Benjamin Fulford Interview: Can China Govern as a New Global Superpower?

> News > Benjamin Fulford Interview: Can China Govern as a New Global Superpower? – Prepare For Change

In this episode , we discuss the following; Muller, FISA, 911, Fukushima the truth must come out. Will war happen on the Korean peninsula? China creating new networks including new UN building in LAOS, yet they’re lacking social and global skills to govern as a new superpower. Will there be a big event or a slow continual gradual change into the new system? North Korea giving Putin F-35 present. Julian Assange case has much weirdness to it and may not be what we are being told. Also, there is something up in Low Earth Orbit that we’re not being told about and more… The old system IS collapsing and we’re seeing the death throes of the old guard. Until we’re finally fully liberated, we must keep applying pressure to the old system.

For Russian President Vladimir Putin, a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un offers a chance to raise Moscow’s clout in the region and gain more leverage with Washington.

While Russia’s ability to influence Kim’s position is limited compared to that of China, a dialogue with Kim could allow Putin to emerge as an essential player in the North Korean nuclear standoff.

With Russia-U.S. ties at their post-Cold War low over the Ukrainian crisis, the war in Syria and Russia’s meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the crisis over North Korea is a rare subject where Moscow and Washington could find some common ground and engage in political dialogue.

“There are areas where Washington and Moscow can and do cooperate, and North Korea is one of those areas,” said Dmitri Trenin, the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center.

He noted that Putin wants to send a message to Washington — as well as Beijing and Seoul — that “Russia should be factored in when Korean issues are discussed.”

Moscow’s involvement comes at a tense moment when talks between Washington and Pyongyang are on hold following the failure of U.S. President Donald Trump’s summit with Kim in Hanoi. For Kim, the meeting with Putin would be a win even if he just gets a cautious statement of solidarity with the North, or a rebuttal of Washington’s policies.

“Right now, after the failure of the Hanoi Summit, Russia can play a role,” said Georgy Toloraya, a former Russian diplomat who has extensive experience in the North Korean affairs. “That would be very useful. If Putin ever meets Trump, it will be one of the issues on the agenda.”

Russia has a border with North Korea and, like the U.S., strongly opposes Pyongyang’s nuclear bid.

“Russia is worried that Korea could become potentially a battleground for a new conflict … potentially with nuclear overtones,” Trenin said. “It is also worried that the North Korean nuclear and missile programs could lead to accidents that could endanger Russian security.”

Moscow has argued that the crisis should be settled through U.S. providing security guarantees to the North and easing sanctions against Pyongyang.

Putin’s foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov hailed the importance of U.S.-North Korean talks and promised Tuesday that the Kremlin will seek to “strengthen the positive trends and work to create preconditions and positive atmosphere for reaching solid agreements.”

CHINESE ECONOMIC REFORMS

China is already an economic superpower. At purchasing power parity, which adjusts the value of a dollar for what it can buy in a given country, China now has a larger economy than the U.S. The gap is only likely to grow, given that China has far more people making and buying things, and they’re likely to get richer than they are today.

Just looking at the scale of an economy in terms of what it can buy domestically may be misleading, however. Superpowers buy military bases, influence and goods abroad. The high-tech stealth fighters they purchase have an international price. The dollars that China invests through its Belt and Road Initiative to connect with markets around the world are just dollars, with the same purchasing power as anyone else’s. One way to measure how much extra buying power China has on the global market each year is to look at its GDP growth in current dollars, unadjusted for inflation or purchasing power parity. That paints a different picture.

The economic reforms that were introduced by Deng Xiaoping in the late seventies have transformed the Chinese economy and produced a period of spectacular growth. China’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew at an average rate of 9.3 percent between 1979-1993. The world experienced a growth rate of 2.6 percent for the same period. China’s GDP has also quadrupled over a period of only fifteen years. It has also improved its status as a trading nation, rising to eleventh position from number thirty-seven in ten years. Another important fact is that China has accumulated a large foreign currency reserve and is second in the world to Japan. China has also taken advantage of foreign investment and is also rated second in the world, after the US. It is important to realize that the above figures do not include any contribution from Hong Kong, which China regained as a possession in July 1997.

While China’s performance has been impressive, it also has the potential to maintain this growth. It has a massive population, which represents not only a large domestic market but also a cheap labour source of some eight hundred million people. It is also a country that is blessed with vast natural resources. The current economic problems in Asia have not had a major impact on China, though there are predictions of slower growth. However, it is expected that China will become the world’s largest economy, in terms of GDP, by 2019.

As the U.S. well knows, it’s expensive to be a superpower. The costs of maintaining a large military, leading diplomatic missions and providing aid to foreign countries all add up. The more China extends itself around the globe, the heavier the burden will be. While the country has deep pockets, there are economic and financial challenges at home, and if things go belly up domestically it could put strains on President Xi Jinping’s ambitions. As the Chinese general Sun Tzu wrote in “The Art of War” two and a half millennia ago, “first count the cost.”

So a key question for China is: What kind of great power does it want to become? Surely, China wants to dominate in Asia, its backyard. At that regional level, projections of the Middle Kingdom’s economic growth, population size and defense spending suggest it will have outstripped the U.S. by 2030.

Military Power

Though still largely untested, China’s military has been transformed since it last fought a war, against Vietnam in 1979. It has rearmed and either copied, developed or bought many of the missile and stealth technologies required of a 21st century superpower. By now it spends more than three times as much on defense as Russia, and it is closing a still enormous gap with the U.S. While China still lacks the carrier fleets and other equipment to project power to all corners of the globe, and can’t yet produce a top-flight jet engine, its capabilities close to home have already changed U.S. calculations in the disputed South China Sea, as well as for any potential conflict over Taiwan.

The most remarkable part of China’s military modernization is just how affordable it has been, even accounting for a large suspected underreporting of defense spending in official statistics. As China’s defense spending has risen from around $19 billion in 1989 to $228 billion today in 2016 dollars, the cost as a percentage of GDP has barely changed, probably remaining below 2 percent. As a share of government spending, the burden imposed on China by its defense budgets has actually fallen to a third of what it once was.