Special to WorldTribune.com By John J. Metzler UNITED NATIONS — Beijing’s ambitious “Belt and Road” infrastructural initiative has scored its first significant beachhead in the Mediterranean, as Italy has signed on to the expansive Chinese globe-spanning project. China’s President Xi Jinping was feted in Rome with a grandiosity fit for an visiting Emperor as the […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Richard Fisher, Geostrategy-Direct China’s military spending for 2019 will increase by 7.5 percent to about $177.61 billion, as revealed on March 3, 2019 by an official at Chinese Communist Party’s annual National People’s Consultative Congress. This figure, while lower than the 8.1 percent for 2018, is greater than the announced 6 […]
by WorldTribune Staff, March 17, 2019 The Pentagon’s proposed $718 billion budget for 2020 is designed in large part to counter the threat from China and its rapidly advancing military technology, acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan said. In presenting the Trump administration’s proposed 2020 defense budget to the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 14, […]
by WorldTribune Staff, March 15, 2019 Though it ended its cooperation with the Pentagon, tech giant Google has no problem boosting China’s military, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff said. “The work that Google is doing in China is indirectly benefiting the Chinese military and I’ve been very public on this issue […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By John J. Metzler UNITED NATIONS — The devastating double veto cast by both Russia and China to derail a U.S Security Council draft resolution providing humanitarian aid for impoverished Venezuelans reflected the latest round in a widening standoff between the socialist Caracas regime and the democratic opposition. And while the international […]
FPI, March 8, 2019 Chinese supreme leader Xi Jinping and the Communist Party are stepping up demands for political loyalty from China’s 1.3 billion people. “Be on high alert to all kinds of erroneous thoughts, vague understandings, and bad phenomena in ideological areas,” the party warned earlier this year. “Keep your eyes open, see things […]
by WorldTribune Staff, March 4, 2019 A slogan repeated in Chinese state media says, “Once you lose trust, you will face restrictions everywhere.” People with poor social credit scores were banned from buying plane or train tickets 23 million times in 2018, a Chinese government report said. China’s National Public Credit Information Center reported that […]
by WorldTribune Staff, February 26, 2019 Sens. Marco Rubio and John Cornyn have written a letter calling on the Trump administration to ban the use of Chinese tech giant Huawei’s products in the U.S. energy infrastructure. Congress has already blocked the use of Huawei products in U.S. telecommunications equipment “due the company’s links to China’s […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk HANOI ― The slogan, “Hanoi, City for Peace,” would have seemed unimaginable when I was a correspondent in Saigon at the height of the Vietnam War nearly half a century ago. This capital of what we then called “North” Vietnam was the heart of a desperate surge southward that […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Geostrategy-Direct China made official its longstanding rejection of treaties that would control its nuclear weapons on Feb. 16 at the 55th Munich Security Conference. The most senior Chinese Communist Party leader to attend this annual conference, Politburo Member Yang Jiechi, rejected German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s request that China join the 1987 […]
