A monster is stalking our world

Learn Chinese, and do it now, before it’s too late.

Mandarin would be the best, but Min or any other version, such as Cantonese, will help, too.

Why?

Because Chinese communists have learnt their Vladimir Lenin well: the capitalist, thus the founder of the Soviet Union, will sell us (meaning: the communists) the rope we plan to hang him on, provided we offer him a good price.

And this is precisely what’s going on even as you read this.

Business news pages all over the world are filled with stories predicting an imminent financial crisis. This one would be caused by the fall of China’s Evergrande Real Estate Group.

A Ponzi scheme to end all Ponzi schemes, this program promised to build numbers of cities across China, all filled with rental properties that would return profits in hundreds of percentage points to their investors. Not all of the projects have materialised yet. The promised profits have been quietly moving toward zero. Meanwhile, Evergrande has missed payments on several of its huge loans, most, if not all, of those due Chinese-owned banks.

These banks say not to worry, they’re holding Evergrande’s collateral. Except, nobody really knows what it consists of.

Well, say many, it’s a Chinese company and the issues belong to China. Not so fast. Way too many of the investors come from elsewhere. If their money goes kaput, many others will feel the consequences. Not in China: in those investors’ own countries.

Evergrande sits 122^nd on the Fortune Global 500 list. It is officially incorporated in the Cayman Islands. Not in China proper, that is. Its head office can be found in the Houhai Financial Center in Nanshan District, Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, People’s Republic of China.

There’s more

America’s Smithfield Foods is no longer America’s.

It took but $4.7 billion. It is a Chinese company now. With subsidiaries all over the U.S. (in 26 states, to be precise), owning 460 huge farms outright and with 2,100 other farms on contract, employing tens of thousands of Americans, the world’s hugest pork producer may be sitting in America. But whatever profits it makes, they all go to China now, and whatever strategic decisions it takes will be dictated from Beijing.

Last year’s purchase of AMC Entertainment for a mere $2.6 billion by another Chinese company puts America’s largest movie theatre network under Beijing’s control.

This is a metastasis on an incredible scale: how do Thomasville, Alabama, citizens feel about receiving salaries from Golden Dragon Precise Copper Tube Group, Inc.?

It cost the Chinese but $100 million to build and open it. They control it outright.

Same for Detroit: if you buy an American car these days, you can bet most of its price that the majority of its complex electronic innards are either made directly in China, or elsewhere, in factories that belong to China.

How about the legendary coal from Tennessee?

It took the Guizhou Gouchuang Energy Holdings Group $616 million to become the sole owner of Triple H Coal Co. in Jacksboro, Tenn.

The list continues, but it’s important to remember that it’s not only buying up all kinds of industrial complexes or building new ones from scratch: it is about owning other countries’ economies, stock, lock and barrel.

China is the hugest market now available all over the world, and many entrepreneurs would dive in head first, no matter what. They only see the market. They do not see that China has left the rest of the world behind in automobile production, and no, the China-made cars aren’t lemons: they can compete with and, often, outrun their competitors from anywhere.

A sobering statistic: China today is the world’s top supplier of parts that form the basics for the research, development, production and implementation of military hardware AND software.

Orders from Eternal City

And here’s the punchline: lest anybody thinks that these are individual, privately-owned companies that are insinuating themselves into other countries’ economies, start thinking again.

Not a single nail, not a single plank, not a single anything is made in China without the consent of their communist party’s leadership. From the outside looking in, Napoleon Bonaparte’s sleeping giant, or Middle Kingdom as she calls herself, China may look a happy combination of communism with capitalism.

She is anything but.

This kind of news rarely makes headlines elsewhere (it does, occasionally, in China, as a warning shot across the bow): people viewed by many in the west as the richest and shrewdest Chinese capitalists, are ruthlessly executed for angering some of the communist bosses, the real rulers of the place.

In fact, some of these executions often happen in public, and woe on those who either come late or sleep in: they may be next. No tree grows so high as to touch heavens is what Chinese communist elite are telling their people.

And yet, instead of learning Chinese, many still invest there, hoping for a fast buck.

They’re blind as bats. Perhaps as blind as bats Chinese scientists have been testing their viral concoctions on.