US President Donald Trump, Chinese President Xi Jinping and their wives Melania Trump and Peng Liyuan at the Mar-a-Lago estate. (AFP)
Hong Kong (CNN) At the first meeting between Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, held over chocolate cake and sorbet at the US President's vast Mar-a-Lago private club in Florida, the two leaders seemed on the brink of establishing an unlikely and potentially special relationship.
Trump, less than three months into his first term, had spent his election campaign denouncing the Chinese government for undermining the United States, through a wide trade imbalance and cheap labor. "We can't continue to allow China to rape our country," Trump said in May 2016.
But when Trump was standing alongside Xi at Mar-a-Lago the following April, his tone changed dramatically. The two leaders exchanged compliments during a news conference, with Trump describing their relationship as "outstanding." Pictures from the meeting showed the two men sitting side-by-side, smiling broadly, on a golden couch.
"It was a great honor to have President Xi Jinping and Madame Peng Liyuan of China as our guests ... Tremendous goodwill and friendship was formed," Trump tweeted shortly after the visit.
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WNU Editor: The first indication for me that the U.S. - China relationship was going to go downhill was when President Xi broke the promise that he had made to President Trump at Mar-a-Lago to buy US goods to bring down the U.S.-China trade deficit. After that everything got worse. But what broke the "camel's back" was the pandemic.
WNU there were so many issues where China fcked over the West
ReplyDelete-- currency manipulation and abuse of WTO status
-- theft in the trillions, organised and legitimized directly by the CCP
-- human rights violations on a scale that makes Nazis look like amateurs. Death camps. Forced labour camps. Concentration camps. Reeducation camps. Sterilisation programs. Organ harvesting from the deceased/ killed
-- the Hong Kong issue
-- killing of 20 or so CIA spies
-- many broken promises to become a normal state in which eg religion and free assembly and basic human rights are established, instead
-- beating of priests and imams, burning of churches, mosques and synagogues, full on national socialism
-- persecution, silencing and torture of Xi critics on mass scale, including the book dealers in Hong Kong that were put into sleep torture halls and beaten and then put in front of cameras.. and those were the lucky ones
-- hypermilitarisation of the south China sea and disputes ruth literally every single nation from Vietnam to India to Australia
-- cultural warfare program conducted through the Confuscius institutes, exported color revolution
-- the Wuhan virus and disinformation campaign to terrorise our population and break our economies
-- the profiteering of our deaths and the insult on top
-- the Chinese thousand talents program and subversion of several key people you will not believe, including in media, health, busines and government. Top people everyone knows
--... I could add much more
This will not end well.
The reason why you see media blackout on some issues is because there's disagreement on our response. Some want to give China one last chance, others want it over with
ReplyDeleteThe virus' spread is beginning to appear deliberate, I am coming to believe.
@1024 the reason why China went the virus route is because MAD doctrine doesn't copy over well for bio weapons. On top, they knew decoupling will come. China will become decoupled fully, with exception of some trade imports/ exports and key personnel travels. They'll introduce death penalty for covid violations. The virus will keep mutating in the rest of the World for the next years, plunging much of the World into chaos. The Chinese count on us to be too weak, misinformed and divided to agree on a solution on both, the virus send the China issue. They'll be proven wrong, but at a price we all will pay. But in the end, it's important to remember who moved from trade war to hot war, and that was Xi, to save his own neck when calls for his removal grew louder in late summer 2019
ReplyDeleteOh and China will take Taiwan at the height of the second wave
Good luck