https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/opinion/china-united-states-trade-economy.html
In the grand tradition of Russia rejecting the West because it threatens the greatness of Russia, China will screw the world (and eventually themselves) to show how wonderful they are. In his article in the NYTimes, Thomas Friedman describes four ways they have been and are continuing to do this:
“Xi’s election to an unprecedented third term on a platform emphasizing Marxism and ideology over markets and pragmatism “shows me that the opening up of the Chinese economy is not going to continue. … We have to assume that China is setting itself apart from other countries and will build a countermodel to the liberal, market-oriented model of the West.”
“[In the] aftermath of Tiananmen Square in 1989, when the Chinese Communist Party leadership sought to dampen the democratic aspirations of China’s youth with a fire hose of hyper-nationalism.”
“a much more aggressive Chinese foreign policy that is trying to assert dominance across the whole South China Sea, frightening China’s key neighbors, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, India and Taiwan.”
“Instead of importing effective Western-made vaccines to keep the pandemic at bay, China is relying on a “zero Covid” policy that uses lockdowns of whole cities as well as all the new tools of a surveillance state: drones, facial recognition, ubiquitous closed-circuit television cameras, cellphone tracking and even tracking of restaurant patrons, who must present a QR code to be scanned and recorded. It feels like a Xi strategy for preventing both Covid and freedom from breaking out.”
Without even mentioning the million or so Xighurs being forcibly reeducated by China, the article concludes:
What Xi fails to grasp is that all of the most advanced technologies of the 21st century — like semiconductors and mRNA vaccines — require big, complex global supply chains, because no country can be the best at each one of their increasingly sophisticated components. But such supply chains require a huge amount of collaboration and trust among partners, and that is exactly what Xi has squandered in the last decade.
when one-sixth of humanity makes a wrong turn in our still very connected world — China, for instance, still holds almost $1 trillion of U.S. Treasury debt — everyone will feel their pain.
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