

February 2014 THE UKRAINE COUP: The US-backed Maidan coup following the Euromaidan protests succeeds in the Ukraine, overthrowing the democratically elected President Yanukovych. Neo-conservative national security advisor Victoria Nuland (wife of Project for the New American Century founder Robert Kagan) infamously tells the US ambassador, “F**k the EU.” Russia takes back Crimea, populated mainly by Russian-speakers.

2013 THE IMF AND THE UKRAINE: The International Monetary Fund (IMF) demands that, having defied them and raised minimum wages and pensions, President Viktor Yanukovych should liberalise the Ukraine economy and slash budgets and energy subsidies in exchange for trade integration with the EU and an aid package of $15 billion. He declines Vice President Joe Biden’s deal and turns instead to Russia. This seals his fate. NATO pledges support for the Ukraine. The American-backed coup succeeds in 2014. Ukraine will cut energy subsidies to satisfy the IMF in 2016. The Nord Stream pipelines will be blown up in September 2022 making Europe dependent on American Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) and sending prices soaring.

July-August 2013 TALISMAN SABER MILITARY EXERCISES: 22,000 US personnel and 7,000 Australians using 26 ships and V-22 aircraft practise war on China off north east Australia. It involves blockading various straits, including the crucial Malacca Strait, fencing in our global factory under the pretence that China will want to block its own sea lanes.

March – June 2013 OBAMA INCREASES MILITARY FORCES IN ASIA
“It is expected that when the ‘rebalancing’ or ‘pivot’ of forces from the Atlantic to the Pacific is complete, 60 percent of the U.S. Navy will be based in the Pacific – a 10 percent increase from current levels. In effect, the theater would gain one additional U.S. aircraft carrier, seven destroyers, ten littoral combat ships and two submarines, plus reconnaissance assets such as EP3 spy planes.” Strategic Trends 2013
4 June 2013 Memorandum: Securing U.S. Interests and Values in the Asia-Pacific” The Asia-Pacific Strategy Working Group at the The American Enterprise Institute tells Obama he can achieve his aims in Asia Pacific by employing ” a comprehensive, long-term strategy that satisfies the following four conditions: promoting economic integration and liberalization; strengthening alliances and security partnerships; reinforcing U.S. military posture in the Asia-Pacific; draw on the full range of U.S. diplomatic and national power.” (Wiki)

10 March 2013, FORMER VICE-PRESIDENT XI JINPING IS ELECTED STATE PRESIDENT at the 12th National People’s Congress, replacing President Hu Jintao

15 November 2012, XI JINPING GAINS KEY LEADERSHIP ROLES
Vice-president Xi is elected general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC) at the 18th Central Committee. Along with two thirds of the party leadership replaced, this represents a major change of guard, although he keeps Li Keqiang as premier. He stresses that China does not export revolution or poverty. The average Chinese Joe wants better education, jobs, healthcare, higher living standards and environment and Xi is the the man to deliver the “Chinese Dream”. Both tigers and flies would be targeted in anti-corruption action, and he isn’t about to do anything reckless with the economy. Slow and steady progress is the order of the day.

2012, PRESIDENT OBAMA’S PIVOT TO ASIA TURNS EVEN NASTIER IN THE MALACCA STRAIT
Obama’s Pivot to Asia steps up its intimidation of China in 2012 when US plans for military expansion in the Asia-Pacific include sending more forces to Singapore, Darwin, Perth, Guam, Philippines, South Korea and Japan plus a floating navy of 16,000 troops. The Malacca Straits becomes a key focus, linking the Pacific with the Indian Ocean and the location of US ally war exercises. To all intents and purposes, this is a practise run to blockade China and its sea routes to the rest of the world outside outside Asia. In addition, the US has a noose of hundreds of bases surrounding China.

22 October 2012
The Guardian: Memo to the RSC: east Asians can be more than just dogs and maids by Anna Chen
The Royal Shakespeare Company’s casting for The Orphan of Zhao seems to hark back to an age of British imperialism
It’s no fun being bred out of the cultural gene pool. Watching TV, theatre or film, I’m on constant alert for a glimpse of someone who looks Chinese, for the slightest resemblance to an estimated 499,999 others like me living in the UK. …
So it was with a sense of “here we go again” that we learned that the esteemed Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) is mounting the classic play The Orphan of Zhao in the way prize trophies usually get mounted: gutted and stuffed. This 13th-century Yuan-dynasty masterpiece may be the first Chinese play, to make it to the hallowed RSC, but the only parts given to actors of east Asian heritage are two dogs. And a maid-servant. Who dies. Tragically.
Yes, out of 17 roles in the classic known to Eurocentrics as “the Chinese Hamlet”, a grand total of three have gone to Asians. Another dog is played by a black actor, making you wonder exactly what the RSC is trying to say. … continues
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2 August 2012
The Guardian: The monstering of swimmer Ye Shiwen says much about declining superpowers by Anna Chen
Chinese Olympic athletes are people, not comic book villains. Something’s going on when one nation is so singled out
It’s not cricket, you know. There’s something fiendishly cruel about the monstering of 16-year-old Ye Shiwen, who won a swimming gold in Saturday’s 400m individual medley. First she was labelled a cheat in front of a global audience and then refused an apology when repeated drugs tests show up clean as a whistle. …
The argument slips around like a noose that keeps on missing. You can’t get her on doping as she’s clear so, in order to save face, it must be genetic engineering, the Chinese being so subhumanly clever and ruthless. …
Elsewhere, the press has been sly in their dehumanising insinuations about Ye looking like a “killer whale”, and the Chinese being selected to the point of being a “different species”, with shades of Morrissey’s infamous “subspecies” jibe. …
Is it the howl of big beasts who once defined human excellence and standards of beauty being knocked off their perch by the rising superpower? … continues
READ MORE: Guardian article >>>
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June 2012 CHINA AND UKRAINE GOVERNMENTS SIGN AGRICULTURAL TRADE MEMORANDUM
In the deal, Ukraine receives USD$3 billion in credit and will supply China with 3m tons of maize. China provides seeds and crop protection, and will build fertiliser and crop protection plants.
Throughout 2013, relations will draw the countries closer together with treaties and cooperation pledged and signed.

Thursday, 17 May 2012
The Opium War by Julia Lovell book review: Smoke and mirrors
The West’s culture warriors get into gear, bending the narrative to warm us up for what’s coming down the pike – a reordering of global power.
With renewed calls for the West to assert its imperial might in the interest of “capitalism and democracy … if necessary by military force ” (historian and BBC Reith Lecturer Niall Ferguson), it’s useful to examine one episode in Britain’s history when we attempted to do so, with catastrophic results for the conquered nation. …
Lovell seeks to make a case against the communist government, but her thrust replaces one orthodoxy with another. In describing the fundamental rottenness of an ossified and decadent empire (China’s, not ours) she inadvertently stirs a degree of sympathy with those men and women who tried to build a better society in response to the horrors visited upon a country on its knees but who have tragically failed to avoid writing their own catalogue of misery despite doubling life-expectancy and raising 600 million out of absolute poverty. As a demolition job on the upstart rival on the global stage, this book is sure to do well among those less scholarly than the professor who will seize on this exercise in exculpation with glee. …continues
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March 2012, CCTVS IN CHINA FACILITATED BY US CAPITAL
Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital finances China’s mass installation of CCTVs across the country, overtaking the UK for the number of surveillance cameras per capita.

“Expect proxy wars and monstering of China in the supine media as we all get programmed to cheer World War Three and a Half.”

Anna Chen, 17 November 2011

Thursday, 17 November 2011
Obama in Yo Mama war with China: Pacific Rimmers look out!
Is it my imagination or is cuddly President Barack Obama picking a fight with China? 
No sooner has the world begun to heal after the Bush neocon excesses that led to such bloodshed in the Middle east, not to mention an enormous fillip to the arms industry, than Obama announces a tectonic shift in US imperialist policy.  
Only a few weeks since Hillary Clinton announced that the new superpower was in the queue not so far along from Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iran and Korea for whipping into shape, I listened to Obama’s speech to the Australian Parliament last night, struck by sabre-rattling out of a bygone age. “The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay.” Is he on something? … Expect proxy wars and monstering of China in the supine media as we all get programmed to cheer World War Three and a Half.
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17 NOVEMBER 2011: PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA (2009-2017) TOURS THE ASIA-PACIFIC AND ANNOUNCES A CHANGE OF POLICY SHORTLY AFTER CHINA HAS BAILED OUT AMERICA AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY.
Obama appears to pick a fight with them, no good deed going unpunished. “America is a Pacific power and we are here to stay,” China must be a “responsible stakeholder” and “play by the rules”.
“As President, I have, therefore, made a deliberate and strategic decision – as a Pacific nation, the United States will play a larger and long-term role in shaping this region and its future, by upholding core principles and in close partnership with our allies and friends. … I have directed my national security team to make our presence and mission in the Asia Pacific a top priority. As a result, reductions in U.S. defense spending will not – I repeat, will not – come at the expense of the Asia Pacific. … As we plan and budget for the future, we will allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in this region.  We will preserve our unique ability to project power and deter threats to peace. We will keep our commitments, including our treaty obligations to allies like Australia. And we will constantly strengthen our capabilities to meet the needs of the 21st century. Our enduring interests in the region demand our enduring presence in the region. The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay.”
Obama’s speech follows Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s manifesto, “America’s Pacific Century,” published by Foreign Policy, 1 October 2011. In it, she emphasises the strategic importance of the central EurAsia landmass and the “Western Pacific,” right up to China’s South and East China Sea coast.
“The future of politics will be decided in Asia, not Afghanistan or Iraq, and the United States will be right at the center of the action.”
The following year, President Barack Obama announces his Pivot to Asia, pulling out military forces from the Middle East and moving them to Asia.

24 August 2011
Vincent Chin and Simon San: two murders, same indifference
Asian lives continue to be devalued and diminished in the USA and Britain. Dehumanisation is enabled by keeping us invisible and excluded from the culture. It is easier to scapegoat and wish ill on someone whose humanity is hidden.
Vincent Chin and Simon San were born and murdered decades apart on two different continents, but the common factor is the callousness and indifference with which their cases have been dealt with by the investigating police and prosecutors. 
Justice is off the menu when it comes to these Chinese deaths. While the police finally admitthat an acknowledgment of the racist dimension of Simon’s murder by a white mob outside the family-run takeaway in Edinburgh in Scotland would have resulted in stiff sentences, the men have been given 24 months, 26 months and five years for the thug who landed the killer blow that smashed Simon’s head against the pavement. …
This insulting sentence echoes the $3,000 fine and three years probation imposed on the white Detroit car-workers, Richard Ebens and Michael Nitz, who beat Vincent Chin to death with a baseball bat in front of witnesses one summer evening in 1982. … continues 
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JULY 2011, CHINA’S HOLDING OF US TREASURIES PEAKS: Having saved, not only America’s economy but the global system, too, China realises that no good deed goes unpunished. One year after Obama leads the attack on the rising superpower with his Pivot to China in July 2010, China’s purchase of US Treasuries stall with the result that it’s all downhill from here.

June 2011 WIKILEAKS CABLES RELEASED: Secret cables from the US embassy in Beijing from 1989 reveal there were not the deaths in Tiananmen Square as claimed in a vicious propaganda war. There are estimated to be between dozens to several hundreds deaths from clashes between the PLA and protesters in the surrounding streets, which is bad enough, but not the massacre. In retrospect, this looks like one of the USA’s early Colour Revolutions we’ll see again and again in the years following. This revelation confirms what I’d suspected and marks a change of consciousness not just for myself, but many others. No wonder America wants revenge on Julian Assange. For the record, I no longer think of Gaddafi as a despot and I question the attacks on America’s list of target countries. America’s ruling elite won’t even share wealth with their own people, with the top one per cent owning as much as the bottom 90 percent, and 0.1 per cent owning 15.7 per cent of the nation’s wealth. Why would they share the world with anyone?

21 May 2011
Is China a responsible stakeholder? Chatham House report review
In 2005, the Bush Jr administration echoed the fear that China would not be a responsible stakeholder even as they bombed Iraq. And Condoleeza Rice had America on paranoia standby when she declared China to be “not a status quo power”, meaning the US could not be certain that its own interests would remain untouched by the new kid on the block. …
… However, the John Milius school of Red Dawn politics rages that China is only pretending to be peaceful and that she’ll reveal her full gory glory in true Fu Manchu fashion once all her plans and capabilities are in place. I saw Team America. I know how this one plays out. …
… Surfing a tidal wave of claims that China is not pulling its weight, Etzioni cites a parsimonious foreign aid policy. After the Haiti earthquake in 2010, I remember foreign media reporting the rapid arrival of fully tooled-up Chinese rescue teams, complete with dog-handlers, on the stricken island before many Western nations, including Britain, could muster their forces.
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Sunday 1 May 2011
Unto the last babe. Gaddafi’s family slaughtered
Muamar Gaddafi led the richest country in Africa whose people enjoyed housing, health, interest-free loans, free electricity, a percentage of oil sales for all citizens and many other socialist benefits. He’d proposed an African Alliance and continental currency, was then branded a dictator, the prelude to violent regime change, and was assassinated while Obama and Hillary Clinton watched: “We came, we saw, he died,” she quipped. Most of his wealth remains unaccounted for.
Killing Muammar Gaddafi’s family unto the last babe doesn’t seem to have much to to with protecting the rebels from our old mucker but it draws the oil reserves ever closer to our grasp. … continues
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Thursday, 10 March 2011
Working for the Clampdown: Niall Ferguson’s testosterone theory of history
Culture warrior lays out US empire’s core strategy and aims in his Channel 4 TV series. Niall Ferguson’s ‘Killer Apps’ was an early shot by academia in rationalising the coming realignment of global power for the public. The Golden Age with China is to have a limited shelf-life.
Coming on like an Oxbridge Jeremy Clarkson, Ferguson promises an explanation as to why the West is in decline and about to be overtaken by Asia, as represented by China in the first programme. However, instead of presenting a cool economic and political analysis of history since 1420 when China was the most advanced nation in the world and England was a ‘septic isle’, this heavyweight intellectual rammed home a barrage of triumphalist tub-thumping which quite startled me. His nostalgia for Empire, as once observed by an astute Eric Hobsbawm, was cranked up to eleven as he attempted to nail his viewers to the headboard … 
Fergy fetishises capitalist competition out of context, out of time. ‘By being divided, the West was able to rule the world’, he says, as if this is a good thing on its own. He wants this ‘killer app’ applied as a principle where we are all atomised and competing against each other for dwindling resources … continues
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18-21 January 2011, PRESIDENT HU JINTAO’S STATE VISIT TO THE US
President Hu Jintao meets President Barack Obama in Washington. Hu appears to settle the atmosphere after the ructions of Copenhagen and China’s reluctance to rein in North Korea’s President Kim Jong Un and his nuclear tests. In a joint statement Hu and Obama “reaffirmed their commitment to building a positive, cooperative, and comprehensive U.S. – China relationship for the 21st  century, which serves the interests of the American and Chinese peoples and of the global community.”

Thursday, 11 November 2010
UK PM DAVID CAMERON’S TEAM WEAR POPPIES IN CHINA
Yes, that’s a great idea. Wear poppies on a trade visit to China in the 150th anniversary year marking the end of the Opium Wars when Britain forced cheap Bengal opium on the Chinese people at the point of a gun. Prime Minister David Cameron may think he is remembering the dead of World Wars One and Two, but in China the vivid symbols only serve as a reminder of Western arrogance and corruption and the Chinese who died due to the actions of a ruthless invading force … continues
[Ironically, this event ended up marking the start of the Golden Era of UK China relations, brought to a close by the US and Boris Johnson.] 
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Saturday, 25 September 2010
Ed Miliband a safe pair of hands for the US
So, Miliband Minor gets the job. No surprises there considering he’s been falling over himself to prove that he’s as much in the US’s pockets as Tony Blair was. …  As I commented at the time, the Danish Text produced in secret by the rich nations led by the US at the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit last year was in OPPOSITION to the position of China, India, et al. It would have left the US producing carbon emissions at four times per capita that of the Chinese. … continues
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Sunday, 8 August 2010
BBC jumps the orientalist shark: Fu Manchu in Edinburgh
Shortly after Anna presented the series, Chinese in Britain, and other rare efforts to challenge Yellow Peril tropes embedded in the culture (and possibly prompted by them), here’s their revival. Another vampire that won’t stay staked.
Even Radio 4 is at it. Hard on the heels of last week’s Sherlock oriental hate-fest, my beloved BBC Radio 4 has just broadcast someone called Miles Jupp presenting a thinly disguised bit of sinophobia celebrating one of the most notorious exercises in colonialist literature: Fu Manchu In Edinburgh. 
While it’s valid to explore the imaginary world which an iconic literary creation inhabits, the unquestioning depiction of Chinese as dehumanised hate-figures in the almost utter absence of humanised Chinese in the culture is fairly loathsome, not to mention irresponsible. The (il)liberal peppering throughout of orientalised buzz-words such as “fiendish” and “diabolical” only reinforces the suspicion that they’ve dug up Leni Riefenstahl and hired her as executive producer. … continues
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KEY DATE: 23 July 2010, OBAMA’S STRATEGIC PIVOT TO ASIA IS LAUNCHED, ENDING THE US-CHINA PARTNERSHIP.
The opening salvo in Obama’s “return to the Asia-Pacific” is fired by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the ASEAN Regional Forum in Hanoi 23 July, right in the middle of China’s World Expo 2010 showcase in Shanghai. This is the year China overtakes Japan to become the world’s second largest economy, and passes the US to become the world’s largest manufacturer.
The US is clearly rattled by China’s rapid progress and the rising superpower is now seen as America’s main rival rather than its partner.
Obama deploys 60 percent of US navy and air force to the Asia-Pacific region and creates the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) which excludes China from its trade benefits.
In further containment policy, Hillary Clinton starts her “smart power” initiative, stirring up conflict between China and its neighbours.
Critics point out that the effect was to startle China into modernising its military, deepened mistrust between the two superpowers, and focused China’s energies on its economic and trade structures such as Belt and Road, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RECP), the Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP) and creation of the BRICS Development Bank and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Some have labelled President Joe Biden’s aggressive anti-China policy since his election in 2020 as “Obama’s third term”.

Tuesday, 8 June 2010
Anna tackles embedded dehumanisation of Chinese in the culture, making visible the invisible. Or, in this case, making audible the unperceived subtleties of manipulation through music.
Chopsticks At Dawn – BBC Radio 4
BBC Radio 4 — 13:30
Tuesday 8th June 2010 
Written and presented by Anna Chen with Dr Jonathan Walker. Produced by Mukti Jain Campion and Chris Eldon-Lee for Culture Wise.
Pick Of The Day: RadioTimes, Observer, Sunday Telegraph, Time Out, Mail On Sunday. Also daily choice in the Times, Telegraph and Independent
“Anna Chen reflects, through gritted teeth, on representations of Chinese music, the ingy pingy clichés as used by everyone from George Formby to David Bowie, demeaning a culture which, in other fields, we respect. This isn’t a dreary sermon, though. It’s a lively, rueful journey through aural conditioning. Why do some sounds suggest the Orient to us? She listens to Ravel and has the pentatonic scale (as played on a piano’s black keys) explained to her as a short cut to something that to Westerners signals ‘east’. But there’s more to it than that.” – Daily Telegraph
What makes certain configurations of notes in Western music sound Chinese? And why does it set my teeth on edge?
Chinese decorative arts are revered in the West. From Willow pattern dinner plates to the Brighton Pavilion, their designs are regarded as beautiful and sophisticated. But for the past two centuries European composers and musicians have had no qualms about mercilessly parodying what they thought of as ‘Chinese tunes’.
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6 May 2010, THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY WINS THE UK GENERAL ELECTION BUT WITH A HUNG PARLIAMENT.
The two party system nears collapse as there’s so little to choose between them. The Coalition government is enabled by the Liberal Democrats. David Cameron becomes the first Tory Prime Minister since Tony Blair ousted them in 1997.

1 May to 31 October 2010 WORLD EXPO, SHANGHAI and CHINA BECOMES SECOND LARGEST ECONOMY IN THE WORLD
Like the 2008 Olympic Games held in Beijing, the Shanghai Expo showcases China’s technological progress, drawing 73 million visitors from across the world. In the first quarter of 2010, the Chinese economy overtakes Japan to become the second-biggest in the world after the USA. Goldman Sachs predicts China will become the largest around 2027.

Friday, 19th March 2010
This is where the West wants to keep China, making our tat instead of innovating and steadily developing as the world’s lifeboat and growth engine. Anna made this programme in 2010 and look how far they’ve come.
China, Britain and the Nunzilla Conundrum
Written and presented by Anna Chen. Producer Sally Heaven.
BBC Radio 4 – 11.00-11.30am 
PICK OF THE DAY Guardian Guide, Radio Times and Daily Telegraph which says, ” … tying it with a ribbon of her wit. “
PICK OF THE WEEK Sunday Telegraph ” … refreshingly original …”
Recommended by the Diocese of Liverpool
Made in China, designed in Britain, consumed in the West. Anna Chen asks what throwaway gifts such as the fire-breathing wind-up Nunzilla toy or Mummy Mike tell Britain about both its own society and its relationship with China.
“Perhaps a taste for tat signals an economy in the later stages of capitalism which, staring into the abyss, finds solace (if no actual solution) in fits of giggles. For the Chinese, with memories of deprivation rooted in centuries of foreign exploitation, imperial rule and civil wars, wasting money on trivia is serious business. …
… “People want to buy into the brand,” he says of a nation entering the equivalent of Britain’s 1960s economic explosion. “There is extreme wealth, and they aspire to European brands and European-made products.”
“Simon Collinson of Warwick University Business School says change is underway. “As the Chinese get better at understanding what is needed in the West they will get better, not just at designing, but actually coming up with new innovations.”
“The good news is that the government is closing down the bad old factories, with fewer but higher-tech facilities surviving. Only 3,000 out of 8,000 toy factories survive. And in 2006 they would have relaxed their restrictions on unions had the American Chamber of Commerce, backed up by the Europeans, not lobbied hard to stop it happening. …” continues
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2010, SOUTH CHINA SEA AND ASIA PIVOT:
The Shakedown timeline begins in earnest. In 2010, the Obama administration begins a new strategy, echoing NATO’s proposed extension to Russia’s borders, by asserting US power on mainland Asia. It woos Vietnam and Cambodia, China’s close neighbours, with “strategic cooperation” and military exercises.
On the Korean peninsula, Bush’s planned gradual military withdrawal is reversed as Obama pours in even more forces. Australia and Singapore receive new deployments of US troops & hardware.
In 2012, China ends support for US sanctions on Iran.

Page 3: Shakedown Timeline 2020 to the Present. Covid, Joe Biden’s presidency to Trump’s 2nd term

Page 2: (This page) Shakedown Timeline 2010-2020. Obama’s Pivot-to-Asia to Donald Trump’s first presidency

Page 1: Shakedown Timeline 1997-2010. Hong Kong Handover and WTO entry to Barack Obama’s Pivot-to-Asia