Today is Chinese New Year, the Year of the Snake. The Australian Citizens Party wishes a happy Chinese New Year to all, and especially to US President Donald Trump, on whom, unfortunately, so much of Australia’s relationship with China will hinge, because Australia has shown we do not exercise an independent foreign policy.So far as president, Trump has seemed mostly positive towards China, a far cry from the extreme tensions that officials in his first administration, such as Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, stoked from 2017 to 2021, which the Australian government went along with. Trump has blocked both Pompeo and Bolton from having a role in his new administration, and even withdrawn their secret service protection. He has also had a very warm conversation with China’s President Xi Jinping and announced his intention for a face-to-face meeting soon.

However, in terms of actions, not just words, Trump has appointed China hawk Marco Rubio as Secretary of State (p. 9), who has been the USA’s representative on the British-formed Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China  (IPAC), which includes Australian politicians such as the extremely Sinophobic Senator James Paterson. IPAC was formed out of the British Henry Jackson Society (HJS), an extreme neoconservative lobby established to agitate for violent regime-change wars in the name of “liberal democracy”. China has long been their ultimate target: in 2012 Australian HJS advisory board member Michael Danby called for regime change in China, a recipe for a thermonuclear war of annihilation. Trump openly boasts that he employs hawks so he can spook countries into making deals with him in order to avoid wars, but he’s playing with fire. The truth is that countries like China, and Russia, have exercised great forbearance over recent years, which is the only way world war has been avoided. Unless he keeps Rubio on a leash, Rubio’s neoconservative and British backers will look for every opportunity to escalate tensions with China.

This week Trump received a huge reality check when US tech stocks related to artificial intelligence (AI) plummeted, led by chip maker Nvidia, which lost US$600 billion, or almost AU$1 trillion of its share value in one day—the single biggest dollar value loss suffered by a single company in history. A small Chinese company triggered the plunge by releasing an AI platform called DeepSeek that is better than all the US ones so far, and cost less than $10 million to develop, compared with the many billions of dollars its US competitors spent. Not only could this pop the AI bubble, but it exposes the house of cards that the US economy has become, which is no longer based on its ability to manufacture and build infrastructure, but on Wall Street banks and its huge tech companies known as the FAANGs—Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google—which, while dominating global information (outside of China) and the processing of global commerce (outside of China), are not capable of producing the everyday needs of everyday people. Trump-supporting venture capitalist Marc Andreesen called DeepSeek “AI’s Sputnik moment”—referring to when the Soviet Union beat America to launch a satellite into space—and Trump himself praised DeepSeek for how inexpensive it was: “That’s good because you don’t have to spend as much money”, he said. “I view that as a positive, as an asset.” But if Trump wants to remain positive, he will have to contend with people in his own administration, echoed in Australia, who are already trying to cast DeepSeek as a national security threat, to create a pretext for blocking the platform so US firms won’t have to compete.

This week, the ACP posted this Chinese New Year greeting: “The Citizens Party wishes a better and prosperous relationship between Australia and China in the new year.” We will only achieve that if we assert our independent national sovereignty, and ensure our nation supports positive cooperation between Trump and China.

In this week’s issue:

• Comprehensive survey shows Aussies strongly support a government post office bank
• Hypocrisy and cowardice abound in Canberra’s Auschwitz anniversary antics
• What is behind the ‘anti-Semitic’ attacks in Australia?
• Were 2017 bomb threats in USA and Australia a precedent for current ‘foreign-funded’ attacks?
• Anti-Semitism ‘rise’ obscures more slaughter in Gaza
• Ex-foreign minister warns New Zealand against foreign interference laws
• Is US national interest in flagging Quad or rising BRICS?
• Cashing in on the digital gold rush: Trump’s big bang
• Belt and Road countries can finance their own progress—five ways to do it!
• Celebrating Australia Day and Chinese New Year
• 2025: The centennial of the discovery of the Universe
• ALMANAC: Why the President and Congress must nationalise the Fed

A bank to unify the nation

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