Xi’s China Is Farce

11 thoughts on “Xi’s China Is Farce”

1. Spot on. China has made some horrible mistakes. RIght now foreign investment is desperate to diversify supply chains away from China. Domestic demand is the answer for China, and state investment is the exact wrong place for them to look for this demand. China desperately needs public goods like a health care scheme, a national retirement plan and unemployment insurance so its population will be encouraged to consume. The export platform model has reached the end of the road. Also cozying up to Putin was a giant unforced error. Now Putin has blocked grain exports from Ukraine. Guess who imports large amounts of grain? China. Guess who buys a lot of Chinese goods- the West! Just terrible decision making by Xi.

2. And this is the economy everyone is panicking about replacing the US as #1 in short order? Good one. Bidenomics is Trumping (get it?) Xiconomics. Too bad no one who is currently benefiting will acknowledge, understand, or remember that come the next election cycle.

   1. To be clear: China isn’t the problem. Socialism isn’t the problem. Xi is the problem. And really, it’s just “recent Xi.” He’s taking the Mao impression too far. He seems like he may be a little delusional about it at this point. He’s morphed into a cartoon.

      1. I remember being really optimistic when Xi first rose to power. There was an article in the NYT about how he had visited Muscatine, Iowa in 1985 and stayed with a local family. He spoke highly of his visits to America, and Americans spoke highly of him. It seemed like things really could be moving forward to a future relations between China and the United States were on a footing similar to those between the United States and the EU.

         It seems like Xi is a true embodiment of the old adage about how power corrupts. I don’t mean that in the sense of corruption-as-crime; rather, I mean it in the sense of corruption-as-decay.

         1. A visit to the mid-west is nice, but a step back with look at his whole bio would have erased your optimism. He is the cultural revolution’s frankenstein beast. Anyone who suffered what he did at the party’s hand, and then become its leader, would be profoundly disturbed. This one is for psychiatrist to explain.

      2. And being that he is an authoritarian, that should have been completely predictable in hindsight. If anything, China is becoming a preview of what the United States would look like with a decade of Trump, or any other far right leader in charge.

         1. Well said

3. I had hope for China until the Hong Kong suppression…

4. The word that comes to mind is contradictions….A word Communists used to like a lot…The idea that a victim of the cultural revolution would take power and try to thread the needle has a lot of precedents in eastern Europe before the fall of the wall. There’s plenty of irony to go around, but I for one am not at all surprised- Janos Kadar in Hungary, General Jaruzelski in Poland, maybe even Gorbachev. Capitalism needs democracy and democracy needs capitalism…Xi is more regretful of the fall of the Soviet Union than the cultural revolution- that’s all I need to know…Ask Angela Merkel is she has learned anything from Vladimir Putin about capitalism inevitably leading to representative democracy….

   1. Really liked your point about democracy and capitalism. Past Chinese leaders loosened the constraints on free choice and individual power to enable substantial successes for capitalism in China.

      Xi’s approach to governing seems to tighten controls and constraints. But economic circumstances, whether external or internal to China, do not necessarily abide in China’s politics under Xi. Watching Xi try to force certain limited levers of China’s economy in the “correct” direction doesn’t seem to be working well for his purposes.

5. I thought this would be a good way to punctuate this article lol https://youtu.be/_8xoJRdbJdQ