“The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan 501(c)(3) research institute focusing on foreign policy and national security. FDD does not accept donations from foreign governments. ”

FDD does not seem to disclose their funding source(s) on their website. Do they have a reliable history of trustworthy analysis?

I don't know about FDD in particular. They certainly have their own agenda. Wikipedia suggests neoconservative thought and proponents of hawkish US foreign policy [1]. So it's not surprising them supporting the publication.

FDD may be the landing page but the authors were the actual reason I thought this could be interesting to other people. I've read some of their publications before, skimmed through the report itself and realized that they aggregated a set of issues they have previously discussed in more than one paper. There are actually not many new facts if you read Sinocism [2], Axios China [3] or Sinoskop [4] from time to time.

Generally interested, what standards need to be fulfilled that you think a source provides 'trustworthy analysis'?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_for_Defense_of_Demo... [2] https://sinocism.com/ [3] https://www.axios.com/world/china/ [4] https://www.sinoskop.de/blog/ [GERMAN]

Generally, in decreasing order of importance:

1. quality and quantity of false statements on the record (if any)

2. retractions (if any)

3. accuracy and reliability of their data

4. accuracy and reliability of relayed data from third parties

Repeat for their individual contributors, affiliates, etc.

Their Wikipedia page[1] has some of their sources of funding.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_for_Defense_of_Demo...

Aw. Based on the domain, I was hoping this article had something to do with Floppy Disk Drives.

Nope, political trade stuff by some think tank or whatever and not anything to do with /dev/fd0.

This is the crux of it:

“ To implement its agenda, Beijing relies on an arsenal of state-owned enterprises and ostensibly private companies whose incentives are shaped by China’s industrial strategy. “

What China has realized, and no other country has attempted, is to use the fact that every company can be legally coopted to work for the CCP to work ‘as one.’

Imagine if every major company in a country across every industry actually worked together in back rooms to ‘crush the world competition in every field’ they competed with.

This hasn’t been attempted before, and is what China is succeeding at, because western countries don’t have a mechanism whereby for example food processing companies would work with the semiconductor industry to gain dominance in each field (times 10).

What adds even more fuel to it is the massive population. It’s why the world cheers on India’s rise and is tepid about China’s now that they know the strategy.

> This hasn’t been attempted before

The Soviets did something similar, just without as much effectiveness.

Western leaders were never so stupid to treat individual soviet companies as though they were independent from the soviet government.

One major difference is the PRC made lots of promises about liberalization during its accession to the WTO. While the PRC may not be very 'communist' per se, it is also not very 'capitalist.' In hindsight it was naivete for western leaders to accept promises of Chinese liberalization at face value.