There is no war with China, a nuclear armed state.
A US-China hot war would end in about 45 minutes, with the total destruction of both civilizations. And it literally does not have the supply chain for self-sufficiency if China simply stops exporting its treats to the US.
Read my comment here from earlier.
If China threatens to stop exporting its goods until all parties can come to a ceasefire, the global economy will literally grind to a halt. There is simply no replacement for Chinese goods at the moment.
The rare earth export restriction was a taste of the cards China actually hold against the rest of the world.
Yes, this will blow up China’s own economy, but so too will the rest of the Western world. China is in a unique place where such a predicament did not exist back in WWII or during the Cold War.
Anyone who says China is this smol bean that is too weak do anything also cannot possibly claim that China has overtaken the US.
So far it is the US that is willing to use its power to get what it wants. It would be a reasonable ask for China to step in to stop this madness. It’s all about having the political will.
People here won’t like to hear this, but the Chinese model is taking the IMF export-led growth model to an extreme.
Assuming constant demand, every Chinese trade surplus means some other exporting countries lose that trade revenue, all to the benefits of the Western countries who enjoy the Global South competing with one another to sell them cheap products, of course. After all, they can always hide behind tariffs when they deem some of their industries to be threatened.
It worked very well for China’s economic growth, but really at the expense of the working class of other countries, who now have to work even harder to drive their costs lower in order to compete with the Chinese products.
This wasn’t something new, and it had been taken advantage of first by Japan, then Taiwan and South Korea, and other Southeast Asian countries like Thailand, until China joined the WTO in 2001 and leveraged its huge labor force to gain absolute advantage and surpassed all of these competitors.
The USSR was something else entirely. It was self-contained and did not rely on Global South competition to drive wages low, which only benefit Western imperialism.
This is one of the reasons I vehemently disagree with the argument that “cheap Chinese products” are somehow good - no, you want Chinese workers to get paid what is worth their labor, so they can in turn buy stuff from other countries and drive the growth and development of those other countries. All that trade surplus China is accumulating is simply to allow them to show the IMF that their budget is “well balanced” with deficit kept below 3% and is therefore “fiscally responsible”, the best student of IMF neoliberalism.
Unfortunately since the start of Russia-Ukraine war, there has been an entire cottage industry of “alt media” that thrived in selling a particular narrative (in most cases in diametrical opposition to their NAFO counterparts) with half truths mixed in it, fantastical speculations and omissions in others.
Some people were realizing that you can gather a lot of audience simply by telling them what they want to hear, instead of presenting and interpreting real world issues in their full complexities. You can literally see cognitive dissonance in action when they double down even more firmly on their takes even when proven wrong. Somebody must be playing 5D chess, it seems.
China’s foreign policy is uh… shall we say, flexible?
The PRC invaded Vietnam for taking out the Khmer Rouge. China also allied with the US to destroy the USSR (when the US was diplomatically isolated from the world and undergoing stagflation from the oil crisis - the predicament of the US in 1970s was far worse than it is today) because they believed that the USSR was attempting to encircle China through military buildup in Vietnam. In many ways, China saved the US empire when it was at its lowest point.
I guess you can say its strategy is to “play both sides and come out on top”, which to be fair, seems to be pretty successful so far.
China only has two allies: the People’s Liberation Army and the PLA Navy.
This is not true. If you listen to Michael Hudson, a lot of the neocons came from Trotskyist background, many of whom are descendants of those from Eastern Europe who “fled Stalinism” and had been recruited by the Fed to take their vengeance against the USSR. Hudson himself (who wrote Super-imperialism) was recruited when they learned that he came from a Trotskyist family, but declined their offer.
According to him, most of the neocons believed in and turned Trotskyist idea of “exporting revolutions to the developing world to bring about global communism” into “exporting regime changes to the developing world to ensure the supremacy of the US empire”. A lot of their theories were derived from Marxist/Trotkyist lines.
If you read into the history of the neocons, there will be a lot of deranged articles about how they are a Jewish conspiracy, but really, they are just Trotskyists.
Doesn’t change the fact that there was no strategy, and without which the only thing the protest does was to “send a message that we don’t like this”, to which the authorities will respond with “duly received”.
In order for the protests to work, first, the political goal(s) of the movement need to be clearly defined. Not some nebulous idea about why you don’t like the way things are - but actual goal(s) that can be achieved through political actions.
Then, the strategy to achieve those political goal(s) in a realistic manner has to be laid out and disseminated to the public or the participants of the movement.
Without these two steps, you don’t have a movement. You have people “sending a message” which the authorities may or may not choose to ignore. To put it bluntly, a cosplay at best. The participants know that they are not having to commit to any real political action, and the authorities know that the participants know this, and choose to let them gather in public.
Nationalist Chinese Capitalist Party
China is not capitalist. It is socialism with Chinese characteristics.
The leadership is well aware of the situation. These figures are openly discussed and reported in the media.
However, the situation is very complex and requires the length of multiple effort posts. Let me just give you one example: the central government has limited control over employment and wages. They can raise wages of civil servants and SOE employees but that’s only ~70 million of the total workforce in China. The rest are in private sector, which Xi has just vowed to protect (after spending a decade trying to curb private capital, a reversal of his former position) as many in the leadership believes that the government bureaucracy is “too inefficient” and that true innovation and the driver of economic growth have to come from private sector. So we are unlikely to see an expansion of the public sector.
While the government has been very competent in managing acute crises through macro-policy adjustments, as evident by the absence of financial crises that spiraled out of control e.g. the scale of the subprime mortgage crisis in the US in 2007. However, the lack of long-term strategic planning at the national level is starting to show. Such deficiency had been mostly obscured during the property and infrastructure investment boom over the past decade, but the triple crises as a result of Covid, property market bubble bursting and the tariffs imposed by the US and the EU on Chinese godos have begun to expose the innate problems associated with the economic model in China:
The decentralized nature of the Chinese economy meant that local governments have a lot of authorities (and responsibilities), whose revenues rely primarily on land revenue and value-added tax. Such budgeting structure dictated that the property market and the manufacturing sector be prioritized at the expense of other sectors and programs. Massive subsidies had been given to property developers and green tech industries (e.g. EV, solar panels) since these sectors have been announced as a national economic priority in the 14th Five-Year Plan. The lack of strategic planning at the national level resulted in local governments competing with one another to court the companies with the most favorable subsidies/tax breaks.
Of course, these subsidies had to come from somewhere, and created a huge flow of wealth into the hands of the rich. And you can imagine what is happening right now as the property market is imploding, the solar panel industry is taking record losses and the EV exports are being fenced off by foreign tariffs - so much had been invested into these sectors that the local governments have no choice but to keep propping them up, or else their budgetary situation (again, relying on land revenue and value-added tax) would face an impending crisis.
This is why the entire system needs to be revamped, not just a re-distribution of wealth (as noted above, such inequality is structural due to how the local governments financing works) and fighting corruption that is already endemic, but a re-delineation of the responsibilities and authorities between central and local governments, curbing the over-reliance on export industries, and most importantly, massive revamp on the monetary system to institute debt cancellation/restructuring, and to allow the central government the ability to create large deficits instead of relying on accumulation of foreign currencies to expand its monetary base.
I know this went a long and meandering way instead of just answering the question in a straightforward manner, but there really is no simple answer here. The entire issue is complex and has to be treated as such.
It is China’s prerogative to do what it wants with its foreign policy.
However, never in the world have we a country so integral to the global economy that it can put a lot of pressure to stop an all-out war/genocide from happening. This is not a predicament that existed during WWII or the Cold War.
Even at its height, the USSR was so far from being integrated into the global economy that it simply did not have the weight to pull a “I’m willing to stop the world’s economy from moving, including our own, until everyone has come to an agreement that we should stop a war/genocide that will upend millions of lives.”
The only country that seems willing to wield its power is the US. People can laugh at Trump all they want, but he is willing to use that power to get what he wants, as foolish as some of the policies seem to be.
See my response in this thread: