The so-called Summit for Democracy held on December 9-10 this year by Biden Administration online is worth noting mainly because it reflects internal and external problems of the organizer of this event, i.e., the United States. Of the latter problems, today’s main one is Washington’s assessment of China’s emergence as a new global power threat to national interests.

This factor acted as the primary motivation for holding the summit, even though Beijing was not directly mentioned in the speeches of the American President. But, of course, it was clear who was implied to be the main culprit behind the process of democratic recession and the growing role of autocracies in the world, which Joe Biden is concerned about.

The Summit for Democracy to which China, the Russian Federation, and some other countries, including some US allies, were not invited was designated a turning point. Apparantly, one should expect a change in the recession of democracy to the expansion of its significance in the world.

As for the question of definitions, particularly relevant for such a category as democracy, the host of the event confined himself to saying of the countries where people are allowed to breathe freely and their governments do not try to strangle them with tyranny. In this connection, it would be interesting to know how the people who built the US “breathe” today in the face of terror against them from university-educated left-wing groups, which have the full support of the state apparatus.

Generally speaking, Joe Biden is doing the right thing, not being bothered with the aforementioned issue. In the course of the propaganda war, which was the very act of the event under discussion, any detailed consideration of such an issue, and even with the help of concrete examples, can lead to highly undesirable results.

Today, the “democracy” is nothing more than a political marker for those who often use it. By analogy with the primitive Hollywood source, it is intended to separate the Good Guys from the Bad Guys in the global space of the current stage of the Great World Game. Therefore, if somebody bothers with any clarifying questions, it will be discovered very quickly and with a high probability that Good Guys are as bad as they come, but Bad Guys can still be dealt with.

Meanwhile, similar issues arise in the Good Guys’ camp. India, which Washington politicians have recently been designating with the well-established meme “the Largest Democracy in the World,” expressed perplexity) over the composition of those invited to the Summit for Democracy, as well as the appropriateness of the participation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in it. It should also be noted that India has an ever-increasing debate on the consistency of the definition of democracy with the country’s current political practice.

In the main object of the mentioned event, they rated it in advance as an act of information warfare and started preparing for it appropriately. First, the main participants of the forthcoming forum were designated by the term “anti-Chinese ideological clique”. Secondly, a series of analytical materials were prepared, which examined both the category of “democracy” and its compliance with the state system, domestic and foreign policy practices of the main geopolitical opponent.

Representatives of the country’s leadership used various venues to express their own views on all related issues connected to the upcoming Washington event. In this regard, a joint article by the Ambassador of Russia and Ambassador of China to the United States published in late November in the National Interest magazine is significant.

On December 9, during the 14th Bali Democracy Forum, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi spoke (also online), highlighting the same category of “democracy,” among other things. According to the Chinese Foreign Minister, no one has the exclusive right to “possess and interpret” it. One can call a country “democratic” only if the people living there are the masters of their fate. This, of course, is also too general of a definition and needs to be clarified.

On the whole, Wang Yi’s speech was relatively neutral, that is, not confrontational at all. In particular, the speech stated China’s refusal to impose the Chinese state system on anyone and, on the contrary, its readiness to study other countries’ democratic experience.

Once again, by the way, it’s worth noting that this “neutrality” concerning the political arrangement of the partners in the foreign policy arena essentially defines the success of China’s primary global Belt and Road Initiative.

But no political correctness towards the forthcoming Summit for Democracy was shown by the Chinese media commenting on it. As they say, the illustrators of the published articles have had their fun. In particular, stories centered around the Statue of Liberty at were played out. But the illustration on “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?” seems to be a masterpiece of this genre.

The moderate tone of the Chinese minister’s speech mentioned above is noteworthy, given the defiant nature of both the Summit for Democracy format and the series of other, almost simultaneous, overtly anti-Chinese actions. First of all, the participation of the representative of Taiwan in the work of this forum should be mentioned.

At the same time, the Uyghur genocide has been once again brought up to date. The day before the Summit for Democracy began, a draft piece of legislation condemning the alleged forced labor of Uyghurs on XUAR cotton plantations passed through the House of Representatives of Congress. On December 9, the UK-based Uyghur Tribunal made the final decision.

These accusations served as one of the main reasons for activating the diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympic Games in Beijing next February. So far, it involves five Anglo-Saxon countries with a different explanation, which once established The Five Eyes (FVEY) intelligence alliance. But obviously, Japan, which until recently claimed to have its own opinion on this issue, wavered as well.

Finally, it seems appropriate to express the author’s opinion about the place in the history of humanity of the last two and a half centuries of the phenomenon called the US, the organizer of the ambitious Summit for Democracy. Despite all the fair rebukes to this country, it is still a relatively young civilization. So one of the above illustrations, which plays on the theme of the lady’s age personifying the US, seems like an artistic exaggeration. The US is close to what in Russian history is denoted by the pithy word “smuta,” which could be loosely translated as riot or troubles (as in “time of troubles”). Attempts to transfer its costs abroad rather than work to overcome them appear to largely explain Washington’s current period of hyperactivity in the foreign policy arena.

The fact, format, participation, and focus of the Summit for Democracy that has just taken place attest to that fact. Moreover, the summit is now going to be held regularly.

Vladimir Terekhov, expert on the issues of the Asia-Pacific region, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Read more:

https://journal-neo.org/2021/12/16/the-summit-for-democracy/

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BY PEPE ESCOBAR

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin spent an hour and 14 minutes in a video conversation on Wednesday. Geopolitically, paving the way for 2022, this is the one that really matters – much more than Putin-Biden a week ago.

Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov, who generally carefully measures his words, had previously hinted that this exchange would be “extremely important.”

It was obvious the two leaders would not only exchange information about the natural gas pipeline Power of Siberia 2. But Peskov was referring to prime time geopolitics: how Russia-China would be coordinating their countercoups against the hybrid war/Cold War 2.0 combo deployed by the US and its allies.

While no substantial leaks were expected from the 37th meeting between Xi and Putin since 2013 (they will meet again in person in February 2022, at the start of the Beijing Winter Olympics), Assistant to the President for Foreign Policy Yuri Ushakov did manage to succinctly deliver at least two serious bits of information.

These are the highlights of the call:

• Moscow will inform Beijing about the progress, or lack thereof, in negotiations with the US/NATO on security guarantees for Russia.

• Beijing supports Moscow’s demands on US/NATO for these security guarantees.

• Putin and Xi agreed to create an “independent financial structure for trade operations that could not be influenced by other countries.” Diplomatic sources, off the record, say the structure may be announced by a joint summit in late 2022.

• They discussed the Biden-hosted “Summit for Democracy,” concluding it was counterproductive and imposed new dividing lines.

Of all of the above, the third point is the real game-changer – already in the works for a few years now, and gaining definitive momentum after Washington hawks of the Victoria “F**k the EU” Nuland kind recently floated the idea of expelling Russia from SWIFT – the vast messaging network used by banks and other financial institutions to make money transfer instructions – as the ultimate sanctions package for the non-invasion of Ukraine.

Putin and Xi once again discussed one of their key themes in bilaterals and BRICS meetings: the need to keep increasing the share of the yuan and ruble in mutual settlements – bypassing the US dollar – and opening new stock market avenues for Russian and Chinese investors.

Bypassing a SWIFT mechanism “influenced by third counties” then becomes a must. Ushakov diplomatically put it as “the need to intensify efforts to form an independent financial infrastructure to service trade operations between Russia and China.”

Russian energy businesses, from Gazprom to Rosneft, know all there is to know not only about US threats but also about the negative effects of the tsunami of US dollars flooding the global economy via the Fed’s quantitative easing.

This Russia-China drive is yet another dimension of geoeconomic, geostrategic and demographic power rapidly shifting towards Eurasia and possibly foreshadowing the advent of a new world system related to other matters Putin-Xi certainly discussed: the interconnection of Belt and Road with the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), the expanded reach of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the coming Chinese presidency of BRICS in 2022.

The US – with US$30 trillion in debt, 236% of its militarized GDP – is virtually bankrupt. Russia-China have already experimented with their alternative payment systems, which will inevitably integrate.

The most important banks in both countries will adopt the system – as well as banks across Eurasia doing business with them, and then vast swaths of the Global South. SWIFT, in the long run, will be used only in exceptional cases if China and Russia have their way.

Maidan redux

Now to the heart of the geopolitical puzzle.

Ushakov confirmed that the Russian Federation has submitted proposals on security guarantees to the US. As Putin himself had confirmed even before talking to Xi, it’s all about “indivisible security”: a mechanism that has been enshrined all across the territory of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe since a 1975 summit in Helsinki.

Predictably, under orders of the powers that be, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg already rejected it.

Both Xi and Putin clearly identify how Team Biden is deploying a strategic polarization gambit under good old divide-and-rule. The wishful thinking at play is to build a pro-American bloc – with participants ranging from the UK and Australia to Israel and Saudi Arabia – to “isolate” Russia-China.

That’s what’s behind the narrative thunderously splashed non-stop all across the West – to which Biden’s Summit for Democracy was also tied. Taiwan is being manipulated against Beijing while Ukraine is being literally weaponized against Russia. “China aggression” meets “Russian aggression.”

Beijing has not fallen into the trap but has asserted at different levels that Taiwan will eventually be integrated into the mainland motherland, without any ludicrous “invasion.” And the wishful thinking that massive American pressure will lead to cracks inside the Chinese Communist Party is also likely generating zero traction.

Ukraine is a much more volatile proposition: a dysfunctional nightmare of systemic instability, widespread corruption, shady oligarchic entanglements and poverty.

Washington still follows the Zbigniew Brzezinski-concocted Maidan plan laid out for cookie distributor Nuland in 2014. Yet seven years later, no American “strategist” managed to understand why Russia would fail to invade Ukraine, which has been part of Russia for centuries.

For these “strategists”, it’s imperative that Russia faces a second Vietnam, after Afghanistan in the 1980s. Well, it’s not going to happen because Moscow has no interest whatsoever in “invading” Ukraine.

It does get more complicated. The ultimate fear dictating all US foreign policy since the early 20th century is the possibility of Germany clinching a new version of Bismarck’s 1887 Reinsurance Treaty with Russia.

Add China to the combination and these three actors are able to control just about the entire Eurasian landmass. Updating Mackinder, the US would then be turned into a geopolitically irrelevant island.

Putin-Xi may have examined not only how the imperial hybrid war tactics against them are floundering against them, as well as how the tactics are dragging Europe further into the abyss of irrelevance.

For the EU, as former British diplomat Alastair Crooke points out, the strategic balance is a disaster: “The EU has virtually ruptured its relations with both Russia and China – at the same time. Washington’s hawks wanted it. A ‘European Brzezinski’ certainly would have advised the EU differently: never lose both in tandem – you are never that powerful.”

No wonder the leadership in Moscow-Beijing can’t take anyone in Brussels seriously – be it assorted NATO chihuahuas or the spectacularly incompetent Ursula von der Leyen at the European Commission.

A faint ray of light is that Paris and Berlin, unlike the Russophobic Poland and the Baltic fringe, at least prefer having some sort of negotiation with Moscow over Ukraine as opposed to slapping on extra sanctions.

Now imagine Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov explaining the ABCs of foreign policy to a clueless Annalena “Grune” Baerbock, now posing as German foreign minister while displaying a fresh mix of incompetence and aggressiveness. She actually placed the phone call.

Lavrov had to meticulously explain the consequences of NATO expansion; the Minsk agreement; and how Berlin should exercise its right to pressure Kiev to respect Minsk.

No leaks about it should be expected from Ushakov. But it’s fair to imagine that with “partners” like the US, NATO and the EU, Xi and Putin should conclude that China and Russia don’t even need enemies.

Follow Pepe Escobar on Twitter: @RealPepeEscobar

READ MORE:

https://www.unz.com/pescobar/putin-xi-running-circles-around-bidens-hybrid-war/

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Development, Sovereignty, Ideology and the New Great Power
Competition1
William H. Overholt
It’s an honor to speak to this conference of the University of Malaya. I used to travel frequently to Malaysia to attend conferences but unfortunately I have not had that opportunity for several years. I hope my old friend Noordin Sopiee has not been forgotten; he was one of the smartest strategists I have ever met.
Malaysia is one of the world’s success stories. Like all developing countries it has had, and continues to have, many struggles, but the lives of its people have continually improved. It has strengthened national unity in the face of a very diverse society. It has accomplished these things without terrible violence. It has governed itself with a system that, for all its many problems, treats its people with dignity and regularly holds its leaders accountable to its people. That is success.
You have asked me to speak about the implications of China’s rise. When I lived in Iloilo, in the Philippines, the fundamental social rule was, never say anything that will offend anyone. Always speak about delicate subjects in euphemisms. Today we are in a university, albeit virtually, and scholarship only moves forward if we speak clearly. In a complicated world that means offending everyone. If I do my job today I will have offended everyone, including the leaders of my country and including the sponsors of this conference. I hope to do so in a way that is helpful.
Different understandings of China’s rise
In the 1980s I gave many speeches to audiences like this, saying that China’s economic reforms would make it the next superpower. Most Americans thought I was completely wrong to think China would succeed. Those speeches culminated in a 1993 book called The Rise of China: How Economic Reform is Creating a New Superpower. I thought this was a good thing, especially for the Chinese people. From 1985 to 2001 I lived in Hong Kong, and I was inspired to watch a tired, often hungry, poorly educated, poorly clothed population transform into the confident, healthy, better educated people of today.
Our understanding of China’s rise has evolved gradually. In the 1990s Prime Minister Mahathir frequently expressed concern that China’s success would drain trade and investment away from ASEAN. I published articles showing that, to the contrary, as China grew ASEAN’s trade and investment accelerated. China’s economic rise has in fact benefited the whole world. It has increased demand for goods from other countries, provided high quality and low priced goods
1 This talk was the sole keynote address for the conference on “Regional Order and Global Transformations: Asia and China in the Changing Geopolitical Economy,” Institute of China Studies, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, December 9, 2021. The substance diverged from my assigned title, and the spoken version was a few sentences different from the written version. Every sentence eventually appeared in either the spoken version or the answers to questions.
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to other countries, stimulated efficient supply chains throughout Asia, and provided large scale investments. Although the Belt and Road Initiative has many problems, on balance it has benefited many countries and has now stimulated competition from Japan, the U.S. and Europe that will also benefit many countries.
Given the benefit of China’s rise to both China and the world, why has China’s rise recently turned so contentious between China, the U.S. and to a lesser degree many others?
Some political scientists attribute the contention to the Thucydides Trap, the argument that rising powers and established powers usually go to war. Certainly there are rivalries, but the evidence for the Thucydides Trap ignores non-Western history, ignores economics, and ignores post-World War II history. Since World War II, rivalries have been decided mainly by economic competition, not by war. Germany and Japan became big powers through economic performance, with minimal militaries. South Korea was initially inferior in all kinds of power to North Korea, but now South Korea’s economy is over 50 times larger than North Korea’s; it’s clear who won. Likewise, Indonesia, which was the sick man of Asia when it was emphasizing ideology and territorial claims to most of Southeast Asia, became Southeast Asia’s leading country after it shifted under Suharto away from ideological and territorial priorities to a priority for economics.
The Cold War was decided by economic competition. The Soviet Union put all of its emphasis on the military and went bankrupt.
Likewise, China became a big power based on its economic growth before its current military buildup started. In the modern world, economic performance is what counts. Economic competition is different from pure military competition. In economic competition, everyone can win, whereas in military competition any win for one party is a loss for the other.
The emergence of serious conflict
For a long time it seemed as if the U.S. and China were headed toward a workable, mutually acceptable big power relationship. I don’t mean that China was converging politically on a Western model; contrary to some current nonsense in Washington, no U.S. administration ever expected that. Nor do I mean complete economic convergence. That was never expected or necessary. But we could have had a manageable, respectful competition without complete convergence. What happened?
Part of the problem was on the U.S. side. While Washington welcomed China to join the system, it was unwilling to treat China as a completely equal partner. In governance of the World Bank and IMF, there was tremendous resistance to treating China as a partner proportionate to its global economic role. The U.S. military always treated China as an adversary, sometimes in a very provocative way. The ultimate test of the U.S. welcome to China as an equal member was the AIIB. China designed the AIIB to be fully compatible with the Bretton Woods institutions, and AIIB’s subsequent behavior has validated China’s sincerity. However, Washington made excuses to deny that reality.
China’s planning of the AIIB occurred at the pinnacle of Chinese fascination with Western economic models and with some aspects of Western political models. The Global Financial
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Crisis ended China’s acceptance of Western economic models as the ultimate aspiration, and the rise of Trump and Boris Johnson ended any prestige that Western political models had. (It’s easy to forget that there once was such prestige. Through the early years of this century, the Central Party School was among those analyzing alternative models for democratization. There was even talk of a model where the Guomindang might be allowed to win an election in Fujian Province.)
Even more important, both the U.S. and China have been undergoing social changes that create vital challenges for their political systems. President Biden has said that U.S. democracy is at stake. That has happened because the U.S. system has worsened rather than moderated a trend toward severe social inequality and because both major political parties, for different reasons, have refused to ease the inexorable transition from a manufacturing workforce to a services workforce. Instead of helping the workforce evolve, as China has, they have blamed the shift on China.
America’s problems are very serious and I’m happy to elaborate on them. But this conference is about China, so I’ll say more about China.
China’s economic success has brought it to a new phase of development that poses major challenges for its economy, its politics and its international posture.
China’s future economy
The future will see a slower Chinese economy. The engines of fast growth have been infrastructure, property and urbanization. The Chinese government is wisely deflating the property bubble and urbanization is decelerating fast. By 2030 those drivers will be obsolete. +In addition, China has a growing burden of supporting an aging society with an ever declining workforce. China will seek to offset these trends by increasing innovation, but governance developments will limit innovation.
China will still be the first or second largest world economy. It will be a military superpower and a world political leader. But it will not be the driver of growth and structural change that it is today.
The transitions China faces
China’s success derived from emulation of the South Korean, Taiwan, Singapore and Japanese models. In those models for early industrial transition, fast growth is achieved by a strong, tough central government that manages the economy in detail, relies heavily on large state- supported industries, builds infrastructure, and strongly supports well-chosen sectors while liberalizing its internal market. It becomes efficient through extreme domestic competition and a focus on successful competition in foreign markets. China’s success mirrors that of its predecessors.
Transition to economic complexity
Success creates a revolution of complexity and scale. Starting from a relatively simple economy of farmers, road builders and cheap clothing manufacturers, in only a few decades the economies of these super successful countries become enormously complex. Suddenly, to take
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just one sector, there are thousands of computer hardware and software manufacturers, evolving at a disorienting pace. In the face of this complexity, the old detailed central management of the economy no longer works well. In the face of the complexity revolution, South Korea’s centralized management of a dozen chaebol, Taiwan’s centralized management of 40 Guomindang conglomerates, and Singapore’s highly managed economy gave way to much more market-driven systems. The private sector became dominant. Similarly, the private sector in China now supplies virtually all new growth and net new jobs.
Transition to social complexity
Society mirrors this economic complexity. Each sector and subsector becomes large, educated, organized, and self-financed, with leadership and self-consciousness about its interests. Each sector asserts interests that conflict with other sectors and with some government goals. Large firms threaten to capture the state.
Likewise the challenge of social complexity created crises and stresses that led the governments of Park Chung-Hee, Chiang Kaishek and Lee Kwan Yew to evolve toward more market-driven polities. This model adapts to complexity by shifting much power from government ministers to automatic adjustment mechanisms in economics and politics alike.
China recently has chosen instead to fight the tide of complexity. Instead of acceding to it, China seeks ever more comprehensive control: more emphasis on state enterprises, powerful Party secretaries in every business, internet controls, data controls, separation from international flows of information, ever tighter controls on professors, lawyers, women’s groups, Christians, Muslims. The more the economy succeeds, the more society becomes complex, and therefore in this model even more controls must be imposed. Controls are already very tight—on professors, lawyers, journalists, internet communications, Christians, and especially Muslims. Because economic success brings even more social complexity, even tighter controls will be required in the future.
These controls have economic consequences. The positive consequence is a period of stability. But Party secretaries and CEOs often have different agendas, and the differences detract from growth. Tough controls on Christians and Muslims have consequences too. When you tell a Xinjiang Muslim that he can be arrested for praying, going to the mosque too much, fasting for Ramadan, abstaining from alcohol, wearing a beard, or participating in Muslim weddings and funerals, there is an eventual price.
There will be two further drags on growth. Historically, many political leaders have believed that if the state owns the major businesses, the state’s control of society will be greater. But history shows that giant companies invariably end up owning the politicians. Related to this, when one party or one coalition dominates a society for a long time, corruption always becomes severe. That is true for the Chinese dynasties, for postwar Japan, for a period in modern Malaysia, for the Soviet Union and Russia. Xi Jinping has fought valiantly and sincerely against corruption and I admire him for that, but he is fighting an inexorable tide.
It is impossible to estimate the size of these drags on growth, but they will be drags and it may become impossible for China to grow as quickly as the U.S. or EU. A slow-growing China will not
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have today’s bull market mentality at home. It will require brilliant management to avoid becoming a giant, sluggish Japan. It is easy to forget how quickly Japan went from the nuclear dynamo, taking over the world economy and becoming a superpower, to the slowest of the major industrial economies.
Transition to global economic scale
Just as economic growth inexorably breeds complexity, it brings scale. When Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and others were small developing economies, the world tolerated their industrial subsidies, protectionism, intellectual property theft, and other deviations from fair competition. The world wanted them to succeed at development. But success gave Toyota and Samsung a scale that threatened to devastate their competitors. The world’s developed countries play by rules that only allow success through superior efficiency, not through vast subsidies and denial of fair opportunities to competitors. Particularly in Japan’s case, there was quite a struggle over the transition to developed country rules. Washington briefly imposed quotas as well as 10 percent tariffs on all Japanese goods. But the result is that today Americans drive vast numbers of Toyotas, Honda, and Nissans and Americans are just happy to own such great cars.
China has reached that threshold of success where the developed world expects China to play by fair rules. Huawei is the Chinese analogue of Toyota, a great company that threatens to take over 5G for the whole world. But its success depends heavily on the exclusion of competitors from a major role in the Chinese market. Because Ericsson and Nokia don’t have the rights to compete fully in the Chinese market, while Huawei formerly had the right to compete fully in every market, Huawei’s research budget can be larger than all of its competitors combined. It would totally destroy its competitors. Getting special advantages as a developing country is different from demanding the right to destroy all competitors.
If China will play by fair rules, Huawei’s success can be like Toyota’s, perhaps even greater. But as long as China has an implicit rule that no Western company will ever be allowed to become more than a minor player in the Chinese market, there will be an endless series of trade wars.
Transition to global leadership
Finally, just as there is a scale threshold in economic competition, there is a scale threshold in geopolitics. Small developing countries naturally struggle for every advantage. The South China Sea has been an object of such struggle. Every country has played games in the South China Sea. But a country that desires to be a leader, a country that says it wants to create a community of common interests, has to seek a system of stability, not just maximum self- interest. A stable system must take into account everyone’s interests, not just one’s own. China has not accepted this. Its position is that only China’s interests count. Malaysia’s interests, or the Philippines’, don’t count. Compromise is rejected. Rules that apply to everyone, including China, are rejected.
The path to peace
In summary, we have two great problems in the world, the refusal of the U.S. to accept China as an equal and the insistence of China that it must be given all the special advantages of a
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developing country while simultaneously asserting that it is a superpower that will reorganize world politics and economics according to its conception of a community of common interests.
There is only one path to peace:
The U.S. must accept China as an equal.
China must accept the responsibilities of a major economic and political power.
I’m afraid I might have kept my promise to say something that might offend everyone. Sometimes we honor colleagues by giving our most forthright thoughts. In the 1990s had many conversations with Zhu Rongji. I thought of him as one of the two greatest men of the 20th century and I always felt honored to be in the same room with him. He was tough. He was decisive. He always sought constructive criticism; his openmindedness to different views was one of the many reasons for his greatness.
A final thought from history: Chinggis Khan ran the greatest empire in world history and contributed more to economic development than any individual in world history. He was supremely tough and in control. Two of the key reasons for his success and his subsequent impact on the future of our world: The same rules applied to everyone in his empire, without regard for tribe or grouping. And he respected every religion of every group in his empire.

READ MORE:

http://www.theoverholtgroup.com/media/Articles-China/Malaysia-speech.pdf

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