Xi's China Keeps Showing Its Cards
Autocracies have no allies
As Israel was eviscerating Iran, Iran’s “allies”, Russia, China, North Korea busied themselves on other matters. While such behavior accurately demonstrates the truism that autocrats have no allies, only arrangements, it also reflects each nation’s leader’s view of reality.
China views its arrangements as invitations to the Association of Autocrats (AA), invitations to bend the knee to Beijing. Xi’s own policy of “Chinese Centrality” lays out how members of AA, and others - this policy does not exclude so much as mandate inclusion - can satisfy Beijing’s adolescent need to be seen as the head Bully.
Xi, ever considerate of new converts, even seasons his offerings with pedantic references to historic adolescent emissions known as the “Middle Kingdom”. Too weak to succeed, China’s weak Strongmen, known often as “Emperors”, used “Middle Kingdom” aspirations to manage minions and associated masses.
Putin, he of the chant “the West is decadent and in decline”, has his own version of Xi’s Middle Kingdom, positing it as “Russian Greatness”. In service to his “ally without limits” Putin believes this substitutes for, or more publicly, complements, Xi’s vision. Details as to which vision prevails will be “worked out” later. Such work will be accomplished by whomever finds his neck under the jackboot of persuasion.
As Putin’s attempts to manufacture reality bends and breaks in Ukraine, Xi happily delivers to Putin cash and technology, as arrangements dictate, in exchange for Putin’s service in confirming Xi’s notion of “Chinese Centrality”. Putin’s actions explain to Xi the fragility of "Russian Greatness” - opening up ever more space for Xi’s “Chinese Centrality” to occupy.
Putin’s attempts to “manage Trump” persist, giving Putin hope that “Russian Greatness” is where it has always been, right around the corner. Trump, unaware that Russian Greatness might mean something other than a new Trump Hotel, leavens his unawareness by kneecapping Ukraine and destabilizing NATO, further inflating Putin’s confirmation bias. Autocrats, actual and wanna be, synchronize across the harmonics of what they share in surplus, malevolence. (Malevolence is that special combination of stupidity and greed which animate Autocrats.)
Kim of North Korea, tangibly embraces his arrangements with Putin by sending troops to fight Putin’s War. Kim seeks something other than both Russian Greatness or Chinese Centrality. Kim, owner of a nation which has only the basics, applies his efforts to acquire basic, practical, military capacity. Kim’s troops are using Putin’s War as a training opportunity. Kim does not eye The World as his oyster. He looks only at Seoul. (See also:)
Iran, a new-ish recruit to the Association of Autocrats, brings a different energy to the team: theocracy. Theocratic autocracy entwines the worst of two worlds. Theocracy, the art of seeing the broad world of humanity through the narrow lens crafted by limited men, tries to harness humanity’s critical invention for perpetual corruption, autocracy.
Taken together, no greater force for degrading humanity has yet been created. This kind of rule channels corruption using the whip hand of its devoted, to compel its special flavor of human depravity: debasing religion to control people in service of degrading both.
Awkward must be the AA meetings attended by this team of equals.
China, standing aside from military engagement, feeds its associates’ material needs. In return, because Xi’s philosophy asserts the long view, these associates provide Xi’s China with what passes for entertainment: Putin flails in Ukraine. Kim leverages Putin’s folly as a training opportunity, which he will then leverage in a play for South Korea. Kim’s association with Putin may also earn Kim some maneuver room, some space, relative to massive China’s geographic and geopolitical presence in all things North Korean.
Iran, wounded by Israel, and cowed by the received impulse of the US President’s use of US military capacity, is compelled to persist supplying China with oil while receiving non-dollars (yuan) in return. Non-dollar currency is another railroad tie AA members strap themselves to as a condition of association with China. How, Xi wonders, can they not see that Chinese Centrality is already their destination?
But none of this is the weird part.
The weird part is the trajectory of Autocracies. Even as they attempt to expand their reach, their pursuits of “more” (all autocrats crave more the way normal humans breathe) exposes their hollow cores, and weak applications of Power. The components of Power attract autocrats: Wealth, fealty, fear, hope, are different rivers running through the human soul. Autocrats, mostly buoyed by inheriting rather than earning any one of these components, strive to control each one, and more. The arrangements they make are in service of more.
Xi: China’s Weak Strongman
Xi, inheritor of an expanding and dynamic nation, has applied his need for “more” using the tools of control. So utterly fragile are Xi’s applications that students holding blank sheets of paper are seen as threats to Xi’s control. This fragility seems not to be a recipe for China’s vibrant future.
When you find yourself in a hole, the best remedy is to stop digging - unless you’re an autocrat. Xi knows only the shovel and he has applied it to undermining the foundations of China’s economy. Xi’s shovel is called the Government Subsidy. Xi’s attempt to leverage china’s population’s affinity with real estate manifested itself as excessive government subsidies.
Real estate is a main source of wealth and investment for China’s new middle class. The keen mind of Xi, applied to real estate via subsidies, generated actual “Ghost Cities” while eviscerating the middle class’s stores of wealth. These subsidies resulted in outcomes familiar to all observers of hubris: a crash. Make China Poor Again seems to be Xi’s slogan - though he doesn’t sport a baseball cap emblazoned with MCPA.)
Well, “crash” is the sound a dish makes when it hits the floor. Or the sound of the US economy when incompetent ambition (George W. Bush) is greeted by Republican ideology (Conservatism) as occurred in 2008. Xi’s capacity to create a crash wielding subsidies, surpasses both, combined. Xi’s cards all fall face-up. Only Trump, wielding incompetent ambition and feeding off the remnants of Conservatism, to produce Trumpism, may surpass Xi’s folly.
Undeterred by the feat of eradicating China’s peoples’ wealth and hedge against future financial stresses, Xi then focused his great mind on technology, specifically those found around and in Electric Vehicles (EVs). Again, Xi leaned on subsidies. Again, market distortions emerged and China found itself with more EVs than Putin has problems. Xi, truly a mind at work, then attempted to export his vast mistakes to other industrialized nations (the US included) with a price tag marked: “de-industrialization”.
Unconvinced of Xi’s “wisdom”, western countries declined Xi’s invitation to de-industrialize - so far. (So far, because we’re still not sure how dumb Trump actually is, (or how codependent the EU seeks to be). Wanna be autocrats take time to manifest their idiocy far and wide. Hungary’s Orban took over a decade to cripple his nation, and Hungary is smaller than Indiana.). Biden slapped a 100% tariff on Xi’s de-industrialization ploy and the EU, about 45%. More cards left face-up on the table.
It’s somewhat remarkable that Xi’s fellow AA members don’t see what is right in front of them. Xi is entirely dependent upon western trade flows. Disrupting these might very well mean the end of Xi. (Note: This would be a catastrophe only for Xi.) Putin’s looking to China for substantial, North Korean-style relief, is buffoonish, to say the least.
Every autocrat knows, or should know, how many they can kill with impunity. Putin does not know, or better, refuses to learn. Prigozhin, in his way, tried to explain this to Putin. Autocrats that refuse to learn their profession, don’t last. Many might say that Putin has been in power for over two decades, seems like he’s lasting. There is an internal persistence and an external persistence. Internally, Putin has spent his decades eating Russian resilience.
Externally, Putin has picked on only weaker targets. Putin has been able to persist because he never actually engaged the West, power, until February 2022. Three short years later Putin is sparking out threats of nuclear weapons, making deals with Trump, looking at across the board declines in Russia, all while trying to bring his AA team into the fight.
So far, he has convinced Kim to augment Russia’s boots on the ground, and Trump to feed Putin’s needs for “Time and Space” in Ukraine. Used to be that Russia, well led, was rich in both Time and Space. Putin, as his war in Ukraine has demonstrated, has spent down Russian Resilience to a pauper’s level. He needs a loan from Trump to continue: Time and Space. Time to grind. Space to grind.
Trump awaits his payoff.
Political Inheritance is Cancer
Autocrats arise in places where human decency (already a scarce commodity) declines. China’s autocrats inherited their position in a society and culture which actively reveres decency while extolling Emperors - demonstrating, repeatedly, that you can’t have both. Putin inherited his Russia by being the more malevolent of the princes stalking the staggering prey of the Soviet Union’s demise, personified by Boris Yeltsin. Kim inherited his position from his autocrat father. Khamenei inherited his position from his theocratic patron Khomeini. Trump’s inheritance sustained him through his career as a failed businessman and his rise to power in a United States that has agreed to define civility as cruelty as sport.
All “bold” men. All equally fearful of the essence of human decency manifested through free speech, independent judiciaries and free and fair elections. Truly, weak strongmen. Xi poses next to his fellow AA members as one powerful and destined. The others don’t notice because they too pose in the same way, with the same self-regard. Xi’s cards lay face up on the global table. But looking at them requires courage. In this they are safe from discovery.
Why are these men revealed as small when they strike their autocratic pose? Because they are not men. They are like cancer. They only know how to eat away until little is left.
Resilience
Resilience, in a nation, is that ineffable quality resulting from the efforts and sacrifices of a people in service, ideally, to freedom and liberty. The characteristics of resilience emerge through economic, military, environmental, and even political factors. Resilience is amplified by a people’s efforts to extend the benefits of freedom and liberty to generation upon generation. People, united and free, build resilience as a matter of course.
Resilience becomes a normal part of everyone’s day just by putting in the effort to learn more, produce more, and directly or indirectly, to share this opportunity with others who are also willing to learn more, produce more, and share this opportunity. Resilience is not monopolize-able (which, I’m sure is a word) but it is monetize-able (ditto). Resilience promotes an almost self-perpetuating system. Resilience is more than just recovering from “crashes” and natural disasters.
Although, because humans necessarily are involved, the quality of resilience is entirely imperfect. Humans need to acknowledge guidance, ideally guided by their better angels, to create a more perfect union. This guidance is manifested by the outputs of free and fair elections, independent judiciaries, and free speech and a free press.
Defining Resilience Down
Israel’s Netanyahu, because he had both eyes on himself, and couldn’t spare one eye for Hamas, has started an avalanche - resilience falling down. But he had help.
Trump’s constant indulgence of Netanyahu precipitated Israel’s dependency on the US, Trump in particular, a decline in resilience. (It is no coincidence that Netanyahu attacked Iran after Trump became President.)
Trump’s crippling of Nuclear NonProliferation, accelerated by his withdrawal from the JCPOA in 2017, set the stage for Iran’s emerging nuclear capacity. Trump’s failure to continue the Intermediate Range Missile (INF) treaty with Russia helped facilitate Putin’s development of medium range, nuclear-capable missiles; currently in use in Ukraine.
Odd that Trump asserts Putin would not have started his Ukraine war if Trump were president, when you consider Trump initiated the effective decline of Non-Proliferation by cancelling both the JCPOA and especially, the INF Treaty. The expiration of the INF essentially paved the way for the more existential threat of nuclear weapons proliferation: theater nuclear weapons. Or maybe not so odd. When considering Trump a wanna be autocrat, and laying his actions next to those of Xi, Putin, Kim, such idiocy reflects a banal norm.
This consumption of resilience is evident across the Autocratic spectrum. Trump eats US economic resilience by incompetently applying and removing and applying tariffs, introducing instability as a feature in the US economic system. (Note: Instability is a feature of failing systems.) He further erodes US resilience by defunding science, by turning America’s face away from the future by undermining EVs, solar, and their technologies, and by harassing academia, to no national purpose.
He dines out on US resilience by eviscerating US “soft power” - from USAID to the State Department itself. He gorges himself on US military resilience by removing the competent and replacing them with the loyal. He fattens himself on US resilience by eroding Constitutional norms, and failing to “…preserve, protect and defend the US Constitution”.
Resilience can remain resilient, but without constant renewal, it cannot last. Trump’s hollowing out of US civil society, legal norms, economic norms and military norms promote the opposite of renewal.
Endgame?
Xi (and the AA) is watching. Having exposed all his cards and established the scope of China’s economic vulnerabilities, Xi has few cards to play. He, like the remaining members of the AA, are now in the role of gainsayers. Hallmarks of Autocracy include fragility, rigidity and dogmatism. As autocracies wane, as crises traverse the spectrum from the “invented” to the real, these characteristics become more pronounced. Each member of AA presents as fragile, rigid and dogmatic.
Israel’s rigid pursuit of war forced it to seek a subcontractor for its Endgame, “the day after”. Trump’s dogmatic habit of handing Israel whatever he thought it needed, influenced his poorly conceived, but much needed, bombing of Iran’s nuclear program. Xi’s policies are steadily and broadly eroding the quality of life for China’s middle class, generating a fragility of options for his regime. Putin has led Russia to the brink of existential disaster in terms of his dogmatic pursuit of “Russian Greatness”. He may be lucky if Xi allows him to give China back its “stolen northlands”. Xi will need this option, or go to war with the West - which is pretty good at war.
Iran’s regime was born rigid. Theocracies are just this way. Economic capacity can earn them breathing space, but never escape velocity, the theocratic maw does not open easily, or at all, except to take another bite of proximate humanity.
Trump, now that he’s formally signed Netanyahu’s subcontractor papers, owns Israel’s previous responsibility for an Endgame, a “day after”. Trump, Netanyahu’s “Mark”, shows no signs of understanding this. He’s moved on to the next hour of his reality show presidency.
But that’s not the next item on the subcontractor’s agenda.
Israel, Netanyahu, is bombing Lebanon.
Sources:
Council on Foreign Relations, Chinese Approach to Global Governance: https://www.cfr.org/china-global-governance/
Journal of Democracy, China in Xi’s “New Era”: https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/china-in-xis-new-era-the-return-to-personalistic-rule/
China’s Ghost Cities: https://www.newsweek.com/what-happened-china-ghost-cities-2047985
US Withdraws from the Intermediate Range Missile Treaty with Russia: https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/article/article/1924779/us-withdraws-from-intermediate-range-nuclear-forces-treaty/
Manufacturing is War now:
The Intelligence Failure of October 7, Jerusalem Strategic Tribune: https://jstribune.com/sofrim-the-intelligence-failure-of-october-7-roots-and-lessons/
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