I have written here several times before about correspondence i have received from my friend Terry.
Terry although he may have lead a mixed personal and public life, his commentary on things political in that correspondence have often seemed so insightful that I was prompted to share it here.
He discusses recent article in the NY Times about current events in China and the threats they pose to the United States and the world.
We are fortunate here in the United States that we we have in Joe Biden a president more focused on governing than politics, on the future of humanity rather than party (although he pays close attention to both.) As Terry pointed out in a previous communication:
While our democracy responds to a serious infection in the form of Trump, our foreign policy is responding creatively to China and N Korea in the Pacific.
Our domestic politics may look chaotic, but it’s not. It’s responding in a methodical and grinding way to envelop and destroy a virus: Trumpism. And it’s succeeding. Impressively . Why? Because Republican leaders at the local level are providing the overwhelming evidence to destroy Trumpism.
Our Politics and the Federal structure of independent states with separate jurisdictions has attacked Trump and Trumpism with a vengeance. He is done. His cohorts are done and the world will go on with America unbowed by Trump. Period .
Terry writes about the current turmoil in China:
Disaster is on the horizon. Forget Trump. He’s toast. It’s China we need to worry about.
First the Back Story:
President Xi Jinping was promoted and supported by the leadership of the People’s Liberation Army in 2011 to become the next President of China BECAUSE of the Generals fear that the entrepreneurial class was far too powerful and that what happened to the Communist Party in the Soviet Union would repeat in China: the Party would loose control of the country and become irrelevant.
So the Generals pulled off a coup and Xi became first the Vice President and then President by pretending that he supported the reforms of Ding and the thriving capitalists. Twelve years later, after purging the Party leadership of the supporters of the entrepreneur class, Xi has effectively throttled the booming Chinese economy by putting unqualified Party hacks in charge of the economy both locally and nationally and converted a free market economy to a “centralized demand economy” thereby building goods and products that the people don’t buy or use. Hundreds of Thousands of apartments are empty; thousands of high speed trains are running half full, train stations and airports are unused, cars and durable goods are not bought, etc. The economy, since Xi took over has , in a word, TANKED.
Mark my words, economic collapse is inevitable IF this continues. China is repeating Mao Zedong’s “Cultural Revolution”. Youth unemployment is through the roof and political persecution is all the rage. The economy is slipping into a deflationary spiral (see the article below). The average Chinese sees no way out. Hence refuses to spend on anything not absolutely necessary thereby crashing the consumer economy.
Xi and his henchmen are unable to act because they want the economy to be controlled by the Party but fail to understand the consequence is economic disaster, just like the “Cultural Revolution”.
This is horrible news for The West. The collapse of China, the second largest economy in the world, would throw the world into a serious recession and, more significantly, cause the Chinese Leadership to lash out militarily in the Taiwan Strait to distract from their economic failures. This would likely lead to an enormously destructive war nobody wants.
This is a conundrum Biden and the West face in the next twelve months. Trump is toast; it’s China that we need to be worried about. The US needs to help China economically, but in a way that does not help or encourage military adventures. That’s a tough one. Brilliant minds are required to work our way through the next twelve months, and send a very large life raft to China.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/21/business/china-deflation.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare. As China Falls Into Deflation, the Mood Turns Dark
I am not so sure the threat is as dire as Terry maintains, but I have no doubt as to its danger.