PARIS - As a leading figure among French politicians familiar and friendly with China, former French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin has been promoting cooperation between the two countries in the past decades.

"I am witness to the tremendous development of China," said Raffarin in a recent interview with Xinhua. "I saw China becoming proud of herself."

Raffarin said he first came to China in 1970, and his frequent trips to China since then have given him an insight into China's progress.

He recalled that in the past, he saw families of four to five people, sometimes more, living in one room. "Nowadays, comforts of modern housing are present everywhere," he said. "You feel a major change -- people, especially young people, look confident."

"I think innovation is the key to the future in China," he said, adding that "in this match for tomorrow, the Chinese youth seems well armed."

On Sept 17, Raffarin, together with five other foreigners, was awarded the Friendship Medal by China for his great contributions.

The former French leader said that he has a relationship of trust with the Chinese people.

"I understand them and my link is very emotional," he said.

"China follows its own path," he said, referring to socialism with Chinese characteristics.

Raffarin said that for him, the most essential one of these characteristics is the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC), adding that it is obvious to attentive observers that the CPC is the real backbone of the People's Republic of China.

He noted that China's global influence has considerably increased in the past 70 years, and that now as the second largest economy in the world, China is present across the world with its products and culture, which influence people in many countries.

"In France, the Chinese New Year is almost a national event," he said.

Besides, in such major international institutions as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, China has been given positions of great responsibility, which shows "its influence in global multilateralism is growing," he added.

"It seems to me that Chinese diplomacy is inspired by a belief deeply rooted in Chinese culture -- cooperation is better than tensions," said Raffarin.

Read more:

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201909/28/WS5d8f0a72a310cf3e3556e08a.html

Our scum hypocrite scummo is only interested in cash from China and his little pissy stand says it all... Australia is still the largest producer of CO2 emissions per capita in the world. Opening new coal mines is not going to look good when chastising the most populous county on the planet.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has used an important foreign policy lecture to urge against a "new variant" of what he called "negative globalism".

• Scott Morrison said "the world works best … when the character and distinctiveness of independent nations is preserved"
• The PM criticised "an unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy", but did not mention any by name
• He reiterated his belief that China should bear greater global trade responsibility in line with the size of its economy

Mr Morrison gave the Lowy Lecture at Sydney's town hall on Thursday — he is the third prime minister to give the speech — and he largely centred his speech around Australia's approach to global challenges.

A week after using an address to the United Nations (UN) to criticise "internal and global" critics of Australia's climate change policy, Mr Morrison appeared to take a veiled jab at the UN on Thursday evening.

The Prime Minister said he did not want to see global organisations like the UN getting overly involved in the governance of independent nations.

"The world works best, we believe, I believe, when the character and distinctiveness of independent nations is preserved within a framework of mutual respect," Mr Morrison said.

"This includes respecting the electoral mandates of their constituencies.

"We should avoid any reflex towards a negative globalism that coercively seeks to impose a mandate from an often-ill-defined borderless global community and worse still, an unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy.

"Globalism in a positive light facilitates, it aligns, it engages, rather than directs and forces."

The Prime Minister warned more broadly that freedom of "exchange", "open markets", "capital" and "ideas" had never been more important, but were under threat.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-04/scott-morrison-takes-jab-at-unite...

Why do I feel that this glorious speech is a self-serving dollop of hypocrisy, considering his views of the Chinese freedom of "exchange", "open markets", "capital" and "ideas" with the Pacific Nations? As well unbridled expansionism of trade can and will exacerbate global warming. At this stage we need to be far more astute than the local grocer selling goods that have passed their use-by-date. 

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While Australia farts around with the environment (see wasting money and praying for a cyclone...) , the Chinese are planting trees...

It borrows its name from the massive stone structure built by the Qin Dynasty. But the purpose of the Green Great Wall is not to hold back the barbarians — it's to stop the ever-encroaching deserts.

"About a quarter of all of China's land mass is desert, and those deserts, up until very recently, were expanding; they were growing at the rate of about 1,000 square miles per year," journalist and author Vince Beiser says.

It's a desertification rate that has laid waste to vast swathes of valuable farmland and regularly choked the suburbs of Beijing in clouds of dust.

When completed, the Green Great Wall will stretch more than 4,800 kilometres across the north of China, forming a living barrier along the edge of the giant Gobi Desert.

The 50-year project involves the planting of more than 88 billion trees and the results so far, says Beiser, have been "amazing".

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-17/green-walls-in-china-and-africa-k...

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Two outspoken Liberal politicians have been barred entry into China but deny it is a reflection on the Federal Government. 

• James Paterson said he thought the decision was due to recent criticisms of China's ruling Communist Party
• Andrew Hastie has previously compared the West's handling of China's rise to the failure to contain Nazi Germany 
• Senator Paterson said he wanted to engage with China in good faith, calling it a "shame" the opportunity had been denied

West Australian MP Andrew Hastie and Victorian Senator James Paterson were due to take part in a study tour to Beijing next month.

But when the tour operator called the Chinese Embassy to arrange their visas, it was told the pair were "unwelcome at this time".

Mr Hastie believed the decision was politically motivated.

"I think we've been banned from travelling to China largely because we've been outspoken about the Chinese Communist Party and we've been vocal on human rights issues," he said. 

"We've spoken for the Uyghur people in Xinjiang province, we've spoken for Dr Hengjun, an Australian citizen still in detention, we've also spoken with deep concern about the process in Hong Kong."

He insisted it was not an indication that relations between Beijing and Canberra have hit a new low. 

"I don't think it reflects on the Government at all," he said. 

"We're both backbenchers so the things we say aren't necessarily the views of the Government and that's clear."

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-15/andrew-hastie-james-paterson-bloc...

These two naive clever idiots are vocal about Chinese "human rights issues", are very vocals about destroying the social fabric of Australia, including removing legal protections of minorities against abuse. For example, James Paterson was a member of the IPA till he was elected to Parliament. The IPA is an awful extreme (for Australia) right-wing outfit that promotes ugly CONservative policies, including the destruction of the ABC, through "privatisation", wants the destruction of "safety nets" such as welfare, is a fierce denialist of global warming and has a multitude (15) of awful views to turn an efficient social program designed to protect the underprivileged into a fight for all. They might support (?) subsidies for "their friends" the farmers during times of drought, though, otherwise we would not get food on the table...

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Some if the mild IPA views:

8. Privatise the ABC

In a free society the government should not own and operate its own media company. The media market in Australia is highly competitive. Online platforms have transformed and disrupted traditional approaches to media. Consumers have never had more choice about where to source their news and opinions on current affairs. Moreover, the ABC is unremittingly bias. Its staff are five times more likely to vote for the Greens compared to the general population.6 The ABC is beyond reform. New leaders will not fix the problem, regardless of their experience or intention. The ABC must be privatised.

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9. Re-introduce the debt ceiling

Gross government debt is currently $546 billion, all of which must be paid back by today’s young Australians via higher future taxes.7 One approach policy-makers can take to reduce government debt, or at least

reduce its growth, is to re-introduce the debt ceiling. A debt-ceiling places a limit on how much the Australian government can borrow. Raising the debt ceiling requires an Act of Parliament, which ensures the issue will be debated and receive the public attention it deserves. A debt ceiling was implemented by the Rudd government in 2007 and it was set at $75 billion. With the support of the Greens, the Abbott government with Joe Hockey as Treasurer abolished the debt ceiling in 2013 as debt approached $300 billion.

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10. Hold a Royal Commission into the Bureau of Meteorology’s tampering with temperature and climate data

The Bureau of Meteorology appears to have tampered with temperature and climate data and to have re-written history to make it appear as if the temperature is higher than it actually is, and that is has risen faster than it actually has.8 Australians deserve to know the truth about their public institutions. The only way to find the truth about potential temperature data manipulation is to hold a Royal Commission into the Bureau of Meteorology’s activities.

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11. Abolish compulsory superannuation

Compulsory superannuation is a tax on workers’ wages which is coercively redistributed to the Unions. Australian workers should be free to decide how much of their own income they are willing to defer until retirement, and how much they need in the present to spend on items such as housing, education, and health care.

Gus Note:

The Superannuation scheme has been a very successful policy introduced by Paul Keating, in order to remove (or reduce) the retirement pension bill for the government. Removing the Super would create a new class of old poor people, way below the poverty line. Not only this, "how much they need in the present to spend on items such as housing, education, and health care" is also dependent of stagnant wages that are inadequate to provide the said services which to some extend can be free on Medicare, public education and subsidised housing which of course the IPA wants to eliminate...

Meanwhile, Andrew Hastie, a devoted Christian, is a fierce critic of China and has been called "clumsy" by senior Liberals:

"The West once believed that economic liberalisation would naturally lead to democratisation in China. This was our Maginot Line. It would keep us safe, just as the French believed their series of steel and concrete forts would guard them against the German advance in 1940. But their thinking failed catastrophically. The French had failed to appreciate the evolution of mobile warfare," Mr Hastie wrote in an opinion piece for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. 

"Like the French, Australia has failed to see how mobile our authoritarian neighbour has become. Even worse, we ignore the role that ideology plays in [Beijing's] actions across the Indo-Pacific region."

Mr Hastie said the West had made the same mistake before in believing the actions of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin "were the rational actions of a realist great power".

The backbencher's intervention will rattle the government, which is trying to balance its strategic partnership with the United States against China's status as Australia's largest two-way trading partner.

Read more:

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/like-no-other-time-in-history-au...

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What this does not say is that "Australia has left a vacuum" in the pacific region by stopping Radio Australia and also becoming arrogant re global warming... This vacuum is being filled by "more caring" Chinese...

Gus Note:

The IPA is also against the Snowy 2.0, like Gus, BUT FOR THE OPPOSITE REASONS. Gus thinks the scheme — using the unused power from solar and windmills to pump water back up the mountains — would become an expensive inefficient white elephant, while the IPA HATES ANYTHING DONE by the government TO MITIGATE GLOBAL WARMING, including wind turbines and solar panels...

Read from top.

by  Alex Turnbull

...

It’s important to put Chinese coal imports from Australia in perspective. China consumes around 3.2bn tonnes of coal a year, of which only 267m tonnes are imported. China’s thermal coal demand can best be thought of as the offcuts of a much bigger energy market. These imports went from nothing to the levels they are today as China’s growth in energy demand on the coast outstripped China’s capacity to move coal from its inland coal fields to where the demand was.

In 2012 I attended a presentation by China’s central planning authority, the National Development and Reform Commission, outlining that they were not happy about this and were going to invest heavily in freight rail capacity to solve this problem. By 2015 the coal market was in freefall and Peabody filed for bankruptcy in 2016.

After a brief squeeze in the coal market driven by China’s efforts to get rid of smaller, more dangerous coalmines, Chinese coal output continued rising inland and rail capacity was completed that allowed more shipments to the coast. We are very much back to 2015 again today, with Peabody’s debt available for 50-60c on the dollar and coal prices back to 2015 prices. 

China seems to be intensifying these efforts in its “blue sky war” to better use its own resources and push for more renewables in the sunny and windy western provinces, combined with ultra high-voltage power transmission to get it to the coast. This should reduce coal demand by about 18.4% by 2025, or more than four times what China imports, according to the State Grid Research Institute. These plans have become more aggressive over time as the cost of renewables have fallen and China’s middle class values breathable air more than bragging about steel output numbers. There is no reason to expect any of those trends to change. 

For Australia, which exports a quarter of its coking and thermal coal to China, this presents an enormous problem. Chinese imports of thermal coal could go to zero and likely will very quickly. In addition, rail capacity expansion will force Australian coal to compete with high-quality Mongolian coking coal which has been stranded by poor logistics. A rail line connecting the Tavan Tolgoi coking coal complex will be completed in 2021 and allow China to import another 30m tons of coking coal– which is almost exactly the amount that Australia exports to China. With a likely cost advantage and pricing advantage, it is hard to see how Australia will compete.

Coal boosters and lobbyists are quick to talk up India and the rest of Asia but in almost any market the sudden absence of Chinese demand is an almost impossible hole to fill. India has its own collieries and is finding that renewables are now better value, and it is a smaller and slower growing economy. Taiwan, South Korea and Japan all have decarbonisation plans and are not going to be in any position to fill the hole left by 25% of the market demand going away in the shorter term and much more of it over the longer term.

For Australia the implications are obvious. We need to prepare for this shift and our policymakers need to stop misleading coal-mining areas and their communities on the outlook – China’s energy transition is moving fast enough to catch them out before the next federal election and they can expect a chilly welcome if they are found to have cynically boosted coal into its collapse while not having a plan B for these areas.

In light of these facts, the Adani mine political pantomime is absurd: if we are going to see that higher-quality mines with existing infrastructure face a crunch, what possible point could there be in building a lower-quality thermal coalmine in this market?

I suspect nothing will change, and it will take Australia being mugged by the reality of this shift before anything is done. It would be wise for political opponents to think about a transition plan for these communities ahead of time. Like Covid-19, this is not an unforeseeable problem, but if we choose to ignore it, it will not go away. 

• Alex Turnbull is a fund manager based in Singapore

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/11/australia-cannot-e...

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On this site, although we did not have the precise figures as shown by Alex, we knew that China was "coal" self-sufficient... We should have been cleverer and manufacture cheaper bicycles... 

Heading at top: selling coal to Newcastle...