Xi Jinping is acting like a gambler, whether he wants to or not. How else would he dare to go down the path of open confrontation with the United States? The U.S. won World War II and established a whole new set of rules for how the world works, and the end of the Cold War made the U.S. the sole superpower and the world’s policeman. Other countries will either be good citizens or hooligans. Since the Chinese Communist Party was reorganized, it has also been biding its Time, that is, abiding by the international rules established by the United States and not causing trouble for the police.
But Xi Jinping has changed China’s course from being a good citizen to being a gambler: breaking the rules set by the United States. This approach of his is certainly like a big gamble. And Trump‘s trade war has led the vast majority of people to believe that the Chinese Communist Party will lose. But today, it is clear that the United States, without Trump at the helm, is no longer capable of confronting China alone. I would have to say that Xi Jinping gambled right on this big bet.
The US is now the weakest it has been since World War II
With China at a disadvantage, Xi Jinping’s policy of hardballing the U.S. has yielded unexpected results. Instead of containing China’s rise, the U.S. has been hit by an Epidemic that has led to more infighting and weakened diplomatic leadership. The biggest beneficiary of this situation is the Chinese Communist Party. In retrospect, if Xi Jinping had still taken Deng Xiaoping’s line and bowed to the U.S., not to mention the impossibility of cracking down on the U.S., it is more likely that he would have taken responsibility for the epidemic. And to the rest of the world, it is clear that there is not much influence.
This path of Xi Jinping is most likely not the result of strategic deliberation, but more likely an inevitable reaction to his worldview and a very reckless act. For in international politics, this kind of confrontation of the world’s second largest power against the first is often the result of war. But the current result is completely unexpected. Such an outcome is entirely determined by the nature of the United States. The United States is an empire, a democratic empire, but at the same time a weak empire. Seeing this weak nature of the United States, it is clear that the key to this gamble by Xi Jinping, whether intentional or not, is not what China does, but what the United States inevitably will not do. Democracies are always weak and appeasing compared to the brutality of authoritarian dictators. Trump, already the most fierce of the past several U.S. presidents in confronting the Chinese Communist Party, has been defeated by an epidemic, by mistake. It is no wonder that many people lament that heaven will not destroy the Chinese Communist Party. Whether we like it or not, we cannot deny that this is the most favorable outcome for the CCP.
The current Biden administration, not to mention consolidating the gains of the trade war during Trump’s tenure, has almost no concrete policies to confront the CCP at all, except for lip service. In my opinion, it is even worse than the Obama-era “return to the Asia-Pacific” policy. In front of the world, the United States is now divided, weak, and helpless from the Chinese virus. It can be said that this is the weakest America since World War II.
Wang Huning, Xi Jinping’s right-hand man and a member of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China, stated America’s weakness back in his 1991 book, America Against America: “The American system, built on the whole on a foundation of individualism, hedonism and democracy, is clearly losing out to a system of collectivism, forgetfulness and authoritarianism. ” Apparently, Wang Huning brought this set of ideas into the core leadership of the CCP, and Xi Jinping thus embarked on this path of confronting the United States, as Wang described. Of course, the so-called collectivism is just the grand rhetoric of the “Family world”; the so-called “forgetfulness” is just a glorification of the advantages of low human rights. But it cannot be denied that there could be a better time to confront the United States. Just when the U.S. is at its weakest.
I am not saying here that the ultimate victor must be the CCP. But it is clear that this big gamble by Xi Jinping has saved the CCP as a regime, at least for now. Democracy is the grave of the CCP’s ideology. There is a saying in the CCP system: reform is to seek death, not to reform is to wait for death. This is the dilemma of the CCP. Because the CCP’s ideology dictates that only dictatorship and autocracy can preserve the Life of the CCP. But dictatorship and autocracy, in turn, will cause the collapse of the economy. So before Xi Jinping, the CCP leadership was very afraid of direct confrontation with the United States and was timid before the battle. But today it turns out that it is precisely the help the United States has given China over the past 40 years that has given today’s CCP the capital to confront the United States. And Xi Jinping has taken full advantage of this, and at the most critical time, he has struck the United States and increased the CCP’s voice in the international arena. The darkness is so dark that, as a fart, it is better to wash up and go to sleep.
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