What's happening in China?

I just wanted to say a few words about what's happening in China right now. I'm sure you've all seen, videos and clips from the anti lockdown protests that have erupted across the country in various cities. Well, here's my take. Xi Jinping has not been imposing these severe lockdowns across China because of COVID, not at all, but because China is imploding. In fact, China is suffering multiple implosions.

The real estate market is collapsing and that's one of the most important and biggest sectors of the Chinese domestic economy. Multinational corporations are exiting China at an accelerating pace, and there's a lot of reasons for that. And China is in the process of a seismic demographic decline that will likely see the population of the country cut in half within the next few decades. Now the big problem is that the hype about the Chinese economic miracle was making promises to the people that it can't deliver, and it's falling apart very rapidly and very dramatically. Xi Jinping is aware of this and so he anticipates large scale mass unrest, uprising, rebellion, protest, and so on.

Once the people recognize that the government cannot produce perpetual economic growth. So he needs to consolidate complete repressive control before this realization hits. But this becomes a self fulfilling prophecy because lockdowns just exacerbate the already existing severe damage that the Chinese economy is already suffering. By preemptively trying to prevent protest, he's provoking it. Now, obviously, it is reasonable to suspect US interference in what's going on in China.

American intelligence is undoubtedly working inside China to stoke protest. If they weren't, they wouldn't be doing their jobs. I mean, we already know from their own website that the National Endowment for Democracy earmarked some half million dollars, more than half $1,000,000 for fostering and supporting dissent in China just this year. So obviously, Washington is interested in and involved in efforts to destabilize the government of China while simultaneously pursuing the strategy of containment of China regionally. Now China's economic relationship with the West is quickly unraveling.

So Xi Jinping sees that his best hope is engagement with the global South through projects like the Belt and Road Initiative and other investment projects. But even these are going to become untenable if he has to contend with domestic rebellion. China's first instinct is always to self isolate, consolidate control, and worry about their own periphery more than international relationships. Now I would guess that Xi Jinping is probably going to and probably already is directing the power and the resources of the state towards greater communist party indoctrination of the population so that ideology can supersede as a priority financial prosperity, and so that the people can become actually content with a China that has diminished economic vigor. Now in America and in the international press, everyone is talking about China's pursuit of greater military strength because they think it means that China is going to invade Taiwan or Xi Jinping is gonna throw his weight around in Southeast Asia.

That's forgetting the fact that the number one enemy of any state is its own population. Not to mention the fact that a great number of external military conflicts are only engaged in for the purpose of distracting the public from your government's domestic failures. Now also China is developing its own version of the military industrial complex that they have in this in The US. But that's primarily a device or a vehicle for boosting the economy, not for actually engaging in wars. Now The US, of course, would love for China to invade Taiwan just like they loved for Russia to invade Ukraine.

I don't see how it makes any sense for Xi Jinping to do that in Taiwan except again for a distraction of the population and also as a pretext for even greater crackdown on descent inside of China. Now the takeaway from all of this for Muslim countries and for the global south generally is that I think we have a short window of opportunity for extracting investment from China, and we should do it as much as we can while we can. Look, Chinese loans and investment don't come with IMF style conditions. And at the end of the day, China has no mechanism for demanding payment, which is why they just recently forgave billions of dollars worth of debt from African countries. The best FDI, foreign direct investment, and financial assistance that is available to Muslim countries and the global south generally is from China today.

And that option may not exist for very much longer, so we should get it while we can. I wrote in a Facebook post in 2020 that within three to five years, we're gonna start hearing The US calling for regime change in China. Now, when I wrote that, I got a lot of pushback at the time, but I still stand by that. And that's the trajectory in which things are going. You literally have protesters today in Beijing calling for the overthrow of the communist party.

If you think that The US won't be saying the same thing in solidarity with the protesters, then you're not someone who really even should be following global politics. At the same moment when everyone is talking about the creation of a multipolar world, the owners and controllers of global financialized capital are systematically taking down every potential rival. So if your country has the opportunity to collect investment from any of those rivals before they fall, you should do it.