Juno News - October 17, 2020


China is preparing for war

Mentioned
Xi Jinping Barrick Gold
Big Tech's Assault on Free Speech Trudeau stonewalls while Ford changes his mind

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

176.91

Word count

643

Sentence count

44

Harmful content

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The other day, reports surfaced that Chinese leader Xi Jinping was touring a military facility and told his troops, "Prepare to go to war." What could he possibly mean by that? And why is China interested in buying a mining company in Canada?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 The other day, reports surfaced that Chinese leader Xi Jinping was touring a military facility,
00:00:10.560 was inspecting the troops, and told them, hey guys, prepare to go to war. Well, that news hit
00:00:17.440 the West and all the analysts and pundits said, hmm, I wonder what he means. What could he possibly
00:00:22.800 mean by that? What should we take from it? How about we take the man at his word and assume
00:00:28.080 he means what he says, in that China is preparing to go to war. You know, it's funny, anyone who 0.97
00:00:35.200 studies Xi Jinping will know that he's actually a pretty clear-cut guy. Speeches, essays written,
00:00:40.720 remarks that he says, he really articulates a robust vision of the direction he wants to send the
00:00:46.160 Chinese Communist Party and the country into, and well, boy, it is a worrisome one indeed. So if he 0.92
00:00:52.480 says, let's get ready to go to war, it is consistent with him saying similar remarks
00:00:57.360 in past years. He has said that China must be a country not only capable of waging war, but also
00:01:02.880 winning wars, and they are ramping up their military. Now, they sure have a lot of fighting words to issue
00:01:08.960 to Taiwan, which they consider to be a wayward province that they want to return and bring into 0.99
00:01:14.160 the Chinese fold. So a lot of those war rhetoric words, they could be directed right towards Taiwan,
00:01:19.360 which is increasingly becoming an ally of Canada. We're acknowledging it as we should, and well,
00:01:24.480 we need to be their ally even more. This all ties into something else though. The federal government
00:01:29.920 announced that they are going to be doing a national security review of a takeover of TMAC
00:01:36.080 resources, a mining operation in Nunavut. What does this have to do with what Xi Jinping was saying?
00:01:41.840 Okay, hold on, I'll tell you. TMAC resources, there's a bid for them to be purchased by about $200
00:01:46.960 million, which isn't that much when it comes to a mining company in Canada. There's a lot of small,
00:01:52.800 more exploratory companies. There's so many more than, say, Barrick Gold, which is a very large company.
00:01:59.040 Shandong Mining Company, they want to purchase TMAC resources. Shandong Mining, okay, well,
00:02:04.480 what is that? That's actually the Chinese government. They are a part of a state-owned enterprise,
00:02:09.680 and well, the state owns them, and they do the state's bidding. Okay, why is the Chinese government
00:02:15.440 looking to buy something that is really not all that profitable, and the company is just still
00:02:20.000 doing exploratory stuff? It's not really doing all that well. Well, if you look at the map and you see
00:02:24.800 the operations that TMAC has, they also have an airport and a seaport. And depending on how you
00:02:31.280 switched all the buildings around and so forth, they could be conceived as basically a military
00:02:35.760 depot up in the Arctic. Is that why China wants to buy it? I don't know. Maybe. It's certainly
00:02:41.840 possible, and we also know that China is increasingly looking at having a foothold in the Arctic.
00:02:47.920 Personally, if I was doing this national security review of this deal, here's what would happen.
00:02:52.640 I'd hear about it. Okay, I'd pick up a napkin. I'd get a sharpie and write, and oh, no, there's the
00:02:58.160 review. Done. Capisce. Nothing else to talk about. Really. I mean, it's that simple, and I certainly hope
00:03:04.480 they'll be faster at this than they are with the ongoing Huawei review. But there you have it.
00:03:08.960 Xi Jinping saying, let's go to war, and then potentially buying up something in Canada that
00:03:15.520 could be used refueling station for, I don't know, Chinese vessels. Who knows what will happen there,
00:03:20.400 but it is something that we have to say no. A wholesale ban, really, on strategic assets being
00:03:25.520 sold to state-owned enterprises.