China is a continent with a state government superimposed on it. That's a fragile arrangement.
Nothing indicates if this is a problem for the next several weeks or the next several decades, but it is a problem Chinese rulers are concerned about:
Chinese are hyper-aware of how historically fragile their present unified state is. China has spent most of the past 3000 years fragmented into several contending states, or warlordism and anarchy. Stable unity has been the exception. The period of troubles when a dynasty is falling is called Fall of the Mandate of Heaven. Watching for, and fantasizing about, signs of this are common. Local Chinese leaders, currently civil government officials responsible for various political and geographic areas, economic interests, and so on, tend to carry this watchfulness to extremes. If The Fall ever happens, they can endeavor to prosper or at least survive.
Do read it all, for it touches on the Chinese bio-lab discovered here in America last year as a symptom of the fear of falling:
China’s government has lost control of its regional leaders, who are now waging private wars against America. With weapons of mass destruction. Had it been an official Chinese government biowar lab, that would have been an overt act of war. Fortunately, it wasn’t, but it is still a big problem because the California lab is unlikely to be the only one, and we absolutely dare not assume it was.That red lined my pucker factor. I'd hope the FBI would spend a little more time finding and cleaning these up in America rather than going after conservatives.
That fear of chaos may be one reason the Chinese Communist Party is so brutal with its minorities in Xinjiang and Tibet (and Hong Kong, with less brutality but similar dogged effort). And the zeal that China has for its Social Credit system of control of the Han majority, too. China is seemingly ready to shift to brute force rather than economic growth bribery to keep its people in line. Can that work?
Will China strike a foreign enemy to unify China?
Will Xi even have accurate information to act on? That's a requirement for China's mythical long-range planning ability, isn't it?
I've long noted that China is a continent with forces pulling it into numerous countries. Which means predictions of China's future path could be "all of the above":
With a state both cruel and failing economically, governing a continent-sized population with a history of fragmentation, I don't know why we need to guess which course the government of China will follow. The continent of China is big enough that it could follow all the possible paths.
These are strange times. As China's state imposed on a continent trembles, the continent of Europe sees the proto-imperial European Union trying to impose a state on a continent. With a Brexit loss before the prefix can be fully stripped from the title.
And in Russia, an empire already partially stripped of imperial territory in 1989 and 1991 seemingly risks breaking the seams that hold its rump empire together with the enormous stress of pouring its blood and treasure into Ukraine. Will further secession and civil war follow with the regional military power Putin is bizarrely encouraging to divide potential enemies?
Of course, we can toss in Turkey trying to revive a pseudo-empire on the bones of former Ottoman reach. And the Sunni jihadis who dream of the Islamic caliphate (empire) under their control rather than the Turkish successors to the Ottoman Empire.
Hell, is Iran's "axis of resistance" just a manifestation of old Persian Empire aspirations?
Some will say America is an empire, too. But that is not the case. Oh, one might look at the rise and fall of actual empires to try to judge the rise and fall of America's global influence and alliances. But that's still a different animal with limits to how much that can inform rather than confuse. At home our federal system is a safety valve for all but the most serious inter-state disputes. States can reclaim power within the range of historically normal division of power without breaking America. And with the federal government accelerating its path to going broke, there might not be much of a struggle in the end as the federal government has no choice but to tell states to fund--or don't fund--a lot of non-core federal roles that Washington, D.C. has absorbed and created over the last 90 years.
But I digress.
The interesting thing about China's potential to break apart is the strange role of the Chinese Communist Party whose primary goal is the survival of the Chinese Communist Party. Nothing else--not even China's territorial integrity--matters in the end.
What would China look like with a fragmented civil government structure but a Chinese Communist Party that retains power? Will a rump PRC under the control of the CCP--with cells all across Chinese territory--with control of nukes then have the job of expanding its control of Chinese territory even as it works to deter significant foreign encroachment on Chinese territory in a new potential century of humiliation?
Or is is it a pipe dream of the CCP to think it can hold the center even as China's central government breaks down?
Interesting times, indeed.
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
