Liu wrote, “More likely China will go more nuclear before it goes green … (there are) two types of nuclear technology that could revolutionized the world as much as the steam power or petrol power did in the 19th and 20th century.”
Until Liu left that comment, I was unaware of the types of nuclear power China is developing.
I discovered the Chinese are investing millions in research into reactors powered by thorium, a metal, supporters say, that is as common as lead (which means it would be cheap and easy to find), and one, which, despite some concerns, would lead to power plants with fewer safety issues as well as other benefits.
“Thorium-based reactors certainly have advantages,” says Wang Kan, leader of the Tsinghua University Thorium Research Team. “The energy release from Thorium is greater than from Uranium, the by-products from using Thorium are less toxic than from Uranium, and it’s much harder to make weapons from those by-products.”
However, China was not the first nation to research the use of Thorium. In the late 1940s, US physicists were exploring the use of thorium as fuel to generate power but dangerous and dirty uranium won since the US and the USSR were fighting the Cold War and building thousands of nuclear weapons.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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A friend sent me a link to the story of Glenn Shriver, an American sent to jail for four years after he pleaded guilty for being paid $70,000 by China to attempt to get a job with the CIA or another intelligence agency in the US.
The Huffington Post said, “Court documents said Shriver was approached by Chinese officers while living in Shanghai in 2004 after earlier study trips to China.”
Shriver didn’t get the job since the CIA caught him before he was hired by the agency.
In fact, the Daily Herald reported that Shriver isn’t alone and “was one of at least 57 defendants in federal cases prosecuted since 2008 involving espionage conspiracies with China or efforts to pass secret information, sensitive defense technology or trade secrets to various players within the nation — be them intelligence operatives, state-sponsored research institutes or private-sector businessmen, according to an Associated Press review of U.S. Justice Department cases.”
It’s a fact that China spies on the US. That cannot be denied. Heck, there are cases where England and Israel have spied on the US too.
However, before you start ranting about China being sneaky and underhanded, you may be interested that spying is a two way street between nations and the US plays the same serious game.
In February 2003, the BBC News World Edition reported, “The US Central Intelligence Agency has launched a campaign to attract Chinese-American recruits with an advert welcoming the Year of the Goat.” The CIA advertised in newspapers and magazine in American cities with big Chinese communities.
What’s ironic, is Glenn Shriver never became a spy. He only appeared to have had the intent to spy. Since Shriver was paid $70,000 over a period of several years and still failed to get a job, who are the fools here?
How much does the CIA spend for its operations?
The overall US intelligence budget has been considered classified until recently when Mary Margaret Graham, a former CIA official and deputy director of national intelligence for collection in 2005, said the annual intelligence budget was $44 billion. Source: Wikipedia.org
However, that may not be all the money the CIA spends on spying.
According to Source Watch.org, “The CIA black budget is annually in the vicinity of 1.1 trillion dollars and the covert world of ‘black programs’ acts with virtual impunity, overseen and regulated by itself, funding itself through secret slush funds, and is free of the limitations that come from Congressional oversight, proper auditing procedures and public scrutiny.”
Don’t have any secrets to sell. Don’t worry. Glenn Shriver was paid $70,000 by China and had nothing to sell and if Source Watch is correct, the CIA has a lot of money to throw around but watch out. You may find yourself in prison for just wanting to be a spy for the other side.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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In February 2008, Amy Chu was one of two guests on Riz Khan’s Al Jazeera talk show as an expert on the rise and fall of empires.
LegalTreeHouse.comsays of Chua’s second book, which has nothing to do with parenting, “Day of Empire (2007) argues that great civilizations — hyperpowers, as she calls them — rise because of their tolerance of minority cultures and religions. Conversely, hyperpowers decline when this stops, when they, in the words of the Publishers’ Weekly review, “lapse into intolerance and exclusion.”
Chua speaks first saying, “A hyperpower is one of a few remarkable societies in all of history that amassed so much wealth and military might they dominated the world.
Then the host turns to Parag Khanna, who says he does not disagree with Chua. However, he mentions that the European Union (EU) and China are also capable of influencing affairs and events globally.
While answering the first caller’s question, Chua says her book explores parallels between the Roman Empire and the United States and there are many. She then says that every hyperpower in history was tolerant while rising and intolerant while in decline.
Chua says, she does not mean tolerance for modern human rights and respect for others. She means being tolerant by allowing many different kinds of people regardless of skin color, ethnicity or religion to live, prosper and participate without persecution or limitations.
Today, to be globally dominant, Chua says, a society must attract the best and brightest from all ethnicities around the globe. She says if her thesis is correct, China cannot become a hyperpower but can become a super power since China doesn’t allow many ethnicities to live, work and prosper in China as citizens.
Parag Khanna answers the next question of how the US may react as it is in decline since it has so many weapons of mass destruction at its disposal. He also mentions that the EU is the largest economy in the world — not the US. Then he says India is far from being able to compete globally with the US, the EU and China since it has so many internal challenges to solve.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
I read about China’s J-20 Stealth Fighter at the Huffington Post. Sinophobes seem to be all a Twitter saying, “The J-20 would pose the greatest immediate threat to Taiwan and undermine the Taiwan air force’s advantages.”
However, the US is currently the only country in the world with operational stealth fighters and bombers, and China is years away from deploying stealth aircraft.
As for China’s aircraft carrier, in April 2009 CCTV reported that China wanted an aircraft carrier and would eventually build their own.
China Businessasks, “Will China’s future aircraft carriers be a threat to other nations?”
In fact, China’s first aircraft carrier is a very old, used Russian-made aircraft carrier and may be operational by 2012.
Wu Huayang, Deputy Political Commissar of the PLA Navy, says China has the economic and technological capacity to build its own aircraft carriers. Western military experts believe that China will eventually build five.
Liang Guanglie, China’s Defense Minister, says, “China will not be the only major country without an aircraft carrier to protect the country’s maritime security.”
Even Japan has an aircraft carrier, its first since World War 2. It was launched in 2009. In fact, Japan is planning to build six-light carriers. Sounds sinister to me. No wonder China wants stealth and aircraft carriers after what the Japanese did to China in World War 2.
An outdated list at Wiki shows that the US has 67 aircraft carriers with 11 in service and the United Kingdom has 40 with two in service. India has two with one in service. Even Thailand has a light aircraft carrier.
For stealth, the US has the F-117 Nighthawk (about 64 were built), the B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber (20 are active), the F-22 Raptor (168 built and 187 planned) and the R-35 Lightning II (13 test flight aircraft).
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
I often find Al Jazeera to be one of the best sources to find unbiased and educational reports of China, and in August 2010, Al Jazeera’s Inside Story questioned if China is attempting to become a major, global military power and if following the US example to modernize the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will achieve this goal.
Inside Story starts out showing a Chinese military parade with troops marching in precision much as I did in the U.S, Marine Corps when taking part in military parades after serving in Vietnam. It’s just that Americans seldom see the American military on parade. Believe me, the precision you will see at the beginning of this Al Jazeera video is no different from military precision in the United States military. The style of how they march may be different but the precision is the same.
While serving in the US Marines 1965 to 1968, I took part in military parades where Marines were required to be perfect while marching, doing drills with unloaded weapons, and standing in the summer heat at attention for hours without batting an eyelid.
If a Marine passed out in the heat, it helped if he or she fell while still standing stiffly at attention all the way to the ground. The chewing out that might come later wouldn’t be as harsh.
Al Jazeera English – Inside Story, Modernizing China’s Military – 23:24 minutes
On the 83rd anniversary of the PLA, the Liberation Army Daily said, “China’s army should modernize to boost combat capability using the US as an example.”
The Liberation Army Daily reported, “History and reality have shown again and again that a country which does not have a world view is a backward one. A military which lacks global vision is one without hope.”
To discuss this issue, Al Jazeera convened three military experts from around the globe: Shunzi Taoka from Japan, Lei Wang of Harvard University, and Richard Weitz of the Hudson Institute in Washington D.C.
Lei Wang says that the topic of a modern military in China is not new. It is a topic that has been discussed in China for centuries. He points out that in the 19th century many countries invaded China, which caused people to rethink how to protect China.
Wang says, modernizing the Chinese military will serve economic achievement, China’s role in global peace keeping, and fighting global terrorism. In fact, Wang points out that Chinese troops are always the first to reach a site in China devastated by a natural catastrophe to provide aid and protection to the people.
Richard Weitz agrees that the Chinese military has been modernizing all through its history, which means more than two thousand years. In fact, the Chinese military was technologically superior to the Roman Empire at the time of the Han Dynasty, and maintained that position for centuries until the 19th century.
Shunzi Taoka says he is not typical Japanese. He says he does not believe in the theory that China is a military threat. He points out that China’s navy is no match for the US, and China’s military expansion is over emphasized.
Lei Wang then says that the key mission of the Chinese military is to protect all of China’s economic development—not to intervene or invade other countries. He says, “It is important to look at the culture of Chinese and to also look at what China has done…” and China is now part of global trade and feels a responsibility to provide global protection for free trade. To achieve that goal, the military must be modern.
When asked about China’s military secrecy, Richard Weitz says that is somewhat understandable. However, he points out, we have seen cooperation. China has become a major contributor to UN global peacekeeping operations on the ground.
Shunzi Taoka says to see China as an enemy of the United States as the Soviet Union was during the Cold War is outdated. China is too heavily invested in America and depends on American trade for its economic development. China is very, very different from the Soviet Union.
In fact, China sponsors the US with economic support.
In summation, all three military experts did not see China as a military threat to other nations.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
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