Xi Jinping signaling China is preparing for major attack
By Gordon Chang, Daily Caller News Foundation
Massive ramping up of food production a critical step
A Chinese state-owned ship-building company has converted a bulk carrier into a floating farm that will produce 2,800 tons of fish a year.
The 225-meter-long Zhe Dai Yu Yang 60001 is part of a “marine bread basket” project that “aims to boost the nation’s food security by repurposing old vessels for use in aquaculture.” Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping is mobilizing state entities, including, in this case, China State Shipbuilding Corp., in his all-of-society effort to achieve food security.
Why should anyone outside China care about Xi’s obsessive drive? Because this effort is another signal that he is preparing to attack.
Building mobile fish farms is not Xi’s only initiative. His regime, beginning about two years ago, began a nationwide program to cut down forests to increase farmland acreage. The plan was a reversal of previous policies that, at great effort and expense, had turned farmland into forests.
Moreover, other land is being repurposed. The Rural Comprehensive Administrative Law Enforcement Brigade, nicknamed the nongguan or “rural managers,” has been uprooting cash crops — tobacco, pepper and ginger plants — as well as cutting down bamboo groves and ripping up vineyards. In Chengdu, the government converted a portion of its belt of parks, created between 2003 and 2017 at a cost of more than $4 billion, into farms. Lawns of a residential complex in that metropolis are now growing wheat and corn. In other locations, officials have been using chainsaws to cut down fruit trees, filling in fish ponds, and confiscating poultry.
Xi has been urging the Chinese to leave cities and return to farming, and, in a replay of the Cultural Revolution, he is sending college graduates to work the soil.