George Magnus is an associate at Oxford University’s China Centre and the author of Red Flags: why Xi’s China is in Jeopardy.
The last thing the government in Beijing wants right now, given its fractious economy, is a full-blown trade war.
Oh yeah, it’s China that’s in trouble
What the fuck is a “fractious economy”
Dunno but I fail to see how it can be more fractious than an economy based on a stockmarket that is in free fall because of the tweets out of a mad ~80yr old king.
China has a Schroedinger’s Economy. It is always in a superposition between imminent collapse and growing faster than the American economy, both being true simultaneously. The West actually believes both, and to make sense of the cognitive dissonance in their head, they call the economy “fractious”
China is so advanced their whole economy is in quantum superposition
That links to an article the same guy wrote a year and a half ago about the usual “muh Evergrande” stuff. So to answer your question, I don’t know.
An economy way past its bedtime?
You can’t reason with the Chinese economy when it’s in this state, it’s over tired and doesn’t know what it wants.
The problem with sanctioning and tariffing everyone around you is that eventually, countries just ignore you all together and start trading with others.
We’re speed running the Confederacy here. The Confederacy thought that King Cotton would save the South. They thought that if the British were cut off from their cotton supply, eventually they would be forced to intervene on the side of the South. Instead, the British eventually just found alternative suppliers in Egypt and India. (They weren’t exactly angels here, this was still colonialism.)
Sanctions and tariffs can work if they are limited and targeted. Are there two or three countries that you truly feel are doing abominable things? Then cut them off from the trade system, and they will feel pressured to change their ways. If you embargo or tariff half the planet however, all those affected countries can still trade with each other. If you embargo or tariff too many countries, eventually you are embargoing yourself.
We don’t have cotton though. We have the war machine
not for long. countries are starting to buy chinese there, too
They are collapsing!!!
“We didn’t start this war, but we will finish it”
where is this quote from?
We didn’t start this war, but we will finish it
planet of the apes and also netanyahu
Eww I didn’t know Netanyahu said this
where is this quote from?
I’d assume this has been said about many wars throughout human history.
I guess from the saying that Russia did not start the Ukraine war but is now finishing it
I’ve been hearing that quote for decades so I guess it’s just a saying
Of course they do. They know they have access to almost everything they need for their economy to thrive within their own borders. They have good relationships with their neighbors for the most part and have a lot of advantage in trading negotiations. They’ve spent the last 50 years building up their industry to world-class levels. They could close their borders entirely and cease all trade and they’d survive and weather it well for quite some time. The same cannot be said for the people they trade with.
they’re also ran by competent governance so would have prepared for this likelihood. there is genuinely no reason for top-xi to put all the eggs in one basket. i mean at this point they’ve had almost a decade to ready themselves for trump’s antinixon shock, he even gave them a little test run during his first term so they could get some experience.
Trump as the anti-nixon is an interesting thought. I know you’re limiting it to Chinese relations opening/closing trade, but now I’m curious if there are other anti-parallels (perpendiculars?).
yanis varoufakis and others have written extensively about the manner in which trump’s actions are sort of a (poorly constructed, extremely not thought-out) reversal of the post-Bretton Woods economic global order.
Any writings you recommend for that in particular?
https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2025/02/21/donald-trumps-economic-masterplan-unherd/
with the caveat that i think yanis is probably giving the trump guys too much credit in terms of actually having thought this through.
If anything that makes me feel that even a hyper-liberal like Nixon was still actually competent, despite how much he fucked up but his administration were still planning things, they still cared.
Cool, thanks!
Nixon created the EPA and several medical services.
Trump dismantled those same institutions.
We live in a world where Richard Nixon is seen as a decent, responsible, and forward-thinking statesman.
Richard. God. Damned. Nixon.
I mean he only did it because a river caught on fire and nobody could put it out
I mean our leaders here dont care to stop shit like that. They are just letting a genocide continue; In this analogy theyre actually burning the river.
Theyre Burning The River. I think you could name an article on the Nixon-Trump parallel that.
China doesn’t have natural oil reserves so until we get a green revolution, they do need to trade within the rules of the petrodollar. Obviously things could change but this makes them pretty different from the USSR who was able to exist as a pariah state for some time.
They are very much keeping Russia onside, probably with the awareness that there could come a time they rely almost solely on their oil.
Russia, Sudan, they also keep decent relations with Iran and Iraq IIRC, I dont think Venezuelans have a ton of easily accessible Oil trading partners but with less trading to America we could see ships not really caring about the Psuedo-blockade theyre under.
Harden your heart President Xi and dump all the US treasuries
Are you enjoying the show?
Refill your popcorn, you’ll love this next partChina must realize that USrael is an existential threat to them and humanity.
no more half measures walter
I really think that Trump won’t care or bend. I think he’s convinced that importing stuff makes us weak and the solution isn’t China bending the knee or paying him $500 million or anything like that, it’s reshoring American manufacturing to some level that capitalists up until these tariffs have been entirely unwilling to consider and may still refuse to consider given he’s not giving them free money and loans/grants to build the factories here. I mean ideally I think he hopes to keep the tariffs on but get some concessions for goods orders from China to factories in the US that help with his reshoring but barring that I think he’s just happy to create conditions where it’s not economical to buy many Chinese goods.
It’s either that or Trump and his advisors are planning on forcing an anti-Nixon as Varoufakis supposes where other countries are forced to appreciate their currency against the dollar to make the US competitive.
So it’s good China is not being bullied but I don’t think them standing firm is going to get Trump to flinch and drop the tariffs on China. I think those stay on or increase because he thinks its essential to reshore and is willing to tank the economy, destroy the access to treats, etc and has all the hooting chuds lined up behind him. America is self-owning itself but with a purpose and a design and a light at the end of the tunnel they believe.
Given how all the chuds are lined up behind this message of austerity and autarky and have done amazing 180s from crying about eating bugs and pods and taxes to supporting this and bashing whiners as unpatriotic and waxing philosophical about money in uncharacteristic ways for them we must consider that they are quite serious about the long haul here. Maybe in 6 months if the economy has crashed and is burning congress might push through a bill to take the tariffs off and take the power away from Trump but it’ll be a bitterly fought matter. As will control of the world be for that matter. China still has to contend with the fact Europeans are racist white supremacists and deeply ideologically committed to the project of liberalism to the point of being more than willing to commit suicide for it so they’re not going to be partners with China in resisting the US on this most likely. Other markets are still developing and we see an increasing likelihood of campism returning with the anti-US camp being in a much stronger position admittedly than it was in the first cold war but still likely to face conflict and resource grabs against their weaker non-nuclear partner members.
I don’t expect Trump to change course either, and I expect that it will work in China’s favor in the end. Currently, most countries are trying to keep a balance between China and the US, but the tariff war makes pursuing a relationship with the US largely pointless. China standing strong will create a rallying point for the rest of the world.
I’m not so convinced. The US has done a good job of convincing countries in Asia that they need to “counter Chinese influence, balance Chinese power” and indeed as most of these nations are capitalist nations they think in capitalist terms, they don’t think China won’t prey on them and drain them if it gets the chance if US power wanes because they’d do that in China’s position. It’s similar with Europe, they want to check US power and know the vassal arrangement has gone too far but they’re committed to liberalism completely and are willing to self-immolate to defend the honor and notion of liberalism and “liberal values” and China is antithetical to those values by its nature as a DoTP state with a ML party at the helm.
So many, many, many countries want to find some sort of magical imagined balance between the US and China, this idea that they can use one to check the power of the other and get maximum benefit and don’t want to get too in bed with the Chinese system because they’re convinced if the Chinese achieve yuan reserve currency status that they’ll use it as badly as the US has been weaponizing the dollar and frankly they’re more comfortable with the enemy they know in the US than the enemy they don’t know in China given that for most of the existence of US hegemony things were not this bad and there are some ideas it could still get more reasonable under the US regime. China taking power and replacing the US would be a change and change like that is greatly feared because it’s not a change you can undo in a year or a decade if it works.
But we’ll see. We’ll see, probably a months where decades happen situation.
I think it’s likely a lot of countries bend the knee to the US and become further under the US thumb vassals while some amount join BRICS and China in resisting but that pans out not to a quick US collapse but to a new cold war and new increasingly disconnected trading blocs with the US one trying to destabilize and destroy the other through any and all means.
The reality is that these countries have no choice now. EU and Vietnam came crawling asking for zero tariffs and they got rejected. Given that the US will not even allow them to supplicate, they have no choice but to work with China or their economies will crash. Many European countries may choose to implode rather than work with China, but majority of the world will now.
The fact that Trump won’t change course is exactly why China is going to crush us. They’ve prepared for this. The century of Chinese embarrassment has ended. They will not be taken advantage of again and they have the economy structure to be patient as time has shown consistently.
Pleeease I want it to be so bad.
I think it would be easier for the capitalists to get Congress to take tariff powers back with a veto proof majority than to build factories in the US on the timeline Trump is imagining. Or they just hunker down and save money for the next 2 years and try again with the next Congress. Or in the worst case, the next president drops the tariffs on inauguration day. They’re not going to build factories here when the tariffs won’t last.
Mess with the bull, you get the horns.
Do it, Xaddy.
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