Comments by "yop yop" (@yopyop3241) on "China After Xi || Peter Zeihan" video.

Xi’s daughter is highly Americanized. She has been living and working in NYC and Boston ever since graduating from Harvard.
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@timrobertson8436 Much more of the economy is on the coast, now. Imports and exports are waaay more important than they were in earlier iterations of Chinese warlordism. If/when China shatters again, the coastal shards will have much more potential for making their independence stick than in previous iterations.
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Major economic problems incoming. Real estate and demographic bubbles popping. Trade restrictions going up everywhere— which countries have tariffs under 50% on Chinese EVs these days? Economic problems lead to unrest.
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@user10u7 Check Xi’s recent speech. He warns the Party to prepare for it.
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@tilhon Keep in mind that the PRC government is not organized the same way as we do it in the West. In the PRC, the popular parts of government are monopolized by the national government while the unpopular parts are all pushed onto the local authorities. The national government is responsible for the military, the space program, their equivalent of the National Institutes of Health, etc. The local governments get stuck with the duties of the IRS, enforcing EPA regulations, etc. And the local governments are almost always desperate for funds, because the national government gets its funds by taking money from the local governments and has little in the way of checks or balances. The end result of this national vs local government architecture is that the Chinese populace loves the national government but absolutely loathes their local government. How stable is the system as a whole? Impossible to say, but it’s definitely a mistake to focus on the popularity of the national government without also considering the unpopularity of the local governments.
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No chance. Strict capital controls. “Contagion” won’t be via finance, it will be via supply chains.
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Xi’s only offspring has been living in the US for almost half of her life now.
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⁠⁠ @foregone_roulette The disconnect between population vs carrying capacity is far more extreme this time around. In addition, water-borne trade is far more important than it was at the time of previous falls. In summary, this collapse will be especially severe, and many of the resulting fractured pieces will be far better equipped to retain independence for the long haul. Net result: permanent end of the Chinese Empire, similar to how the Roman Empire fell and was replaced by the myriad countries of Europe that we know today.
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@user10u7 Xi apparently just gave a speech to a bunch of high CCP officials telling them to prepare for civil war….
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@Swiplys When the current self-inflicted bubbles in Chinese demographics and real estate pop, it’s going to be very bad in China for a very long time. We’ll see if the CCP can convince the Chinese that the misery is being distributed equitably. It’s abundantly clear that it won’t be, but it’s possible that the CCP will manage to convince the Chinese that black is white and up is down.
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@Swiplys So you see Chinese people like yourself simply agreeing to lie down and go gently into that good night? Zeihan predicts far worse than ~1960(?), and it seems likely that Xi plans to push the brunt of the pain onto the coastal elites. That’s your sort of people, right? Chinese people who have learned English and use VPNs to access YouTube are overwhelmingly from the coastal cities. Zeihan predicts that China will lose more than half of its population. It’s just a question of what the division between the Four Horsemen will be in the final accounting. To me, it seems obvious that the most humane possible outcome is for those coastal regions to split off to gain humanitarian support from the West. Keeping people alive is far more important than keeping China intact.
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⁠ @user10u7 They aren’t. None of “Xi’s people”have anywhere close to the level of support and respect that Xi has. Very high probability that there will be a prolonged power struggle when Xi passes. We’ll see if the fragile China of the mid-term future will be able to weather that period.
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@stunstar4553 The CCP’s way of thinking is the same as the Mafia’s.
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Like Japanese for “four” or “death”?
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He has purged millions, and he hasn’t let up since completing the purge of the opposition. He has been going after the influential with no apparent aspiration to rule. Of late, he has even been going after the influential among his longtime supporters. Millions. Let the scale of that sink in….
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Xi has reportedly purged between 2 and 2.5 million people, starting with almost everyone of any significance from the two main CCP power blocks since Mao’s death but also extending to anyone with any influence from any walk of life. And keep in mind that Xi was a small fish compromise candidate, chosen because each of the two main factions thought they could take control of him and use him as their puppet. Xi only has a relative handful of his own people. In the US, when a new President is elected, they bring their most trusted people with them, but that’s probably only a few dozen people at most. A President is responsible for appointing ~4,000 people, over 1,000 of whom are important enough to require Senate approval. Where does a new President turn to find the appointees that they need? Obviously, they look to the top people in the country, especially the ones who have worked their way up in their own political party. Now do you see the problem?Xi has purged the top 2-2.5 million people. There’s evidence that Team Xi is struggling to run the country. It’s just too big for Xi and his small band of trusted, experienced people. But what comes next is likely to be far worse. There’s a huge leadership/experience/competence/influence vacuum behind Xi, and Xi appears to be too paranoid to allow anyone to grow to fill that vacuum.
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His prediction is that China collapses by 2030. He has been consistent about “by 2030” going back to at least 2011. The timing is about China’s retirement crisis. China’s post-Great Famine Baby Boomers have just started to retire. By 2030, they will almost all be retired. From now until 2030, China is going to experience a ratcheting up of the pressure on its economy from its retirement crisis. Somewhere along the way, that pressure will get bad enough to cause one or more (likely all) of the bubbles/instabilities that underlay the Chinese economy to burst, collapsing the entire edifice. Note that some of those instabilities lie outside of China. For example, a slowing Chinese and global economy reduces oil demand which puts pressure on Persian Gulf regimes and increases the risk of conflagration. If the flow of oil from the Gulf is curtailed, China will suffer the worst of it, because China is geographically further from the remaining oil suppliers than anyone. BTW, a signpost that Zeihan has been saying (again since at least 2011) to look out for on the way to China’s collapse by 2030: deflation by 2024. That prediction is coming to fruition as we speak.
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Compare the situation in China vs in the US. The US government is far more robust. When a US President is elected, he appoints ~1,500 people at the top of the government. He’ll undoubtedly only have a dozen or two of his own close trusted, experienced people, so where do the rest of those ~1,500 appointees come from? The answer is that each of the two big political parties has a stable of ~10,000 reasonably competent, experienced people that a newly elected President will draw from. Those numbers— 1,500 and 10,000– provide continuity and robustness. Compare that with the current situation in China. Xi was a compromise candidate, not part of either of the two main CCP factions, and since taking power, Xi has apparently all but completely gutted the two former main factions. That leaves China with just Xi and his one or two dozen people. There are no longer any stables of 10,000 competent, experienced people to draw on to staff the top 1,500 positions. There’s strong evidence that Team Xi is incapable of governing fully effectively. And the next leadership groups are likely to be even worse. At best, you’ll get continuity but with a likely lesser man at the top. What are the odds that one of Xi’s longtime followers is as good or better at leading than Xi? At worst, you get a prolonged period of internecine conflict, possibly exploding into complete chaos.
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2030.
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Mao’s successor had a much easier job. For starters, China is much, much more complicated today than it was in 1980. In addition, Mao’s vs Xi’s successors face opposite trends in terms of demographics and relations with the rest of the world.
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@u2beuser714 What’s superficial is to believe that ~15 years living in the US amounts to “drinking Starbucks and having iPhone.” Mainland Chinese who live in the US for more than a decade rarely choose to go back to live in China ever again.
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@Hfjsjsgjddbidhdjeu When she gets her US citizenship, maybe she’ll sponsor her mom and dad for chain migration.
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⁠ @timrobertson8436 No, for most of human history, trade over any significant distance has been only a very small part of the economy. The overwhelming majority of people owned and consumed almost nothing from further away than they could walk in a day. Until very recently, the Chinese economy was almost entirely local. The current situation is entirely different. We will see how that difference affects the outcome of the next warlord era.
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That’s Zeihan’s point. Even with Biden at the top, the US government still functions at a high level. In China, everything seems to depend on Xi. And since there’s no clear successor to Xi, what happens if there’s a months or years long power struggle when Xi passes? If everything depends on one person at the top, what happens during the months/years when there’s no one at the top? Note further that this is likely to occur at a time when China is likely going to be facing major problems in the aftermath of the popping of its demographic, finance, and real estate bubbles and in the face of severe external international pressure.
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He might weigh more than both of them combined, though….
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