China got old before it got rich. And it showed its aggressiveness before it stopped relying on foreign customers.
China was a much more important country [before Russia invaded Ukraine]. What has happened over the past two years has been the dysfunction of the Chinese economy to a point that it cannot support many other things. For example, the naval capability that it has, okay, it's quite expensive to maintain. They're not doing that. So at this point, they have a situation where they've arrived at the place that the United States did after the Civil War. After the Civil War, we started being an exporting power, and we did very well—50% of the world's exports came from the US until World War I broke out and nobody could buy any, and we went into the Great Depression.
So when you have an exporting power, you're looking at an accident that will happen. They're dependent on the internal capability of their customers. ... And this is why we forecast a while ago that China can't sustain its growth because you cannot sustain reliably an economy based primarily on exports unless you own the countries you're exporting to. And they don't. And the United States had the Great Depression and what we're having now is a greater depression in China. ...
Now, it's very hard to say that there's going to be civil war, but on the other hand, when you sit down and exclude everything else that's possible, you see this as they're going to have to fight with each other to settle this and they're going to try to hold together as long as possible. But the problem that I saw was that at the beginning, China was an illusion. China had its ability, but there was no infrastructure beneath it, no financial system that was coherent underneath it. And while it showed enormous growth, a lot of that was fake. Not in the sense that it didn't happen, but in the sense that it was based on a hill of sand.
Do read it all. He covers a lot about Russia and China. I absolutely respect his analysis whether or not I agree with him.
And he says foreign wars could lead to bigger problems for China. Although I'll counter that if keeping the Chinese Communist Power in charge of China is indeed the highest priority of the CCP, even a losing war might be a victory in that narrow sense:
If large-scale unrest--common enough in China--takes place and appears to threaten party control--could China initiate a war abroad believing nationalism will smother the internal fissures?
China could easily believe a quick sharp blow against our forces will discourage us from continuing the fight, and the national joy of defeating America would end domestic unrest at little cost to China.
We like to think that it makes no sense for China to risk their economic growth by going to war. We assume--perhaps rightly--that we'd beat China.
But if the Chinese Communist Party is willing to accept even defeat as the price for defending Chinese Communist Party control of China, they have an entirely different view of what is rational than we do.
China showed its true face of aggressive ambition before it could escape the trap of needing potential victims as customers. I speculated even before Putin invaded Ukraine that making Putin's Russia the target of a war might dilute Western hostility. As I observed a little later:
China used to try to keep a low profile during its rise in power. Now it goes out of its way to openly push America and anybody else who resists China's rise. Does China think it is more powerful than it is?
Even that might not work out for the CCP, of course. Let's not pretend that the Chinese have near-mystical planning abilities, eh? Because I also say in a country with the size and complexity of a continent, all outcomes are possible at once.
Have a super sparkly day.
NOTE: The image was made from DALL-E.
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
