GOOD MORNING FROM LONDON
25 SEPTEMBER 2026. CHINA POST NO #640
CHINA AND THE FOREIGN MEDIA
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EXTRACTS
1 XI JINPING AT THE WHITE HOUSE
2 BRICS EXPANDS
3 BELT + ROAD – DEBT DIPLOMACY? NO.
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#1 XI JINPING AT THE WHITE HOUSE
GRAHAM PERRY WRITES;-
I read my morning papers looking in vain for a comment on Xi Jinping’s dress code for the White House Dinner. There was plenty of comment about AI and Taiwan and Ukraine and China’s big trade surplus and about the Invited Guests and about the Menu. But nothing about what is always referred to in the Western media as “Mao’s Tunic.” Xi was making a statement and the media had missed it. Xi did not just pull out the Tunic from his suitcase. Mme Peng didn’t choose it. Xi didn’t add it to his suitcase as an afterthought. He had selected it well before he left Beijing. And he had it pressed and ironed on arrival in Washington. Xi looked smart. Not Flamboyant or Super Smart or Innovative. Just a well fitted Mao Tunic. Xi was making a big statement.
Pause for a moment. Think it through. Xi at the White House. Xi at a Banquet in the White House. The World’s media (CNN apart for domestic reasons) were focused on the President of China. He was the star turn – not Trump or Mrs Trump or Madame Peng. The media listened for his every word, watched for his every move, scrutinised his every movement. Did he lean to speak to any of the guests? If so, which guest and what did the lip language reveal? And what did he say? What words were used? What messages did he convey?
And yet the media missed out on The Tunic. And the Tunic mattered, It was a political statement. “I Am Chinese. I am China’s #1 Communist. China has arrived.”
This is not just a moment in time but part of a long story that began in 1921 with the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC). The Tunic reminds the U.S. that the CPC prevailed over the KMT (Chiang Kaishek’s Kuomintang) who the U.S. backed and hoped would prevail in the China Civil War. It was the Tunic that Mao wore to inaugurate the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949. And again in the Korean War when the U.S. and General MacArthur failed to destroy Mao’s volunteers. And then the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmin Deaths when the U.S. concluded that China had imploded and that the 21st Century was safe for the World’s #1 – the U.S. Well not quite. China regrouped, learned its lessons, focused on its economy and now, in 2026 is emerging as main challenger to the U.S.
Disregard the niceties about AI and the rest. China is on a journey and the Tunic was a statement. Xi chose to wear the Tunic as a message to the world – “I dine at the top table wearing a Tunic that is a symbol of China’s long-term journey. China has Arrived.”
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THE BRICS SUMMIT
THE ECONOMIST
“The recent Brics summit in Delhi ended with a declaration 140 dense paragraphs long that centred on how sovereign states can insulate their economies, supply lines, and payment infrastructures from weaponised western financial networks. The aim was to show that the “global south” can shape rules without turning into an anti-American alliance. “The operational strategy does not aim to eradicate the dollar overnight,” the Indian commentator Navroop Singh explained, “but to construct a parallel, non-dollar pipeline through which bilateral commerce, especially in strategic commodities like oil, gas, agriculture, and critical minerals can flow unhindered by extraterritorial oversight of the United States.”
At this month’s SCO meeting at Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan, China’s president, Xi Jinping, said: “The overwhelming majority of countries do not subscribe to power politics, do not want conflict and confrontation, and do not wish to remain closed off and left behind. Instead, they aspire to secure an equal place on the world stage through their own development and international cooperation.”
Formed to manage border disputes among former Soviet states, the SCO’s activities long ago expanded to include an economic dimension fostering connectivity, trade and investment.”
GRAHAM PERRY COMMENTS;-
The focus of BRICS is not to form an America alliance. The U.S. is not the target. The long-term goal of BRICS is “to construct a parallel, non-dollar pipeline through which bilateral commerce, especially in strategic commodities like oil, gas, agriculture, and critical minerals can flow unhindered by extraterritorial oversight of the United States.”. BRICS is something quite new. It is a coming together of developing nations – which used to be called the Under-Developed World or the Third World – to promote trade and commerce free of dependence on the U.S. The target is not the U.S. The aim of BRICS is not to contribute to the decline of the U.S. in the long term (though the decline of the U.S. is a distinct possibility because of inner weaknesses in the state of the U.S. today – socially and economically) but to strengthen the stability and well-being of the developing nations and their peoples.
The Developing World is fighting back. It is ceasing to be beggars on their hands and knees but instead is becoming a large and important group of nations trying to stand on its own collective feet. It does not trust the Group of 10 and seeks an alternative route to prosperity. Bringing down the U.S. is not its goal or its aim or its target. The U.S. will have a choice if it reads the signals and sees which way the wind is blowing. It can obstruct the development of BRICS nations or it can change tack and join together with BRICS in an enlarged trade grouping. That is the choice facing the U.S over the next thirty years.
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FOREIGN EXCHANGE SUPLUSES INTO GEO-POLITICAL CAPITAL
TOMASZ NADROWSKI – MINERAL WAR
“Rather than let those billions sleep passively in liquid reserves effectively helping depress U.S. yields, the CCP redirected them for strategic effect. The idea was simple but potent. Cement China’s image as the coming global economic superpower , a nation whose communist elite would finally bask in near-universal deference. In this Spenglerian reading of history, the Western world, once grand, had now become an increasingly irrelevant living fossil, more energy efficient, less commodity hungry and slowly drifting into geo-political footnotes , shelved in the corner next to other dusty volumes, whose spines read – Rome Byzantium, Austria-Hungary”…The scale of these investments astonished both Western executives and political economists…whatever its economic benefits, there is little doubt that the BRI helped Chinese miners beat their Western counterparts in terms of geographic breadth.
GRAHAM PERRY COMMENTS;-
Remember the phrase repeatedly used by Western politicians to explain away China’s Belt and Road Initiative – Debt-Trap Diplomacy. The West argued, with more than a hint of racism, that “sly, cunning, deceitful” Chinese were encouraging the developing world to over-borrow resulting eventually in across-the-board asset seizure by China as borrowers failed to repay their BRI loans. This was a plot; a grand design; the lender who comes knocking with smiles and a bag of cash and a deep ulterior purpose – an intention to lull the borrower into debts which could not be repaid leading to asset seizure by China in payment for the outstanding debt.
But it did not happen. Borrowers did over-borrow but no asset seizure. Who says so? – The John Hopkins University in the U.S.; the International Monetary Fund and well-known historian Frances Fukiyama. They all agreed that the loans had been renegotiated. There was no asset seizure.
Why didn’t China redirect the trillions of funds they had loaned back into China’s economy and improve the standard of living of their own people? The average Chinese disposable income is approximately $13,900 so why not increase the well-being of their own people by putting the loans to the Developing World back into China? The West struggles here. The “debt-trap” argument has failed to materialise. So how to explain China’s continued overseas funding of the developing world?
China wants a stable prosperous world – not just for China but for the developing world. China’s long-future is more stable and secure if developing countries are allowed to develop. Debt-laden countries remain under-developed. They remain poor, under-achievers, on the edges of widespread poverty with an uncertain future ahead. Better for the world as a whole if prosperity is shared.
We, in the West, find it hard to get our heads around this explanation. Hitherto the world has been divided between the Haves and the Have-Nots. There is a choice ahead – continue to exploit the Have-Nots for the benefit of the Haves or go in a quite different direction and genuinely assist the Have-Nots with loans, investment and long-term determination to raise the well-being of people in countries written off by the developed world.
Remember also that the U.S. has extended its global reach with the use of 800+ military bases. Why does China have just one overseas base? The explanations that apply to the U.S. do not work when it comes to China. Why?
GRAHAM PERRY
