The recent interactions between China and the United States are a bit subtle, but generally there are some benign interactions, which have slightly cooled the tension between the two countries.
There are several positive events that just happened:
1. Sino-US trade communication channels. US Secretary of Commerce Raimondo visited China, and the two sides agreed to set up two permanent mechanisms to discuss promoting trade and clarifying their respective trade restrictive measures.
2. Sino-US military exchanges resumed. The spokesperson of the Ministry of National Defense, Colonel Wu Qian, revealed on August 31 that Xu Qiling, deputy chief of the Joint Staff Department of the Central Military Commission, communicated with representatives of the US military in Fiji. This is the first face-to-face exchange between senior generals of the Chinese and American militaries this year.
The meeting took place in the middle of last month, just before Raimondo’s visit to China. Wu Qian said that from August 12 to 18, Xu Qiling, deputy chief of staff of the Joint Staff Department of the Military Commission, led a delegation to Fiji to attend the Indo-Pacific Defense Forces Commander’s Conference jointly hosted by the United States and Fiji. Admiral Aquilino, commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, attended the meeting. It is estimated that Aquilino met with Xu Qiling. This is the first offline exchange between senior generals of the Chinese and American militaries, which shows that the Chinese and American militaries have resumed high-level contacts.
3. Dutch lithography machines are sold for 4 months longer. The latest Dutch chip equipment export control measures came into effect on September 1. The Dutch chip production equipment lithography giant ASML confirmed that the Dutch government has issued the license required by ASML, allowing ASML to continue to ship TWINSCAN NXT: 2000i and subsequent infiltration products this year. Type lithography machines (deep ultraviolet light, DUV lithography machines) are exported to China. This is one of the company’s three mainstream immersion lithography machine products, which can produce advanced chips with a 7nm process. The current license is equivalent to delaying the ban by 4 months, until December 31 this year.
The Dutch government and ASML certainly want to sell more lithography machines to China, but the main decision maker is the United States. If the United States does not agree, the Dutch government can extend ASML’s sales license. So this news can also be understood as a slight concession from the United States.
The U.S. has repeatedly made concessions, although they are all narrow-minded, and China is also a little loose, but at this time, it is reported that President Xi Jinping will not attend the G20 summit in India.
As we all know, U.S. President Biden made so many moves because he wanted to meet with President Xi at the G20 summit held on the 9th and 10th of this month, repeating the “G20 summit” held in Bali, Indonesia last November. Xi Jinping”. However, Reuters broke the news that Xi Jinping will be absent from the G20 summit, and Premier Li Qiang is expected to attend the meeting on behalf of the Chinese government.
It is estimated that the recent interaction between China and the United States refers to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders meeting held in San Francisco, USA from November 12 to 18. If President Xi does not attend this month’s G20 summit, the only occasion for the “Xi call” this year should be the APEC leaders’ meeting.
Here comes the problem. The United States had rumored that it would not grant a visa to Chief Executive Li Jiachao, who was unilaterally sanctioned by the United States, to attend the conference in the United States. If the United States does this, will President Xi attend the APEC summit at the home of the United States? Since President Xi does not have to go to the G20 summit at home in India, of course he does not have to go to the APEC summit at home in the United States.
Perhaps the mutual trust between China and the United States is so low that even if the United States says it can grant a visa for the Chief Executive to attend the meeting, if the “Xi Calling Meeting” is over in September, China will not have confidence that the United States will fulfill the agreement, so let’s wait until November!
Lu Yongxiong
Recently, someone posted some posts on the Internet to commemorate the 8.31 Prince Edward Station incident in 2019. After reading it, I was very moved.
This reminds me of walking through a large park on a recent weekend and seeing an old tree with peeling bark and lots of ants on it. I stopped and watched for 15 minutes, and found that there were ants on the road, and the two ants greeted each other when they met, and brought a lot of food back to the ant nest, just like a small kingdom, they lived in another world.
This is reminiscent of the story of Zhuang Zhou’s Butterfly Dream. Zhuangzi said that one day he dreamed that he had turned into a butterfly, lifelike and flying around. When he woke up, he found that he was still Zhuangzi, so he didn’t know whether he was a butterfly who became Zhuangzi, or Zhuangzi who dreamed of becoming a butterfly.
Perhaps the person who is immersed in the 8.31 incident 4 years ago is the butterfly in Zhuang Zhou’s dream. Things in the world are so similar.
That day, someone wrote a script as vivid as Zhuang Zhou’s dream on the Internet. The first time it was “The Black Cop Kills”. It is said that 6 people in the Prince Edward Station were killed by the police, and it spreads more and more. When it comes to why no family members of these 6 people came forward to complain, it is because all 128 of their family members were killed.
The second chapter of the script is “Anger and Struggle”. Because the police were so brutal that even innocent citizens were killed, groups of people poured out to mourn and protest at the gate of Prince Edward Station. I once went to the scene to see it, and found that those who mourned were convinced of the so-called murder.
The third time is “revolutionary success”. At that time, the United States preached to Hong Kong’s media bosses, saying that under the trade war, the Communist Party’s regime would not go smoothly.
The last episode of Zhuang Zhou’s dream script is “Hong Kong’s founding of the nation”, and now it seems that it is just a joke.
The dream of Prince Zhuang Zhou kept spreading in the online world like this, and several types of problems arose.
1. Philosophy. Zhuang Zhou’s Butterfly Dream itself is a philosophical question, how do people understand reality? If the dream is real enough, it is difficult for people to know that they are dreaming. Since most people obtain information online, some people intentionally spread edited false information on the Internet. Within just one hour of dissemination, it is already convincing, and it is useless to explain it afterwards. what is true What is a dream? It will be more difficult to distinguish than imagined.
2. Politics. The prince standing behind Zhuang Zhou’s Butterfly Dream naturally has a political purpose. The rule of the regime depends on the military and the police and the media, so to overthrow the regime, you must first surround the military and police, persuade them to surrender, and then attack the TV station to declare victory. However, the incident in 2019 was quickly shattered by the “Hong Kong National Security Law”. Coupled with the improvement of the political system, the dream has been shattered by reality: there are no dead people in the Prince’s Station, and the truth cannot be faked. The problem is that those who are still obsessed with mourning the 8.31 incident on the Internet have not yet awakened politically. But those who pretend to be asleep will never wake up.
3. Life. The world used to move very slowly, but now is the 10x speed era. If Zhuang Zhou didn’t wake up and wanted to stay in Hong Kong, he would feel very uncomfortable. And immigrating to a foreign country will give you a short-term relief. Therefore, most of these online mourners are Hong Kong people who have immigrated overseas. The problem is that in the past, Solzhenitsyn, a dissident in the Soviet Union, went into exile abroad, and it took 20 years to see that the exiles actually completely lost their political power. But now one or two years will see the real chapter. For example, Tsikhanuskaya, the wife of a dissident in Belarus, became a political leader of the opposition movement in exile, but a war between Russia and Ukraine made Belarusian President Lukashenko famous and his power stabilized. In the past three years, Tsikhanuskaya has been questioned by the outside world about her inability to lead the movement.
The conclusion is that the butterfly dream is a dream, and life is life. If you are obsessed in the butterfly dream, you will not wake up. Decades will pass quickly, and the end will be rather bleak.
Lu Yongxiong
#ChinaU.S #Interaction #Pointing #APEC
2023-09-01 10:50:42
