Buddha's Dragon: China's Great Silk Roads Reset
Romanian translation available and here
The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative is such an integral part of the Chinese Dream that the CCP wrote it into their Constitution: “Following the principle of achieving shared growth through discussion and collaboration, and pursuing the Belt and Road Initiative.”
Without a doubt, the BRI, or the New Silk Roads project, as it is informally called, is the largest infrastructure project in world history—first launched in 2013 by Xi Jinping. Once it is finished, it is undeniable proof that the Heartland Doctrine of geopolitical dominance, advocated by Sir John Halford Mackinder in 1904, is flawed.
Mackinder’s basic thesis:
Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;
who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;
who rules the World-Island commands the world.
— Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality, p. 150
MACKINDER WAS WRONG, SPYKMAN WAS WRONG
To put Mackinder’s thesis in plain English: If you want to rule the world, you have to rule the Eurasian continent, and in order to do that, you need to control Eastern Europe and Russia (The Heartland).
The alternative Rimland Theory, proposed by American political scientist Nicholas Spykman in his book, The Geography of the Peace, written in 1944, resulted in him being known as the “godfather of containment”—because containment of Russia (Heartland) became the foreign policy of the USA after WWII.
He opposed the Heartland theory of Mackinder, and put forward his own theory, arguing that geo-strategic power is maintained by control of the coastal regions surrounding the Heartland, which he called the “Rimland.” Spykman believed that whoever controlled the Rimland could prevent the Heartland from expanding its power and could potentially challenge the Heartland’s dominance.
Mackinder was wrong, Spykman was wrong.
Russia did not need to be contained and the Cold War was a monumental diplomatic foreign policy disaster. The Heartland eventually retracted under the weight of its own bureaucratic obesity, and the Rimland (with Chinese characteristics) did not try to conquer Russia—instead, China made an alliance with the Russian Heartland, and launched the Belt and Road Initiative. Neither Mackinder nor Spykman foresaw that economic integration and thus, financial dominance of the Eurasian continent could be achieved by major infrastructure projects, without military might.
And furthermore, instead of doing full metal jacket Karate with the Western globalists, China did some geopolitical judo and made a Sun Tzu-ian bargain with the Faustian blockheads. The late Henry Kissinger must have been impressed, even after spending at least a hundred years studying Metternich and Bismark.
THE YELLOW PERIL
Mackinder and his British masters feared that either a German conquest of Russia, which almost happened in WWII, or a Russian-German alliance would be the likely scenarios for the conquest of Eurasia, and that would be the end of the British Empire and all its lovely wickedness. However, Mackinder did not seriously take heed of the rise of the “Yellow Peril.”
The phrase yellow peril was coined by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, in the 1880s, after a dream in which he saw the Buddha riding a dragon threatening to invade Europe.
Sinologist Wing-Fai Leung explained the origins of the term and the racist ideology: “The phrase yellow peril ... blends Western anxieties about sex, racist fears of the alien Other, and the Spenglerian belief that the West will become outnumbered and enslaved by the East.”
It should be remembered that the British Empire and its offspring, America were racial supremacists at the turn of the century. (Some would argue they still are.) They were confident in their Manifest Destiny, that the sun would never set on the West, because God was an Englishman and He would never permit yellow heathens to muck about with their plans for world power.
Spengler was also a technophobe, and he predicted that the advances in technology developed by the West would be used against Western civilization by other nations. He was right about that.
Oswald Spengler’s prescient tome The Decline of the West, was written at the close of WWI, when Germany and Europe lay in ruins. According to Spengler, the Western world was ending, and the final chapter of the Faustian bargain they made with the devil, was coming to fruition. And like Spengler, the Washington elite are horrified by the reality that China is emerging as the dominant player on the world stage, and the West is sinking like a stone.
ENTER THE NEW SILK ROADS PROJECT
The New Silk Roads project is a series of six transportation routes with additional ports, oil and gas pipelines and shipping lanes to connect it all together. The Belt and Road project includes 71 countries that account for half the world’s population and a quarter of global GDP—at an original projected cost of over $1 trillion.
As of September 2020, the value of BRI road projects, including projects with Chinese involvement, reached a staggering $4.3 trillion. Among these, 2,025 projects—valued at $2.41 trillion—were belt and road projects, while 1,595 other projects with a combined value of $1.87 trillion are classified as projects with Chinese involvement.
China set up banks to fund the various projects, which puts the borrower countries at a disadvantage—at least until they pay off their loans for their local infrastructure projects. China’s three government policy banks (China Development Bank, Export-Import Bank of China, and Agricultural Development Bank of China) are the main sources of bank lending for BRI projects, along with international financial institutions such as the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the BRICS’ New Development Bank.
The New Silk Roads will result in freight being much easier and cheaper to transport, and it also means that troops and military equipment can be funnelled all over the Eurasian continent quickly and efficiently, in the event of hostilities. These anticipated hostilities are certain to come as the world descends into a totalitarian police state, managed by China and the World Economic Forum.
The World Economic Forum is enabling China’s quest to become the world’s new policeman and enforcer of the “rules-based order”—assuming the role that the USA previously occupied for decades. The WEF predicts that the USA will drop to number three economy by 2050, surpassed by China and India.
In a two-year study, the RAND social engineering think tank, recommended that the USA needs to accept its future third fiddle status, and learn to love the multilateral, multipolar world order:
“Create a more shared order that takes seriously the demands for a more culturally diverse approach and does not privilege Western influence.
Our study concludes that, in part because of the emergence of an era of more distinct rivalries, leading a revised, more complex multilateral order continues to represent the grand strategy that best serves US national interests.
Multilateral responses to rising challenges will be more effective than unilateral ones — and more importantly, without the benefits and legitimacy conferred by such an order, vibrant US global leadership will become financially and strategically unaffordable.”
The seeds of the multipolar Silk Roads project originated in 1971, when Henry Kissinger opened up diplomatic relations with Mao Tse Tung. The WEF and the trillionaire financial class have thrown their weight behind China because of China’s central position on the Eurasian Chessboard, its supply of cheap labour, and possibly because the Chinese are more competent managers and easier to work with than the Americans.
For more info on Kissinger’s plan for a New World Order:
MARITIME CHOKE POINTS
The architects of the Great Reset, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the BRICS, G20, United Nations, WHO, IMF and the World Bank have undoubtedly spent thousands of collective hours pouring over maps, debating and discussing geostrategy, reading reports and surveys written by their underlings, and then coming to a consensus on a grand strategy for the human race.
They then set to work, moving the pawns and chess pieces on the board to achieve their long term goals. One of their main goals is to reset and then reintegrate the transportation grid of the entire planet into an efficient machine, with China as the hub.
They are aware that maritime transport is an essential part of international trade—approximately 80% of global merchandise is shipped via sea. There are five primary choke points that need to be controlled in order to rule the world:
Panama Canal
Suez Canal
Strait of Hormuz
Strait of Malaca
Bal el-Mandeb Strait
One of these primary choke points is the Panama Canal, which provides a shortcut for ships travelling between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Ships sailing between the east and west coasts of the U.S. save over 8,000 nautical miles by using the canal—and it shortens the trip by approximately 21 days. It is also important for American military ships as a transit route, and lastly, the strategic location of the Panama Canal is essential for control of Central America.
The Pan-American Highway begins at Yaviza and goes all the way to Alaska, through the I-69 corridor.
THE DARIÉN GAP AND WEAPONIZED IMMIGRATION
There is a gap through the Darién jungle of about 66 miles, where there is no highway between Yaviza and Turbo in northern Columbia.
The flow of immigration coming through the Darién Gap is about 10,000 people a month, and these immigrants are making their way north to America. In 2022, there were 250,000 crossings, compared to only 24,000 in 2019. In 2023, more than 520,000 passed through the gap, more than doubling the previous year’s number of crossing.
China is working with the explicit cooperation of both the United Nations group, The International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) which has its office 40 meters from the Chinese-built processing center.
The head of the American DHS is a Cuban Jew, Alejandro Mayorkas
HIAS has its critics from within the Jewish community:
“By using Jewish money and a giant endowment of millions to settle thousands of people into the U.S. each year—many of them who hate Jews—HIAS has basically betrayed the Jews,” he says. “Then, after HIAS gives them services for a couple months, they leave them to the American welfare rolls.”
There is currently a new bridge being built that will open up the Darién Gap to Columbia. Investigative journalist, Michael Yon was there many times, and has described the weaponization of immigration. “The aliens used to stay in the camps sometimes for several days, even weeks. Now they usually just stay for several hours, maybe overnight … By 2025, I would not be surprised to see a million per month coming through Darién.”
The Darién Gap bridge project is part of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative. The Chinese have a dominant presence there—they have built a processing center to coordinate the flow of immigrants, as well as building the bridge through the Darién jungle.
Over 15,500 Chinese migrants were counted in Panama after traversing the Darién Gap. This figure is nearly eight times as many from the same period in 2022, and more than 40 times that of 2021.
In the first nine months of 2023, the US Border Patrol made 22,187 arrests of Chinese nationals entering the country from Mexico. This was 13 times the number from the same period in 2022.
Chinese immigrants were the fourth-highest nationality, after Venezuelans, Ecuadorians and Haitians, crossing the Darién Gap during the first nine months of this year, according to Panamanian immigration authorities.
According to a report from the Wilson Center:
China was one of the last countries to continue a zero-COVID policy. Geared toward acting “dynamically” when new cases surfaced, health authorities used tools such as mass PCR testing and digital health data tracking to justify supervised quarantines and even the shutdown of entire cities. In December 2021, the city of Xi’an, home to 13 million, was shut down, and residents were forbidden to exit their homes. In April 2022, an increase in cases of the milder Omicron variant triggered a lockdown of Shanghai and its population of more than 26 million. Residents waited in massive lines to stock up on goods with only several days’ notice. During the lockdown, many faced food shortages, pets were beaten to death on the streets for fear of transmitting the virus, and authorities entered homes unannounced to forcefully sanitize. In November 2022, frustrations over zero-COVID policy boiled over as cities across the country saw protests that, in their open expressions of anger and defiance, were rare for China. Chants of: “Step down, Xi Jinping! Step down, Communist Party!” were heard amongst crowds in Shanghai. “We don’t want lifelong rulers. We don’t want emperors!” was heard in Chengdu, a criticism of Xi Jinping’s unprecedented third presidential term.
Immigration expert Zheng Cunzhu told Axios news: “Zero-COVID policies severely harmed ordinary Chinese people … many people didn't care about politics before, but the pandemic awakened them. They realized there’s really no freedom in China.”
RUNOLOGY
A new meme gained traction online, during the draconian lockdowns in Shanghai. Runxue is a combination of the Romanized character 润 which sounds like “run” and the character for study, xue (学). The play on words translates to “runology.” As more and more people sought ways to practice runxue, the Darién Gap emerged as a viable escape route that flooded social media channels.
Posts on Weixin (WeChat), Douyin (TikTok), and Telegram taught Chinese viewers how to apply for passports, where to fly, how to pack, and how to navigate around cartels and border officials. Reuters conducted two dozens interviews at the US-Mexico border, and every respondent credited social media and private chat groups for info on this new route to the US.
Donald Trump’s personal secretary/cheerleader, Laura Loomer, flew down to the Darién Gap to interrogate Muslim asylum seekers, and report back to Americans the horrors of immigrants running away from countries that America bombed.
Loomer concludes by wondering “How long before we have another 9/11?”—a question that reveals she is not the adult in the room, and has no idea what is going on in the world.
All Americans are equal but some are more equal than others.
OVERSEAS 110
The Overseas 110 is the brand of extralegal offices established by China's Ministry of Public Security, and its public security bureaus in other countries. The 110 is a reference to China’s emergency number for the police, 110.
In 2022, human rights group Safeguard Defenders published a report finding that the Chinese government illegally used these offices to intimidate Chinese dissidents and criminal suspects abroad, and to pressure them to return to China. The report led to investigations of the stations by the governments of several countries.
China has jailed a long list of political dissidents for the crime of journalism, many of them getting over 10 years in state prison.
According to Matt Schrader, writing for the Jamestown Foundation, “overseas Chinese service stations” were first established in 2014, with 45 centers in 39 countries having been opened by 2019.
One of the key operations the Overseas 110 are involved in is the “persuasion to return” process, in which activists overseas are forced to return to China by using threats and retaliation against their families back in China. When they return, they are arrested and often sentenced to lengthy jail terms.
“In the mere fifteen months between April 2021 and July 2022 alone ... a staggering number of 230,000 Chinese nationals were returned to face potential criminal charges in China through these methods, which often include threats and harassment to family members back home or directly to the target abroad either through online or physical means.”
In 2013, President Obama initiated the 100K Strong program, setting the goal of sending 100,000 American students to study in China by 2014, a goal that was met ahead of schedule. The 100K Strong is funded by transnational corporate partners such as Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Citigroup, and Deloitte. Jewish billionaire Steve Schwarzman, Co-founder of Blackstone, is an advisory council member of the 100K Strong Foundation. He sponsored the Schwarzman Scholars program in Beijing Tsinghua University to rival the Rhodes Scholarship.
In 2015, President Xi Jinping and President Barack Obama announced a more aggressive program, the 1 Million Strong, to expand by five-fold Mandarin-language instruction in US K-12 schools from approximately 200,000 to 1 million by 2020.
Obama stated:
“We relaunched this initiative in 2016 and took a new name, the US-China Strong Foundation,’ said Fang, adding that the foundation now leads three signature campaigns that ‘focus on supporting the full spectrum of American youth, ranging from our youngest students through young professionals entering China-related careers.”
BUDDHA’S DRAGON
According to legend, Siddhartha Gautama, otherwise known as the Buddha, travelled to China and camped out by a lake to meditate and seek enlightenment.
A great storm arose and threatened to destroy the Buddha’s peaceful reverie, until a great dragon emerged from the lake, and coiled his tail around the Buddha to protect him. Buddha was saved and he was forever grateful to the great dragon.
The great dragon is, of course, China who slept peacefully for centuries at the bottom of the lake, but then was awakened by a storm caused by British ships practising gunboat diplomacy in the mid 1800s. The Buddha represents the cultural and philosophical roots of China that needed protection from Western aggression.
In the mythology of Western Christianity, the dragon represents evil and the forces of Satan.
And the great dragon was thrown down, the serpent of old who is called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.
—Revelation 12:9
In contrast, the dragon in Chinese mythology is a benevolent creature, representing wisdom, authority, prosperity, health, and protection.
For the Chinese, whose national pride was crushed during the 100 Years of Humiliation, it is the West who are the “foreign devils,” because it was the West who forced opium down their throats during the Opium Wars of the 1800s. Consequently, for the next 100 years, China lost almost all of the wars that it fought, and was often forced to give major concessions to Britain, Russia and Japan in treaties that gave China the short end of the stick.
All things being equal, the best revenge is success. The West may soon be devoured, not only by Chinese dragons, but by their own personal inner dragons, and then, they too may face 100 years of humiliation.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/06/23/an-egyptian-bank-claimed-details-of-a-suspected-10-million-payment-to-trump-might-be-in-china/