Ethically pure Chinese soldiers who purge the world of evil American mercenaries

[TooSteep + 142]

Peter Zeihan's latest newsletter. Pretty strong stuff. Thoughts?

A Failure of Leadership, Part II:  How To Lose Friends and Mobilize People Against You By Xi Jinping (and Peter Zeihan) on May 14, 2020 The propaganda out of China of late has been…notable. Beijing has accused the French of using their nursing homes as death camps, has blamed Italy for being the source of the coronavirus (at the very peak of Italian deaths), has charged the US Army with bringing the virus to China in the first place, has thrown a “fact sheet” of truly disbelievable disinformation at the fact-oriented Germans, and turned the country’s ambassadorial core into cut-rate tabloid distributors – all while leaning on anyone and everyone from the United Nations to the World Health Organization to the European Union to regional legislative bodies to alternatively suppress and delete any information or analysis that does anything but laud China, as well as push them to take public stances that slobberingly praise China.   In doing so the Chinese have seemingly deliberately wrecked their relations with the Americans, French, Italians, Germans, Czechs, South Africans, Kazakhs and Nigerians, just to name a few. (The Swedes had all but ended their diplomatic relationship with China – having come to the public conclusion that the Chinese government was a pack of genocidal, power-mad, information-suppressing, exploitive, ultranationalists – before COVID.)   Nor are these disturbing shifts limited to the realm of foreign disinformation. Propaganda at home is boiling in a new direction as well. Overt, blatant racism is the core of the new program, with the government expressly blaming foreigners of all stripes for coronavirus in specific and China’s ills in general. Everything from restaurants to buses to gyms are banning foreigners. As a rule the government edicts are color-blind, but there are plenty of stories out there of this or that municipality or establishment singling out this or that nationality or skin color for…special consideration.   And the invective will get more offensive and self-destructive and seemingly stupid. China’s propaganda offensive April was done by the professionals – the folks at the head of the Ministry of Truth-, er, Foreign Affairs. All the lies and everything that demeaned and insulted countries in the grips of the coronavirus was expressly deliberate and sanctioned from the top, with the ambassadorial core directed to follow suit. (For those of you who like names, watch spokesman Zhao Lijian, a man who enjoys Chairman Xi’s personal sponsorship).   But we aren’t in April any longer, and China’s propaganda effort has become more diffuse, adopting more of a mob mentality. Now the entire governing apparatus has been unleashed, including agencies and bureaus down to the local level who normally have nothing to do with public relations, much less official propaganda. There is no longer a cohesive storytelling effort a la the Soviet style of propaganda. It is as if the Chinese equivalent of the MAGA crowd and the Bernie Bros are suddenly part of the propaganda effort, working alongside – or at least in parallel to – the Voice of America and the State Department.   The April propaganda was sophomoric and moronic, particularly at influencing foreign audiences or achieving some sort of strategic goal. In May it has already degraded into the realm of the infantile. My personal favorite was when an apparatchik made a lovely post stating “We condemn the fatso to death” with the “fatso” in question being US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Considering the ultrafine mesh the Chinese internal censorship dragnet has been using of late, that particular post’s ongoing longevity is a testament to just how holistic the CCP’s effort has become.   In the past few weeks the Chinese have deliberately destroyed three decades of efforts to build up soft power. I have never seen this sort of influence collapse, much less on a global scale. Even the Soviet fall saw Moscow retain influence throughout Latin America, Africa and the Middle East…and then the Soviet Union collapsed. The Trump administration just lost their Olympic gold in Gravitas Destruction to the Xi administration, and not by a small margin.   So…what the hell?

Hong Kong

The Party may be descending into narcissistic ideology, and the Han Chinese may have always had a superiority complex based on a superiority complex, and we all may be a bit aghast at both the new tone and substance of Beijing’s foreign policy, and CCP is too paranoid, controlling, arrogant and bunkered to pretend to lead anything on a regional – much less global – scale, but I think we can all accept that the Party is not run by a bunch of morons.   The explanation is unfortunately very simple: the Chinese leadership is well aware that soft power isn’t what is going to solve the problem they see. There’s some guidance as to the CCP’s thinking in how the propaganda effort is being explained within China, and it doesn’t bode well for the future.   Semi-officially, the CCP called the April (official) effort Wolf Warrior diplomacy, in reference to a recent (and wildly popular) Chinese movie series about ethically pure Chinese soldiers who purge the world of evil American mercenaries. The closest equivalent I can think of would be like calling an American propaganda effort Starship Troopers diplomacy. (Yeah, it is as stupid as it sounds.)   The (more disperse) May effort, in contrast, is being referred to as a Yihetuan Movement mindset. It is a reference to a particularly chaotic period at the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries when a particularly violent strain of ultranationalism erupted in response to foreign actions within China. Most non-Chinese readers probably don’t recognize the Yihetuan Movement reference, but they probably do recall how it was labelled in the West: the Boxer Rebellion. More on that in a minute.   This new propaganda program isn’t about Xi attempting to convince the wider world of China’s greatness or rightness. This isn’t about the United States or Europe or Africa, and certainly not about global domination. Instead it is about intentionally saying things so far beyond the pale that there’s a global anti-Chinese backlash. The backlash itself isn’t the goal, but instead a means to an end. Xi is attempting to use a global anti-Chinese backlash to enflame anti-foreigner nationalist activity within China. Put simply, Xi is trying to get the world pissed off at China so that China becomes pissed off at the world.   Xi feel he needs to hyperstimulate and mobilize a large enough proportion of the population so that they can assist the state security services in containing, demoralizing, cowing – and if necessary, beating, killing and disappearing – those who do not buy in.   Think this seems a bit…extreme? Brush up on your 20th century Chinese history, particularly in the context of how the CCP is explaining its propaganda effort to the Chinese citizenry.   Google the Great Leap Forward to review just how deliberately brutal the Chinese government can be to their own people, and just how good the Chinese government can be at motivating its own citizens to persecute one another.   Check out the Cultural Revolution to see how mobilizing portions of the population to repress the rest of the population makes the East German Stasi look like New Zealand socialists.   Review the Tiananmen Square massacre to remind yourself of how far the CCP will go even in “modern” times when it faces a threat to its power.   Look up the Boxer Rebellion to see how such processes result in the state-sponsored lynching and murder of Christians and foreigners. (Btw, if you are a manufacturer or investor and you still have personnel in China, now would be a glorious time to get them the fuck out).   The only part of this that is new for China is that this time they have industrial and digital technologies to help manage the population so that the sharp end of state power can be brought to bear more quickly.   This leaves only one question: Why…WHY would Chairman Xi feel this sort of extreme action is necessary?   Put simply, Xi fears the end of China is nigh.   And that, again, requires a completely new newsletter.   Stay tuned for Part III…

Edited May 14, 2020 by Tom Kirkman
Moderator edit - changed the copied & pasted grey text to black, to make it more legible

[0R0 + 6,251]

I was wondering if Zeihan's old projection of China folding into itself are being unfolding before our eyes as they make use of the CV19 outbreak to detach from the world and eliminate the external contacts of their peoples. Don't be surprised if the country dumps your factory and design staff right out of the country by sending rabidly violent mobs into your offices industrial operations and businesses. The rabid nationalist propaganda in China is signaling the end of the China market. It is purely China for the Chinese. 

In financial terms, China's dollar liquidity crisis and internal collapse of the highly leveraged SOEs and private real estate markets, is forcing them to detach financially from the rest of the world after the Baoshang bank disaster as explained by Brian McCarthy. As he says, China's most attractive option is to keep the financial system afloat with internal inflation while cutting off their dollar liabilities and sealing up China hermetically. 

The collapse that was inevitable in my work by 2025 that could have been cushioned with proper aggressive monetary intervention and acceptance of high price inflation so could be done slowly, has been pushed over the edge by the CV19 outbreak suddenly and all at once, combining with the effects of swine fever culling the pork herd in half and bird flu and the lockdown killing off bird flocks and green rot restraining grain output for a second year. Food inflation is already at 20%, while industry is in deflation and unemployment is stubbornly high in the  second month of recovery, with fresh industrial unemployment piling up. All the traditional harbingers of broad social revolt in China are in place.

The future of the CCP is in jeopardy. They must clamp down hard on their own people. Particularly the free thinking professional classes and entrepreneurs that anchored their growth. 

 

 

[Jason Martin + 58]

While I certainly agree with many of your conclusions and your overall perspective, I somehow feel that you've come to the right conclusions for the wrong reasons. Personally I am rather patriotic in my private opinions. America is the greatest Empire on earth, and the only real criticisms I have for it is that it doesn't behave in a properly imperial fashion. Largely for the same reasons that the Roman Republic failed to properly manage it's empire until it was reformed by Caesar. 

The only point of issue I can really find is the hyperbole of your exposition borders on the ludicrously partisan. While personally I'm absolutely invested in crushing the Chinese and driving them before American Exceptionalism to the musical sound of the lamentations of their women, I also recognize that perspective and balance, and a dispassionate appreciation of motivation and results leads to a saner and more utilitarian analysis. 

The one thing I would point out, that you seem to possibly be overlooking is that in the game of propaganda, outrageous lies and bullshit are adaptive and useful. It is in the CCP's best interest to maintain a truth blockade, and for their claims to become increasingly hysterical. The more unhinged they appear, the more they generate fear.

Consider it like this. Who would you rather be trapped in a room with, a totally sane but likely malevolent person, or a 800 pound gorilla on LSD and armor made largely of rusty spikes and razor wire?

Crazy unpredictability is actually a legitimate strategy. I call this the Homeless Guy on a Bus strategy. 

Just my 0.02

[0R0 + 6,251]

New video interview with Brian McCarthy on China's ongoing leverage and economic decline problem coming out of the CV19 shutdown. 

He describes the mechanics of China's dollar trap, the likelihood that their reserves have already been pledged for collateral. How they are tackling the real estate bubble bursting by fixing the prices of real estate above the current market values and how this is preventing liquidity to owners and thus forcing them to borrow against the property, ship the money out of China in export goods, and leaving it abroad, and then skipping town.  

 

[0R0 + 6,251]

52 minutes ago, Jason Martin said:

While I certainly agree with many of your conclusions and your overall perspective, I somehow feel that you've come to the right conclusions for the wrong reasons. Personally I am rather patriotic in my private opinions. America is the greatest Empire on earth, and the only real criticisms I have for it is that it doesn't behave in a properly imperial fashion. Largely for the same reasons that the Roman Republic failed to properly manage it's empire until it was reformed by Caesar. 

The only point of issue I can really find is the hyperbole of your exposition borders on the ludicrously partisan. While personally I'm absolutely invested in crushing the Chinese and driving them before American Exceptionalism to the musical sound of the lamentations of their women, I also recognize that perspective and balance, and a dispassionate appreciation of motivation and results leads to a saner and more utilitarian analysis. 

The one thing I would point out, that you seem to possibly be overlooking is that in the game of propaganda, outrageous lies and bullshit are adaptive and useful. It is in the CCP's best interest to maintain a truth blockade, and for their claims to become increasingly hysterical. The more unhinged they appear, the more they generate fear.

Consider it like this. Who would you rather be trapped in a room with, a totally sane but likely malevolent person, or a 800 pound gorilla on LSD and armor made largely of rusty spikes and razor wire?

Crazy unpredictability is actually a legitimate strategy. I call this the Homeless Guy on a Bus strategy. 

Just my 0.02

The Guy on the Bus strategy is what the Kims have been doing in N. Korea for a long time. That is doubtless the new China strategy of overt insult and bullying and commercial self sabotage as they export defective junk for good prices in antibody tests and PPE. This smells strongly of burning bridges. It appears they need to decouple more than the West is interested in doing so, as the contact with Westerners through their export manufacturing, AI projects etc. is a destabilizing source for dissidents to communicate out of China and with each other via external VPNs and human intermediaries. They do seem to be morphing into N. Korea. 

I don't have the kind of patriotic zeal and partisanship is limited to Trump's stance on "the swamp" (which is largely Democratic, started up by FDR and mobster Joe Kennedy and the Unions and Marxist operatives in academia) and his mild position on China (I have become ever more of a China hawk as I learn more of how deeply kleptocratic their foreign investment behavior is, while corporations keep putting another hand in the Chinese capital meat grinder and the fact that nobody can take their money out of China directly is not showing up on their financials. The SP500 is heavily contaminated with China manufacturing and investments that have no cash flow value and no accounting value as they are captive in China's  capital roach motel). I was a China bull for well over a decade till the failure of their massive stimulus of 2008-2011 to keep traction with the economy, and have become progressively more worried and disillusioned about their prospects as Xi established his personal dictatorship and the economy was "growing" only through gigantic stimulus programs and ever steeper credit impulses.  

I oppose the Democrat power machine and its deep and wide corruption and constant power grabs, I don't support Trump per se. I do appreciate his handle on identifying and attracting his base and  how to press Dem buttons to have them pop like a Jack in the box to capture his base's attention. I am not a Trump Republican by choice. 

My geopolitical stance on the US is very much pro US. Not so much because the US was always smart moral and successful in its global actions, but because of the incredible benefit the world has gained from its sometimes erratic control of the global trade system in what is basically a non-empire. As it is actually costing the US while benefiting its allies, but most of all benefiting non-allies and sometime enemies and challengers that were elevated from subsistence farming into industrial giants. I did think for ages, that the empire was based on "exorbitant privilege"  but looking from post 1970 to post Volcker, the world was a totally different place and it was very obviously a US subsidiary role to the hot growth Eurodollar market through which international trade and finance work. With that perspective looking back to the inflationary 1970s and before, it was foreign manipulation of their currencies that inflated the Eurodollar volumes and thus pressing down the dollar. Once I understood that, I was open to Zeihan's perspective. 

 

[Coffeeguyzz + 454]

Great stuff in this thread.

Arguably one of the most brilliant minds in contemporary discourse - Dr. Victor Davis Hanson - just gave a one hour interview to Epoch Times that touched upon several of the topics discussed above. (Interview easily seen online).

Specifically, in the timestamps between  29:00 to 47:00, VDH covers China-related  items that are as current as today's headlines, including  the Cognitive  Dissonance components that prompt such seemingly schizophrenic behavior across much of the political and social spectrum ... worldwide.

 

While this entire interview is quintessential VDH - ranging from Sophoclean Heros to Director Grenell's recent actions - it is a treasure trove of insight from a truly high level intelligence perspective.

Strong preemptive warning to 'progressives/liberals' who do not process contrary data effectively ...  it may be best to simply shun Professor Hanson's perspectives ahead of time as exposure to a dramatically different narrative may very well be injurious to one's mental health.

[TooSteep + 142]

0R0 - thanks for that Brian McCarthy interview. Price floors. Infinitely illiquid. Stability and control at all costs. Getting out of Dodge. Terribly corrupt system that is not built to care about anyone. System built to crack heads. Seems bullish for Australian, Kiwi, Canadian real estate.

Taking Hong Kong and Taiwan with them might be the thing that finally opens the eyes of the west. Does China force the timeline of a decoupling?

He doesn't really explain why they refuse to let the CNY go from 7 to 11. What is your take on that?

I wonder if Trump recently heard about this? He appears to have done a 180* switch on the US dollar. Suddenly he is talking positively about a strong dollar. 

[Jason Martin + 58]

Quote

 Terribly corrupt system that is not built to care about anyone. System built to crack heads.

Nature is red in tooth and claw. It's never surprising the degree to which a human system mimics nature, what is surprising is the degree to which it doesn't, the degree to which it benefits the unproductive. 

Why do people always think that a system that isn't designed to care, is somehow corrupt? To my mind, the only useful question about a system is not whether it cares, but whether it works and produces expected and tolerable results. I'd say our system does so in spades. 

[0R0 + 6,251]

8 hours ago, TooSteep said:

0R0 - thanks for that Brian McCarthy interview. Price floors. Infinitely illiquid. Stability and control at all costs. Getting out of Dodge. Terribly corrupt system that is not built to care about anyone. System built to crack heads. Seems bullish for Australian, Kiwi, Canadian real estate.

Taking Hong Kong and Taiwan with them might be the thing that finally opens the eyes of the west. Does China force the timeline of a decoupling?

He doesn't really explain why they refuse to let the CNY go from 7 to 11. What is your take on that?

I wonder if Trump recently heard about this? He appears to have done a 180* switch on the US dollar. Suddenly he is talking positively about a strong dollar. 

Yes, Trump knows of this dollar trap China is in. The trade deal was not really about trade, it was about squeezing the Chinese Current account by obliging them to buy specified quantities of goods from the US, thus pushing it into a negative flow. 

Your terms of trade and both credit rating and currency rating are heavily influenced by your currency exchange rate and its trend. As your currency weaken's your ability to cover forex debt comes into question. It also acts to constrain your domestic liquidity because forex credit becomes more expensive (higher rates).

Chinese capital flight is  what caused high real estate prices in all major cities globally and throughout Australia and NZ. Their closing up and implosion will stop capital flight. 

[SUZNV + 1,197]

10 hours ago, TooSteep said:

0R0 - thanks for that Brian McCarthy interview. Price floors. Infinitely illiquid. Stability and control at all costs. Getting out of Dodge. Terribly corrupt system that is not built to care about anyone. System built to crack heads. Seems bullish for Australian, Kiwi, Canadian real estate.

Taking Hong Kong and Taiwan with them might be the thing that finally opens the eyes of the west. Does China force the timeline of a decoupling?

He doesn't really explain why they refuse to let the CNY go from 7 to 11. What is your take on that?

I wonder if Trump recently heard about this? He appears to have done a 180* switch on the US dollar. Suddenly he is talking positively about a strong dollar. 

While waiting for 0R0 answer, I may give my understanding about that:

China will try to hold on as long as they can, no one but themselves can have enough information when they will do it and why because no one know how Covid19 will affect the world. And if the next president is Democrats, then they can buy sometimes, like the video suggested as Democrats may not push Trump's trade war.

If CNY from 7 to 11, at first all employees in China will have reduced salary as inflation is up to 57% and trigger a chain reaction:

-Chinese will try to buy anything that can keep the price, they don't want to have CNY anymore. What they can have depends on Chinese regulation.

-Anyone worldwide who has CNY will try to get rid of CNY, which make CNY devalues more so it will not stop at 11.If I recall an article a few weeks ago correctly, EU central banks currently hold a fund more than 500 million Euro values of CNY with the promise that they can swap that CNY to USD anytime. China denied their obligation to do the swapping for Argentina once in 2017. But EU are much tougher than Argentina so it is harder to say no. Global central banks worldwide hold about  $107 billion towards the Chinese currency in their reserves. They wouldn't want to see their reserves reduce 57% and may ask China to take CNY back.

Surely Trump knows this. But the strong dollars  this year depends how much QE stimulus US will print to save the economics and reduce unemployment  for campaigning the election in Nov. 

 

Edited May 16, 2020 by SUZNV

[0R0 + 6,251]

The second half of Zeihan's piece on the shutdown of China.

A Failure of Leadership, Part III: The Beginning of the End of China By Peter Zeihan on May 15, 2020   The Chinese are intentionally torching their diplomatic relationships with the wider world. The question is why?   The short version is that China’s spasming belligerency is a sign not of confidence and strength, but instead insecurity and weakness. It is an exceedingly appropriate response to the pickle the Chinese find themselves in.   Some of these problems arose because of coronavirus, of course. Chinese trade has collapsed from both the supply and demand sides. In the first quarter of 2020 China experienced its first recession since the reinvention of the Chinese economy under Deng Xiaoping in 1979. Blame for this recession can be fully (and accurately) laid at the feet of China’s coronavirus epidemic. But in Q2 China’s recession is certain to continue because the virus’ spread worldwide means China’s export-led economy doesn’t have anyone to export to.   Nor are China’s recent economic problems limited to coronavirus. One of the first things someone living in a rapidly industrializing economy does once their standard of living increases is purchase a car, but car purchases in China started turning negative nearly two years before coronavirus reared its head.   Why the collapse even in what “should” be happening with the economy? It really comes down to China’s financial model. In the United States (and to a lesser degree, in most of the advanced world) money is an economic good. Something that has value in and of itself, and so it should be applied with a degree of forethought for how efficiently it can be mobilized. This is why banks require collateral and/or business plans before they’ll fund loans.   That’s totally not how it works in China. In China, money – capital, to be more technical – is considered a political good, and it only has value if it can be used to achieve political goals. Common concepts in the advanced world such as rates of return or profit margins simply don’t exist in China, especially for the state owned enterprises (of which there are many) and other favored corporate giants that act as pillars of the economy. Does this generate growth? Sure. Explosive growth? Absolutely. Provide anyone with a bottomless supply of zero (or even subzero) percent loans and of course they’ll be able to employ scads of people and produce tsunamis of products and wash away any and all competition.   This is why China’s economy didn’t slow despite sky-high commodity prices in the 2000s – bottomless lending means Chinese businesses are not price sensitive. This is why Chinese exporters were able to out-compete firms the world over in manufactured goods – bottomless lending enabled them to subsidize their sales. This is why Chinese firms have been able to take over entire industries such as cement and steel fabrication – bottomless lending means the Chinese don’t care about the costs of the inputs or the market conditions for the outputs. This is why the One Belt One Road program has been so far reaching – bottomless lending means the Chinese produce without regard for market, and so don’t get tweaky about dumping product globally, even in locales no one has ever felt the need to build road or rail links to. (I mean, come on, a rail line through a bunch of poor, nearly-marketless post-Soviet ‘Stans’ to dust-poor, absolutely-marketless Afghanistan? Seriously, what does the winner get?)   Investment decisions not driven by the concept of returns tend to add up. Conservatively, corporate debt in China is about 150% of GDP. That doesn’t count federal government debt, or provincial government debt, or local government debt. Nor does it involve the bond market, or non-standard borrowing such as LendingTree-like person-to-person programs, or shadow financing designed to evade even China’s hyper-lax financial regulatory authorities. It doesn’t even include US dollar-denominated debt that cropped up in those rare moments when Beijing took a few baby steps to address the debt issue and so firms sought funds from outside of China. With that sort of attitude towards capital, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that China’s stock markets are in essence gambling dens utterly disconnected from issues of supply and labor and markets and logistics and cashflow (and legality). Simply put, in China, debt levels simply are not perceived as an issue.   Until suddenly, catastrophically, they are.   As every country or sector or firm that has followed a similar growth-over-productivity model has discovered, throwing more and more money into the system generates less and less activity. China has undoubtedly past that point where the model generates reasonable outcomes. China’s economy roughly quadrupled in size since 2000, but its debt load has increased by a factor of twenty-four. Since the 2007-2009 financial crisis China has added something like 100% of GDP of new debt, for increasingly middling results.   But more important than high debt levels is that eventually, inevitably, economic reality forces a correction. If this correction happens soon enough, it only takes down a small sliver of the system (think Enron’s death). If the inefficiencies are allowed to fester and expand, they might take down a whole sector (think America’s dot.com bust in 2000). If the distortions get too large, they can spread to other sectors and trigger a broader recession (think America’s 2007 subprime-initiated financial crisis). If they become systemic they can bring down not only the economy, but the political system (think Indonesia’s 1998 government collapse).   It is worse than it sounds. The CCP has long presented the Chinese citizenry with a strict social contract: the CCP enjoys an absolute political monopoly in exchange for providing steadily increasing standards of living. That means no elections. That means no unsanctioned protests. That means never establishing an independent legal or court system which might challenge CCP whim. It means firmly and permanently defining “China’s” interests as those of the CCP.   It makes the system firm, but so very, very brittle. And it means that the CCP fears – reasonably and accurately – that when the piper arrives it will mean the fall of the Party. Knowing full well both that the model is unsustainable and that China’s incarnation of the model is already past the use-by date, the CCP has chosen not to reform the Chinese economy for fear of being consumed by its own population.   The only short-term patch is to quadruple down on the long-term debt-debt-debt strategy that the CCP already knows no longer works, a strategy it has already followed more aggressively and for longer than any country previous, both in absolute and relative terms. The top tier of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – and most certainly Xi himself – realize that means China’s inevitable “correction” will be far worse than anything that has happened in any recessionary period anywhere in the world in the past several decades.   And of course that’s not all. China faces plenty of other of issues that range from the strategically hobbling to the truly system-killing.   China suffers from both poor soils and a drought-and-floodprone climatic geography. Its farmers can only keep China fed by applying five times the inputs of the global norm. This only works with, you guessed it, bottomless financing. So when China’s financial model inevitably fails, the country won’t simply suffer a subprime-style collapse in ever subsector simultaneously, it will face famine. The archipelagic nature of the East Asian geography fences China off from the wider world, making economic access to it impossible without the very specific American-maintained global security environment of the past few decades. China’s navy is largely designed around capturing a very specific bit of this First Island Chain, the island of Formosa (aka the country of Taiwan, aka the “rebellious Chinese province”). Problem is, China’s cruise-missile-heavy, short-range navy is utterly incapable of protecting China’s global supply chains, making China’s export-led economic model questionable at best. Nor is home consumption an option. Pushing four decades of the One Child Policy means China has not only gutted its population growth and made the transition to a consumption-led economy technically impossible, but has now gone so far to bring the entire concept of “China” into question in the long-term.

Honestly, this – all of this – only scratches the surface. For the long and the short of just how weak and, to be blunt, doomed China is, I refer you my new book, Disunited Nations. Chapters 2 through 4 break down what makes for successful powers, global and otherwise…and how China fails on a historically unprecedented scale on each and every measure.   But on with the story of the day:   These are the broader strategic and economic dislocations and fractures embedded in the Chinese system. That explains the “why” as to why the Chinese leadership is terrified of their future. But what about the “why now?” Why has Xi chosen this moment to institute a political lockdown? After all, none of these problems are new.   There are two explanations. First, exports in specific:   The One Child Policy means that China can never be a true consumption-led system, but China is hardly the only country facing that particular problem. The bulk of the world – ranging from Canada to Germany to Brazil to Japan to Korea to Iran to Italy – have experienced catastrophic baby busts at various times during the past half century. In nearly all cases, populations are no longer young, with many not even being middle-aged. For most of the developed world, mass retirement and complete consumption collapses aren’t simply inevitable, they’ll arrive within the next 48 months.   And that was before coronavirus gutted consumption on a global scale, presenting every export-oriented system with an existential crisis. Which means China, a country whose political functioning and social stability is predicated upon export-led growth, needs to find a new reason for the population to support the CCP’s very existence.   The second explanation for the “why now?” is the status of Chinese trade in general:   Remember way back when to the glossy time before coronavirus when the world was all tense about the Americans and Chinese launching off into a knock-down, drag-out trade war?   Back on January 15 everyone decided to take a breather. The Chinese committed to a rough doubling of imports of American products, plus efforts to tamp down rampant intellectual property theft and counterfeiting, in exchange for a mix of tariff suspensions and reductions. Announced with much fanfare, this “Phase I” deal was supposed to set the stage for a subsequent, far larger “Phase II” deal in which the Americans planned to convince the Chinese to fundamentally rework their regulatory, finance, legal and subsidy structures.   These are all things the Chinese never had any intention of carrying out. All the concessions the Americans imagined are wound up in China’s debt-binge model. Granting them would unleash such massive economic, financial and political instability that the survival of the CCP itself would be called into question.   Any deal between any American administration and Beijing is only possible if the American administration first forces the issue. Pre-Trump, the last American administration to so force the issue was the W Bush administration at the height of the EP3 spy plane incident in mid-2001. Despite his faults, Donald Trump deserves credit for being the first president in the years since to expend political capital to compel the Chinese to the table.   But there’s more to a deal than its negotiation. There is also enforcement. In the utter absence of rule of law, enforcement requires even, unrelenting pressure akin to what the Americans did to the Soviets with Cold War era nuclear disarmament policy. No US administration has ever had the sort of bandwidth required to police a trade deal with a large, non-market economy. There are simply too many constantly moving pieces. The current American administration is particularly ill-suited to the task. The Trump administration’s tendency to tweet out a big announcement and then move on to the next shiny object means the Chinese discarded their “commitments” with confidence on the day they were made.   Which means the Sino-American trade relationship was always going to collapse, and the United States and China were always going to fall into acrimony. Coronavirus did the world a favor (or disfavor based upon where you stand) in delaying the degradation. In February and March the Chinese were under COVID’s heel and it was perfectly reasonable to give Beijing extra time. In April it was the Americans’ turn to be distracted.   Now, four months later, with the Americans emerging from their first coronavirus wave and edging back towards something that might at least rhyme with a shadow of normal, the bilateral relationship is coming back into focus – and it is obvious the Chinese deliberately and systematically lied to Trump. Such deception was pretty much baked in from the get-go. In part it is because the CCP has never been what I’d call an honest negotiating partner. In part it is because the CCP honestly doesn’t think the Chinese system can be reformed, particularly on issues such as rule of law. In part it is because the CCP honestly doesn’t think it could survive what the Americans want it to attempt. But in the current environment it all ends at the same place: I think we can all recall an example or three of how Trump responds when he feels personally aggrieved.   Which brings us to perhaps China’s most immediate problem. Nothing about the Chinese system – its political unity, its relative immunity from foreign threats, its ability import energy from a continent away, its ability to tap global markets to supply it with raw materials and markets to dump its products in, its ability to access the world beyond the First Island Chain – is possible without the global Order. And the global Order is not possible without America. No other country – no other coalition of countries – has the naval power to guarantee commercial shipments on the high seas. No commercial shipments, no trade. No trade, no export-led economies. No export-led economies…no China.   It isn’t so much that the Americans have always had the ability to destroy China in a day (although they have), but instead that it is only the Americans that could create the economic and strategic environment that has enabled China to survive as long as it has. Whether or not the proximate cause for the Chinese collapse is homegrown or imported from Washington is largely irrelevant to the uncaring winds of history, the point is that Xi believes the day is almost here.   Global consumption patterns have turned. China’s trade relations have turned. America’s politics have turned. And now, with the American-Chinese breach galloping into full view, Xi feels he has little choice but to prepare for the day everyone in the top ranks of the CCP always knew was coming: The day that China’s entire economic structure and strategic position crumbles. A full political lockdown is the only possible survival mechanism. So the “solution” is as dramatic as it is impactful:   Spawn so much international outcry that China experiences a nationalist reaction against everyone who is angry at China. Convince the Chinese population that nationalism is a suitable substitute for economic growth and security. And then use that nationalism to combat the inevitable domestic political firestorm when China doesn’t simply tank, but implodes.

[Jee + 27]

The One Child Policy means that China can never be a true consumption-led system...

And why is that?

[Jee + 27]

On 5/14/2020 at 2:14 PM, Jason Martin said:

America is the greatest Empire on earth, and the only real criticisms I have for it is that it doesn't behave in a properly imperial fashion. 

 

Surely we can use more slaves than Rome, had we kept Slaverism going the factories wouldn't be shipped to China in the first place. - And in that sense, China is more like the new Rome.

Edited May 16, 2020 by Jee

[BLA + 1,666]

On 5/14/2020 at 11:54 AM, TooSteep said:

Peter Zeihan's latest newsletter. Pretty strong stuff. Thoughts?

A Failure of Leadership, Part II:  How To Lose Friends and Mobilize People Against You By Xi Jinping (and Peter Zeihan) on May 14, 2020 The propaganda out of China of late has been…notable. Beijing has accused the French of using their nursing homes as death camps, has blamed Italy for being the source of the coronavirus (at the very peak of Italian deaths), has charged the US Army with bringing the virus to China in the first place, has thrown a “fact sheet” of truly disbelievable disinformation at the fact-oriented Germans, and turned the country’s ambassadorial core into cut-rate tabloid distributors – all while leaning on anyone and everyone from the United Nations to the World Health Organization to the European Union to regional legislative bodies to alternatively suppress and delete any information or analysis that does anything but laud China, as well as push them to take public stances that slobberingly praise China.   In doing so the Chinese have seemingly deliberately wrecked their relations with the Americans, French, Italians, Germans, Czechs, South Africans, Kazakhs and Nigerians, just to name a few. (The Swedes had all but ended their diplomatic relationship with China – having come to the public conclusion that the Chinese government was a pack of genocidal, power-mad, information-suppressing, exploitive, ultranationalists – before COVID.)   Nor are these disturbing shifts limited to the realm of foreign disinformation. Propaganda at home is boiling in a new direction as well. Overt, blatant racism is the core of the new program, with the government expressly blaming foreigners of all stripes for coronavirus in specific and China’s ills in general. Everything from restaurants to buses to gyms are banning foreigners. As a rule the government edicts are color-blind, but there are plenty of stories out there of this or that municipality or establishment singling out this or that nationality or skin color for…special consideration.   And the invective will get more offensive and self-destructive and seemingly stupid. China’s propaganda offensive April was done by the professionals – the folks at the head of the Ministry of Truth-, er, Foreign Affairs. All the lies and everything that demeaned and insulted countries in the grips of the coronavirus was expressly deliberate and sanctioned from the top, with the ambassadorial core directed to follow suit. (For those of you who like names, watch spokesman Zhao Lijian, a man who enjoys Chairman Xi’s personal sponsorship).   But we aren’t in April any longer, and China’s propaganda effort has become more diffuse, adopting more of a mob mentality. Now the entire governing apparatus has been unleashed, including agencies and bureaus down to the local level who normally have nothing to do with public relations, much less official propaganda. There is no longer a cohesive storytelling effort a la the Soviet style of propaganda. It is as if the Chinese equivalent of the MAGA crowd and the Bernie Bros are suddenly part of the propaganda effort, working alongside – or at least in parallel to – the Voice of America and the State Department.   The April propaganda was sophomoric and moronic, particularly at influencing foreign audiences or achieving some sort of strategic goal. In May it has already degraded into the realm of the infantile. My personal favorite was when an apparatchik made a lovely post stating “We condemn the fatso to death” with the “fatso” in question being US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Considering the ultrafine mesh the Chinese internal censorship dragnet has been using of late, that particular post’s ongoing longevity is a testament to just how holistic the CCP’s effort has become.   In the past few weeks the Chinese have deliberately destroyed three decades of efforts to build up soft power. I have never seen this sort of influence collapse, much less on a global scale. Even the Soviet fall saw Moscow retain influence throughout Latin America, Africa and the Middle East…and then the Soviet Union collapsed. The Trump administration just lost their Olympic gold in Gravitas Destruction to the Xi administration, and not by a small margin.   So…what the hell?

Hong Kong

The Party may be descending into narcissistic ideology, and the Han Chinese may have always had a superiority complex based on a superiority complex, and we all may be a bit aghast at both the new tone and substance of Beijing’s foreign policy, and CCP is too paranoid, controlling, arrogant and bunkered to pretend to lead anything on a regional – much less global – scale, but I think we can all accept that the Party is not run by a bunch of morons.   The explanation is unfortunately very simple: the Chinese leadership is well aware that soft power isn’t what is going to solve the problem they see. There’s some guidance as to the CCP’s thinking in how the propaganda effort is being explained within China, and it doesn’t bode well for the future.   Semi-officially, the CCP called the April (official) effort Wolf Warrior diplomacy, in reference to a recent (and wildly popular) Chinese movie series about ethically pure Chinese soldiers who purge the world of evil American mercenaries. The closest equivalent I can think of would be like calling an American propaganda effort Starship Troopers diplomacy. (Yeah, it is as stupid as it sounds.)   The (more disperse) May effort, in contrast, is being referred to as a Yihetuan Movement mindset. It is a reference to a particularly chaotic period at the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries when a particularly violent strain of ultranationalism erupted in response to foreign actions within China. Most non-Chinese readers probably don’t recognize the Yihetuan Movement reference, but they probably do recall how it was labelled in the West: the Boxer Rebellion. More on that in a minute.   This new propaganda program isn’t about Xi attempting to convince the wider world of China’s greatness or rightness. This isn’t about the United States or Europe or Africa, and certainly not about global domination. Instead it is about intentionally saying things so far beyond the pale that there’s a global anti-Chinese backlash. The backlash itself isn’t the goal, but instead a means to an end. Xi is attempting to use a global anti-Chinese backlash to enflame anti-foreigner nationalist activity within China. Put simply, Xi is trying to get the world pissed off at China so that China becomes pissed off at the world.   Xi feel he needs to hyperstimulate and mobilize a large enough proportion of the population so that they can assist the state security services in containing, demoralizing, cowing – and if necessary, beating, killing and disappearing – those who do not buy in.   Think this seems a bit…extreme? Brush up on your 20th century Chinese history, particularly in the context of how the CCP is explaining its propaganda effort to the Chinese citizenry.   Google the Great Leap Forward to review just how deliberately brutal the Chinese government can be to their own people, and just how good the Chinese government can be at motivating its own citizens to persecute one another.   Check out the Cultural Revolution to see how mobilizing portions of the population to repress the rest of the population makes the East German Stasi look like New Zealand socialists.   Review the Tiananmen Square massacre to remind yourself of how far the CCP will go even in “modern” times when it faces a threat to its power.   Look up the Boxer Rebellion to see how such processes result in the state-sponsored lynching and murder of Christians and foreigners. (Btw, if you are a manufacturer or investor and you still have personnel in China, now would be a glorious time to get them the fuck out).   The only part of this that is new for China is that this time they have industrial and digital technologies to help manage the population so that the sharp end of state power can be brought to bear more quickly.   This leaves only one question: Why…WHY would Chairman Xi feel this sort of extreme action is necessary?   Put simply, Xi fears the end of China is nigh.   And that, again, requires a completely new newsletter.   Stay tuned for Part III…

 

[BLA + 1,666]

On 5/14/2020 at 11:54 AM, TooSteep said:

Peter Zeihan's latest newsletter. Pretty strong stuff. Thoughts?

A Failure of Leadership, Part II:  How To Lose Friends and Mobilize People Against You By Xi Jinping (and Peter Zeihan) on May 14, 2020 The propaganda out of China of late has been…notable. Beijing has accused the French of using their nursing homes as death camps, has blamed Italy for being the source of the coronavirus (at the very peak of Italian deaths), has charged the US Army with bringing the virus to China in the first place, has thrown a “fact sheet” of truly disbelievable disinformation at the fact-oriented Germans, and turned the country’s ambassadorial core into cut-rate tabloid distributors – all while leaning on anyone and everyone from the United Nations to the World Health Organization to the European Union to regional legislative bodies to alternatively suppress and delete any information or analysis that does anything but laud China, as well as push them to take public stances that slobberingly praise China.   In doing so the Chinese have seemingly deliberately wrecked their relations with the Americans, French, Italians, Germans, Czechs, South Africans, Kazakhs and Nigerians, just to name a few. (The Swedes had all but ended their diplomatic relationship with China – having come to the public conclusion that the Chinese government was a pack of genocidal, power-mad, information-suppressing, exploitive, ultranationalists – before COVID.)   Nor are these disturbing shifts limited to the realm of foreign disinformation. Propaganda at home is boiling in a new direction as well. Overt, blatant racism is the core of the new program, with the government expressly blaming foreigners of all stripes for coronavirus in specific and China’s ills in general. Everything from restaurants to buses to gyms are banning foreigners. As a rule the government edicts are color-blind, but there are plenty of stories out there of this or that municipality or establishment singling out this or that nationality or skin color for…special consideration.   And the invective will get more offensive and self-destructive and seemingly stupid. China’s propaganda offensive April was done by the professionals – the folks at the head of the Ministry of Truth-, er, Foreign Affairs. All the lies and everything that demeaned and insulted countries in the grips of the coronavirus was expressly deliberate and sanctioned from the top, with the ambassadorial core directed to follow suit. (For those of you who like names, watch spokesman Zhao Lijian, a man who enjoys Chairman Xi’s personal sponsorship).   But we aren’t in April any longer, and China’s propaganda effort has become more diffuse, adopting more of a mob mentality. Now the entire governing apparatus has been unleashed, including agencies and bureaus down to the local level who normally have nothing to do with public relations, much less official propaganda. There is no longer a cohesive storytelling effort a la the Soviet style of propaganda. It is as if the Chinese equivalent of the MAGA crowd and the Bernie Bros are suddenly part of the propaganda effort, working alongside – or at least in parallel to – the Voice of America and the State Department.   The April propaganda was sophomoric and moronic, particularly at influencing foreign audiences or achieving some sort of strategic goal. In May it has already degraded into the realm of the infantile. My personal favorite was when an apparatchik made a lovely post stating “We condemn the fatso to death” with the “fatso” in question being US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Considering the ultrafine mesh the Chinese internal censorship dragnet has been using of late, that particular post’s ongoing longevity is a testament to just how holistic the CCP’s effort has become.   In the past few weeks the Chinese have deliberately destroyed three decades of efforts to build up soft power. I have never seen this sort of influence collapse, much less on a global scale. Even the Soviet fall saw Moscow retain influence throughout Latin America, Africa and the Middle East…and then the Soviet Union collapsed. The Trump administration just lost their Olympic gold in Gravitas Destruction to the Xi administration, and not by a small margin.   So…what the hell?

Hong Kong

The Party may be descending into narcissistic ideology, and the Han Chinese may have always had a superiority complex based on a superiority complex, and we all may be a bit aghast at both the new tone and substance of Beijing’s foreign policy, and CCP is too paranoid, controlling, arrogant and bunkered to pretend to lead anything on a regional – much less global – scale, but I think we can all accept that the Party is not run by a bunch of morons.   The explanation is unfortunately very simple: the Chinese leadership is well aware that soft power isn’t what is going to solve the problem they see. There’s some guidance as to the CCP’s thinking in how the propaganda effort is being explained within China, and it doesn’t bode well for the future.   Semi-officially, the CCP called the April (official) effort Wolf Warrior diplomacy, in reference to a recent (and wildly popular) Chinese movie series about ethically pure Chinese soldiers who purge the world of evil American mercenaries. The closest equivalent I can think of would be like calling an American propaganda effort Starship Troopers diplomacy. (Yeah, it is as stupid as it sounds.)   The (more disperse) May effort, in contrast, is being referred to as a Yihetuan Movement mindset. It is a reference to a particularly chaotic period at the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries when a particularly violent strain of ultranationalism erupted in response to foreign actions within China. Most non-Chinese readers probably don’t recognize the Yihetuan Movement reference, but they probably do recall how it was labelled in the West: the Boxer Rebellion. More on that in a minute.   This new propaganda program isn’t about Xi attempting to convince the wider world of China’s greatness or rightness. This isn’t about the United States or Europe or Africa, and certainly not about global domination. Instead it is about intentionally saying things so far beyond the pale that there’s a global anti-Chinese backlash. The backlash itself isn’t the goal, but instead a means to an end. Xi is attempting to use a global anti-Chinese backlash to enflame anti-foreigner nationalist activity within China. Put simply, Xi is trying to get the world pissed off at China so that China becomes pissed off at the world.   Xi feel he needs to hyperstimulate and mobilize a large enough proportion of the population so that they can assist the state security services in containing, demoralizing, cowing – and if necessary, beating, killing and disappearing – those who do not buy in.   Think this seems a bit…extreme? Brush up on your 20th century Chinese history, particularly in the context of how the CCP is explaining its propaganda effort to the Chinese citizenry.   Google the Great Leap Forward to review just how deliberately brutal the Chinese government can be to their own people, and just how good the Chinese government can be at motivating its own citizens to persecute one another.   Check out the Cultural Revolution to see how mobilizing portions of the population to repress the rest of the population makes the East German Stasi look like New Zealand socialists.   Review the Tiananmen Square massacre to remind yourself of how far the CCP will go even in “modern” times when it faces a threat to its power.   Look up the Boxer Rebellion to see how such processes result in the state-sponsored lynching and murder of Christians and foreigners. (Btw, if you are a manufacturer or investor and you still have personnel in China, now would be a glorious time to get them the fuck out).   The only part of this that is new for China is that this time they have industrial and digital technologies to help manage the population so that the sharp end of state power can be brought to bear more quickly.   This leaves only one question: Why…WHY would Chairman Xi feel this sort of extreme action is necessary?   Put simply, Xi fears the end of China is nigh.   And that, again, requires a completely new newsletter.   Stay tuned for Part III…

 

[Jason Martin + 58]

On 5/16/2020 at 12:50 AM, Jee said:

Surely we can use more slaves than Rome, had we kept Slaverism going the factories wouldn't be shipped to China in the first place. - And in that sense, China is more like the new Rome.

Stop working and see what happens. 

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

On 5/15/2020 at 10:38 PM, 0R0 said:

Yes, Trump knows of this dollar trap China is in. The trade deal was not really about trade, it was about squeezing the Chinese Current account by obliging them to buy specified quantities of goods from the US, thus pushing it into a negative flow. 

You might find this analysis insightful:

President Trump Discusses China’s Cover-Up of Wuhan Virus – The Economic Consequences Will Now Increase

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

On 5/14/2020 at 10:54 PM, TooSteep said:

Peter Zeihan's latest newsletter. Pretty strong stuff. Thoughts?

A Failure of Leadership, Part II:  How To Lose Friends and Mobilize People Against You By Xi Jinping (and Peter Zeihan) on May 14, 2020

Just noticed the Author change.  LOL!  Priceless.

[0R0 + 6,251]

On 5/15/2020 at 11:32 PM, Jee said:

The One Child Policy means that China can never be a true consumption-led system...

And why is that?

Stages of life progression. The consumption ages are those of getting to work and then raising a family with all the necessary required expenditure and aggressive income seeking. Then comes the savings stage when mature workers are at the peak of their productivity and start saving for retirement. They reduce spending relative to incomes. Then there is retirement, when savings are drawn, productivity is next to nothing, and consumption falls rapidly as aging retirees are not healthy enough to spend their savings.

The ratio of people in their consumption stage to those in their savings age and retirement ages determines how much of income is directed towards consumption. It also relates to the savings flows into the economy from savings that can be used to invest. Those peak as the proportion of the savings cohort peaks. Interest rates drop accordingly.

My favorite charts to indicate the savings waves are

(1) From Jim Bianco, the neural network fit of demographic and economic data OTHER than central bank monetary level (QE) or rate policy.

(2) The global savings glut as shown in the gross savings figures

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNS.ICTR.CD?locations=CN-US-XC-JP-KR

And we can see it again in savings as % of GDP

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNS.ICTR.ZS?locations=CN-US-XC-JP-KR

The Chinese drop in % savings for GDP is because GDP is overstated while the savings are real. The new retiree stream is growing rapidly and the net savings flow from the pre retirement savings should be falling now and going forward, while the high spending cohort is shrinking rapidly as incoming are  smaller than outgoing (into the saving phase).

[TooSteep + 142]

Even the pro-China people seem to think it's a bad idea:

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/china-reputation-wolf-warrior-diplomacy-covid19-by-minxin-pei-2020-06

Chinese Diplomats Behaving Badly

Jun 9, 2020MINXIN PEI

At a time when China’s reputation is suffering and its relationship with the United States is in freefall, the country’s diplomats should be focused on differentiating China’s foreign policy from that of US President Donald Trump. Yet they are doing just the opposite.

CLAREMONT, CALIFORNIA – Chinese diplomats have long had a reputation as well-trained, colorless, and cautious professionals who pursue their missions doggedly without attracting much unfavorable attention. But a new crop of younger diplomats are ditching established diplomatic norms in favor of aggressively promoting China’s self-serving COVID-19 narrative. It is called “wolf warrior” diplomacy – and it is backfiring.

Shortly before the COVID-19 crisis erupted, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi instructed the country’s diplomatic corps to adopt a more assertive approach to defending China’s interests and reputation abroad. The pandemic – the scale of which may have been far smaller were it not for local Wuhan authorities’ early mistakes – presented a perfect opportunity to translate this directive into action.

And that is precisely what Chinese diplomats have been doing. For example, in mid-March, the foreign ministry’s newly appointed deputy spokesman, Zhao Lijian, promoted a conspiracy theory alleging that the US military brought the novel coronavirus to Wuhan, the pandemic’s first epicenter.

Similarly, in early April, the Chinese ambassador to France posted a series of anonymous articles on his embassy’s website falsely claiming that the virus’s elderly victims were being left alone to die in the country. Later that month, after Australia joined the United States in calling for an international investigation into the pandemic’s origins, the Chinese envoy in Canberra quickly threatened boycotts and sanctions.

But, unlike the fictional special-operations agents after which they are named (from a popular Chinese action movie), China’s wolf-warrior diplomats have not been rewarded for their recklessly confrontational style. Far from burnishing China’s international image and placating those who blame the country for the pandemic, their actions have undermined China’s credibility and alienated the countries it should be wooing.

Why change tack in the first place? One reason is China’s current combination of historical insecurity, rooted in its so-called century of humiliation, and heady arrogance, fueled by its immense economic clout and geopolitical influence. So keen are China’s leaders to gain the respect they feel their country deserves that they have become highly sensitive to criticism and quick to threaten economic coercion when countries dare to defy them.

Another reason is the current regime’s emphasis on political loyalty. Under President Xi Jinping’s highly centralized leadership, Chinese diplomats are evaluated not on how well they perform their professional duties, but on how faithfully and vocally they toe the party line. This is exemplified by the appointment last year of Qi Yu, a propaganda apparatchik with no foreign-policy experience or credentials, as Party Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – an important post traditionally held by an experienced diplomat.

If aggressively pushing the Communist Party of China’s preferred narrative is a matter of professional survival, diplomats will do it, even if they recognize that it is counterproductive (as many probably do). They certainly will not try to persuade their political masters to change course. Whereas diplomats risk paying a heavy price for conscientious dissent, they seem to suffer no consequences – from criticisms in official media to demotions or dismissals – for destructive loyalty. When pushing the CPC-approved narrative produces negative results, it is, in Party parlance, an issue of tactics, not the “political line.” Punishing loyal diplomats for “tactical errors” would make them more reluctant to do the CPC’s dirty work in the future.

By removing any incentive for diplomats to temper their approach and offering a convenient excuse for setbacks, this logic entrenches bad policy. It does not help that China lacks a free press and political opposition to highlight the failures of the wolf-warrior approach. Unlike Western diplomats, those in China do not have to fear public ridicule or criticism. All that matters is what their bosses say – and their bosses want wolf warriors.

This is a mistake. At a time when China’s reputation is suffering and its relationship with the US is in freefall, the country’s diplomats should be focused on differentiating China’s foreign policy from that of US President Donald Trump.

It is Trump who recklessly promotes conspiracy theories and aggressively responds to any perceived slight with threats and sanctions. It is Trump who foolishly alienates friends and partners, rather than cultivating mutually beneficial relationships. And it is Trump whose belligerent insistence on his country’s superiority has eroded its international reputation and undermined its interests.

China’s leaders should know better.

Edited June 9, 2020 by TooSteep

[Hotone + 412]

What Peter Zeihan never told you:

The World Is Feeling Pity for the US 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/opinion/coronavirus-trump.html

America has turned into a pitiful pariah

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/02/trump-has-turned-america-into-pitiful-pariah/

While Germany is led by a woman with a doctorate in quantum chemistry, the U.S. president was suggesting that people inject disinfectant to cure the virus.

With the spiking of America’s hospitalisations from the virus, the images of nurses in New York City wearing garbage bags for personal protection circulated around the globe. 

Many people have cited the line from the Irish Times that “the world has loved, hated, and envied the U.S. Now, for the first time, we pity it.” That’s not quite right. The emotion is not pity, but schadenfreude: people around the world are taking a secret pleasure in the U.S.’s ineptitude. 

The curbside killing of George Floyd in broad daylight by a white Minneapolis cop was a game-changer because the whole ghastly thing was recorded on video and seen worldwide.

Edited June 10, 2020 by Hotone