China rallies countries against dollar as US bickers over gender
As the US bickers over the gender of the latest mass shooter, China is nearing dominion over the United States by playing peacemaker among the world’s most powerful countries and rallying them against the dollar.
China made attempts this month to broker a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, much as Israel did last year. Both times, the US led Western countries in shutting down any proposal of peace, though this time the Biden administration did not wait for negotiations to begin before declaring peace between the countries “unacceptable”.
“What we have said before, and we’ll say it again today, that if coming out of this meeting [between China and Russia], there’s some sort of call for a ceasefire, well, that’s just going to be unacceptable because all that’s going to do . . . is ratify Russia’s conquest to date,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said in an interview on Fox News. “All that's going to do is give Mr. Putin more time to re-fit ,retrain, re-man and try to plan for renewed offensives at a time of his choosing.”
And, true to form, Ukraine and its Western allies declined the Kremlin’s China-brokered proposal for a ceasefire because it did not include the withdrawal of Russian troops from the Donbas region. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that it would “simply freeze” the conflict and allow Russia to “prepare and come back” much as the Pentagon had said prior to the talks.
Just days earlier, China President Xi Jinping had brokered an historic peace deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia after paying a visit to Riyadh in December and hosting Iran President Ebrahim Raisi in Beijing. The two oil-rich countries, who have been feuding bitterly for seven years in a deeply religious conflict, signed an agreement in Beijing this month to reestablish diplomatic relations.
On Tuesday, Saudi Arabia joined China’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security, political and trade alliance led by the Chinese Communist Party and involving Russia, India, Pakistan, Qatar and Turkey, with Iran counted among the four observer states. CNBC describes the move by Riyadh as “a further step away from U.S. interests”.
On Wednesday, Watcher Guru reported that for the first time, China and France conducted a liquefied natural gas (LNG) trade in Chinese yuan, thereby ending reliance on the US dollar for energy trades. The trade involved 65,000 tons of LNG from the United Arab Emirates.
China this week also reached an agreement with Brazil, Latin America’s largest economy, to exclude the US dollar from their transactions. Instead, China and Brazil will transact in yuan and reals, respectively.
China is Brazil’s largest trading partner with a record high $150.5 billion in bilateral trades last year, and Russia’s top trading partner with a record high $190 billion in trades last year.
At the same time, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa make up the BRICS economic alliance that is also alienating the United States, who is imposing sanctions on Russia. BRICS, which represents 42% of the world population, launched the New Development Bank in 2014 as an alternative to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. At the urging of financial experts, BRICS is currently considering offering membership to other countries, in part to untie its members from the US dollar.
