Replies

China has one advantage over the USA.
She, unlike us, has a permanent government ran by one party. Which means, she plays the LONG GAME and can wait us out. A drop in their GDP might cause some pain, but what can their people do? They can’t vote the party out of power.

We on the other hand, have a government that rans in cycles. There is no guarantee that Trump will be the President after 2020.

Hence, China can hope that a bad economy and a tanking stock market coupled with high unemployment will cause ANOTHER administration to rise and hopefully, be more conciliatory to their trade demands.

[She, unlike us, has a permanent government ran by one party. Which means, she plays the LONG GAME and can wait us out. A drop in their GDP might cause some pain, but what can their people do? They can’t vote the party out of power.]

China’s rulers have always had to worry about coups:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hua_Guofeng

And revolts by their subordinates:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuan_Shikai

That’s the reality of absolute rule - the threat is from ambitious subordinates who have carefully masked their ambition for the top spot in order to rise up the ranks.

”China has one advantage over the USA. She, unlike us, has a permanent government ran by one party. Which means, she plays the LONG GAME and can wait us out. A drop in their GDP might cause some pain, but what can their people do? They can’t vote the party out of power. We on the other hand, have a government that rans in cycles. There is no guarantee that Trump will be the President after 2020. Hence, China can hope that a bad economy and a tanking stock market coupled with high unemployment will cause ANOTHER administration to rise and hopefully, be more conciliatory to their trade demands.”

Those are good points. However, China is no longer only populated by poor, uninformed farmers. The opposite edge of their economic sword is that the resulting prosperity has now created a generation of Chinese who have tasted modern life, and who might not be so willing to give it all up again for the “good of the party.” The ongoing unrest in Hong Kong, though not necessarily economically-related at the moment, certainly demonstrates a new willingness to push back against the central government.

I think there’s a tendency, both inside and outside the country, to view the Chinese, as a bunch of robot-like automatons like the drones in an ant’s nest. Nothing could be further from the truth. China’s First Emperor had a trusted head eunuch who was his right hand man. After the emperor’s death, this eunuch had his son and hand-picked heir killed, in favor of another son, his protege, whom he had crowned emperor. When that other son, aka the emperor, showed signs of personal initiative, the eunuch had him killed as well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhao_Gao#Coup_following_Qin_Shi_Huang’s_death

When Plato talked about the shadows in the cave, he might as well have been talking about the CPC leadership. There are all sorts of palace intrigues going on behind the walls of the leadership compound that we will never find out about (unless the regime collapses and the archives are released) and what we see are merely the shadows of those intrigues. Even momentous events such as the Tiananmen Massacre are just byproducts of power struggles that we will never know about directly. We can never hope to learn in real time what is really going on – we can only guess at them from the shadows that we are seeing. Naturally most of the time we are going to guess wrong.