Last month’s stock market crash in China was without any doubt an economic war against China covertly waged by the United States, with the direct objective of subverting the ruling Communist Party, according to the most powerful leader of China’s massive state-owned corporate enterprises.
And anybody who doesn’t believe such a thing is definitely a traitor to the Chinese nation ready to betray the Chinese Communist Party, insisted Lin Zuoming, who made those claims in a July 17 interview with China Aviation News. The interview was subsequently carried by most of China’s major news outlets.
Mr. Lin’s words should not be taken lightly as they reflect an official Chinese view of the stock market woes. Mr. Lin is a member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee and president and CEO of China’s largest aerospace and defense conglomerate, the Aviation Industry Corporation of China. AVIC, which makes virtually all of China’s military aircraft from the J-series aircraft to Zhi-series attack helicopters, is the equivalent of Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman all rolled into one.
Mr. Lin’s company has been aggressively marching into the U.S. aerospace industry. In March 2011, AVIC bought the Minnesota-based Cirrus Aircraft for a reported $210 million. Cirrus, now 100 percent-owned by the Chinese government, is the world’s second largest single-engine general aviation aircraft maker after Cessna.
Mr. Lin sees the stock market’s recent gyrations as one of America’s counterpunches against China.
“It is evident, without any doubt,” Mr. Lin said in the interview, “that we are facing an economic war … [whose objective] is to lure the Chinese masses into doubting the Chinese government … [and] to topple the Chinese Communist Party’s ruling position, ultimately leading to the total collapse of China’s economy. Therefore, the economic war ignited in the A Share sector of the stock market is directly targeted at our five-starred red flag.”
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However, Mr. Lin’s entire case for such a diabolic Washington conspiracy consists of two coincidences of the calendar: China’s main stock market lost 300 points on June 19, one day after the Hong Kong Legislative Council vetoed a Beijing-backed election proposal; and another steep dive of China’s stock market occurred on June 29, when the China-backed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank agreement — which the Obama administration declined to join — was signed.
Even some of China’s own news outlets were embarrassed by the conglomerate leader’s bravado. The day after Mr. Lin’s sensational interview was published, Guangming Daily put out an editorial questioning his theory. The editorial requested Mr. Lin provide more specific evidence of the existence of the stock-busting U.S. plot and asked, “Who is the enemy and where?”
China’s mainstream media immediately backed Mr. Lin by promptly publishing his searing rebuttal to Guangming Daily’s editorial.
“It is beyond belief that there are still people who are asking, ’Where is the enemy’?” he wrote in the Global Times earlier this week, explicitly stating that the enemy is the United States.
“The United States has always been vigilant about the rise of Asia and the Pacific,” Mr. Lin wrote, citing the 1985 Plaza Agreement targeting a rising Japan and Washington’s supposed “black hand” in the 1997 Asian financial crisis that blindsided Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia.
China’s stock market crisis is the third U.S. economic war against an Asian country, in Mr. Lin’s account.
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“This time, the explicit target is China, directly challenging the ruling status of the Chinese Communist Party. … The forces of shorting China want to use a series of events to cause China’s economic downward sliding, social instability, even possibly engineer a color revolution. In today’s world, it is hard to separate economic, political and military affairs. This is a holistic war.”
Those who challenge the U.S. conspiracy theory are traitors, Mr. Lin wrote, just like the Chinese puppet troops who collaborated with the Japanese invaders during World War II. “This episode reminds me of the Japanese offensives during the war where those leading the charge were all Chinese collaborators working for the Japanese who only marched behind these puppets,” he wrote, “The Chinese puppet troops were usually several times more numerous than the Japanese troops.”
With such a serious charge of treason in state-run media, who would dare to argue against such a robust comrade?
• Miles Yu’s column appears Fridays. He can be reached at mmilesyu@gmail.com and @Yu_miles.
• Miles Yu can be reached at yu123@washingtontimes.com.
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