After the systematic campaigns launched against two of the important leaders of the BRICS group, South Africa’s Jacob Zuma and Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff—not to mention the non-stop vilification of Russian President Vladimir Putin—the City of London and the Obama Administration are now targeting key BRICS leader, China’s Xi Jinping. In an article in this week’s Economist entitled “Beware the Cult of Xi,” the Economist compares the Chinese leader with Mao Zedong during the worst period of the Cultural Revolution. “But Mr. Xi does not need to be as extreme as Mao for his concentration of power to cause harm,” the Economist writes. “He has been fighting dissent with even more ruthlessness than he has been waging war on graft. Not since the dark days after the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 has there been such a sweeping crackdown on critics of the party. Internet censors have been busy deleting messages posted on social media by outraged citizens in response to the vaccine scandal. These have included posts reminding Mr. Xi of his words in 2013 about the party’s fitness to rule. Police have also been investigating the appearance early in March of an anonymous letter on a government-affiliated website calling on Mr. Xi to resign (raising, among several transgressions, the personality cult and his stifling of the media).”

The reference to the “anonymous letter,” which included a not-so-subtle death threat to the Chinese leader, is quite revealing. While the letter is said to have been written, and may well have been, by Communist Party “dissidents,” it begs the question of the involvement of “outside interests,” i.e. British intelligence interests. The recent “defection” to the United States by Ling Jihua, a top official in the Hu Jintao government, whose return for trial for corruption has been demanded by the Chinese Government, has no doubt provided a good deal of intelligence to U.S. agencies and their allies about the internal situation in China and in the Communist Party, information which could well be utilized in such a “fifth column” operation as this.

The apocryphal letter, which was played up prominently on the front page of Friday’s Washington Post and London Guardian, just as Obama and Xi were meeting in Washington, includes the following threat: “For the party cause, for the long-term peace and stability of the country, and for your own personal safety and that of your family, we ask you to resign from all positions.” Lyndon LaRouche commented that such a threat from an obscure source is “not a respectable item,” and is clearly an Obama operation against the Chinese leader.

An article in the Financial Times by James Kynge indicates that it is not only the personality of Xi, but the underlying policy which is the target, namely the Belt and Road policy. The Kynge article describes the OBOR as a tool for China to become a global maritime power. The article targets in particular the lending of the large Chinese “policy banks.” Kynge points to recent studies by Grisons Peak, a London-based investment bank and Boston University’s Global Economic Governance Initiative, which document the expansion of lending by the Chinese banks, noting—with outrage—that in 2015 China had lent Ibero-American governments $29 billion while the World Bank and the IDB had cut their lending by 5 percent and 14 percent respectively. The article also reflects the concerns that had been expressed by IRI operative Olin Wethington, at a recent CSIS forum on the Belt and Road, who noted that such an article would soon appear in the Financial Times, and warned that the OBOR should be considered a major threat and that measures should be taken to thwart it.

President Obama met with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Obama-crafted Nuclear Security Summit, held in Washington, D.C. on March 28-29. The discussions were characterized as “frank and constructive,” indicating that there was little agreement on anything but peripheral issues like climate change and nuclear “security.”

Obama has used the presence of many world leaders at the summit to move forward his agenda for nuclear war. After a carefully choreographed meeting with Japan and South Korea in the morning, he then got together with the Chinese President. After reiterating U.S. “concerns” about human rights, he then went on
to assert the U.S primacy of human rights. Obama then started in on cyber security, which the Chinese have already agreed to cooperate on, saying that the U.S. would be carefully “monitoring” China’s compliance with the agreement. Obama then preached about the need for China to keep open the door to foreign businesses and to settle the maritime disputes in the South China Sea peacefully, adding that the U.S. had a “global interest” in maintaining freedom of navigation and overflight in the region.

President Xi no doubt listened patiently to the President’s tirade, and responded coolly but clearly, saying that China was “firmly opposed” to the missile defense plans of the U.S. in the region and considered it a destabilizing measure. He also said that he hoped the U.S. would maintain its declared policy of not involving itself in the South China Sea, and that China would accept no violation of Chinese territorial integrity under the cloak of “freedom of navigation”.

The same day, the Chinese Foreign Ministry, in reply to a question at the press conference in Beijing, reiterated China’s right to declare an ADIZ (air defense identification zone) in the area of the South China Sea. While such a declaration has not yet been issued, U.S. Undersecretary of Defense Robert Work had warned on Wednesday that such an ADIZ would not be deemed legitimate by the U.S.

While the media in China will paint the meeting between the two presidents in bright colors, it is clear that the “nuclear clock” is now ticking more loudly than ever. Russian media such as Sputnik International seem tuned in to that reality, covering March 31 comments by Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Yang Yujan regarding repeated U.S. naval incursions into China’s territorial waters in the South China Sea (“As for the US ships which came, I can only suggest they be careful”), under the following headline: “Beijing Ominous Threat to Washington Over South China Sea: `Be Careful’.”