President Donald Trump is headed to China this week, and according to the legacy media, he is in a weak position. He has no cards to play. The Chinese have the upper hand.
This is total crap. President Trump has spent a decade totally reshaping the global power map. China is in trouble, and Trump is heading into the summit in a power position on every front.
Go back 10 years. Everyone said that China would be dominant 10 years ago.
Wrong.
Today, the Left and the woke Right — which is basically the New Left — say that America should cede global power to “multi-polarity,” which means China and Russia.
That’s not just stupid. It makes them useful idiots for the world’s worst regimes.
According to some sources, China is overconfident. They believe that they have the upper hand. The Chinese government is allowing people in China to see what’s happening in America, and because that coverage is often negative about America, it’s reinforcing the Chinese government’s perception of its own strength.
Now, Trump is headed to China, and our beloved legacy media is chanting that multi-polarity is happening.
Wrong.
China is in its weakest global position in at least a couple of decades.
China is an awful, terrible, autocratic, economically fascist, one-party state. They’ve had serious systemic problems for years, decades, even up to today. Those problems have been masked over the last three decades or so by China’s shift from a completely closed economy in the 1970s to one that engages with world markets, moving from communism at home to a form of mercantilism under the predecessors of Xi Jinping.
There are always moronic economists here in the West who are in love with the idea of a mercantilist, centralized state, meaning a state in which the government directs where private money should be spent and determines which trade deals can be made. Everything is government-sponsored. Everything is government-subsidized. Everything is government-regulated.
A lot of economists love this stuff because it gives them the illusion of control.
But China is not the economic powerhouse they’re making it out to be.
China can direct its economy in a few different directions with serious power, and it can take whatever it has of its economy, cobble that together, and then can punch in one direction.
For example, if they want to generate extraordinary levels of power, they can build many nuclear plants or dig for coal, and they don’t care about the environmental effects.
Thus, they can really out-produce us in terms of energy. And they can build some new cars that are pretty competitive by stealing and adapting Western technology, which they do.
But let us be real. The Chinese economy is not truly competitive with the American economy in any serious sense. Their products are not better than ours. Their services are not better than ours. Their economy is not better than ours. Not even close.
They lack innovation. So they can build these gigantic labs, and they can force a bunch of people into those labs, but when you don’t have free markets, you have a problem. The system of free markets allows for better products and services because of competition.
You want to know why every major AI company is located in the United States? Because they’re all competing with each other. In fact, many of them are located a few blocks from one another in Silicon Valley. That is not atypical in a free market economy.
China has a serious debt problem. They hide their debt problem by stealing money from their citizens.
We’re always hearing about the Chinese military; they have a gigantic nuclear arsenal. But technologically speaking, they are far behind the United States now. Maybe they can pick it up, but not if they’re also lagging in AI, which is why we need to win the AI race.
The only thing that can solve China’s demographic, productivity, and military problems is winning the AI race.
This is why it’s so stupid when you see people from the Left to the woke Right making the case for AI in the United States to be set back.
It’s nuts. That would hand global power to the Chinese.
You’re constantly hearing about China’s gigantic army. It’s huge, but manpower isn’t everything, as we saw in the Ukraine war.
Similar to Russia’s, the Chinese military isn’t up to snuff. China relies on older, less sophisticated chips. What’s more, China doesn’t yet have the capacity to project deepwater power. They have many boats in their navy, which is effective in coastal zones, but they have no capacity to project power beyond those zones.
China’s entire governmental system is built around a lack of competition. The problem with Chinese centralized control is that it cannot produce innovation or building or thriving.
President Trump knows all of this, and he has been spending the last 10 years putting the screws to China. It is the through line of his foreign policy.
People look at Trump’s foreign policy and ask, “What’s he doing in Iran? I don’t understand what he’s doing in Venezuela. I don’t understand what he’s doing with Japan.”
All of it is oriented to China. All of it.
President Trump is opportunistic in foreign policy terms. He waits for an opportunity to arise, and then he takes advantage of it.
A dozen years ago, people were talking about China’s Belt and Road Initiative, or what they called the Silk Road Initiative. It was designed to basically create massive debt traps for countries. China would give them free money, but it wasn’t free; it would come with constraints. Those countries that were poor would take the loans, and then Beijing would basically foreclose on the loans and take control of property in strategic areas.
Countries were joining because they saw free money.
But it turns out the countries have been withdrawing from the Belt and Road Initiative, and even Chinese investment in the Belt and Road has been dropping precipitously.
The reality is that when it comes to the economic battle between China and the United States, we have the upper hand.
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