Cold War 2.0
The big showdown in the first half of this century will be dominated by the emerging cold war and great power rivalry between the decaying Anglo-American-Zionist imperium and the rejuvenation of the Chinese middle kingdom. In the early 1990s, the ‘end of history’ was proclaimed by America’s giddy CIA, freshly drunk off a sense of post-Soviet triumphalism. The new era was supposed to give rise to the much anticipated ‘American century’: Russia carved up and absorbed by the West and the primacy of American ‘democracy’ embraced by every downtrodden capital in the world. There were murmurs that perhaps even China, the last big Socialist holdout, would be caught up in the glittery honeymoon phase with America and ditch its Socialist system for good. There would finally be no more major threat to the mighty USA and the world would live happily ever after with the ‘exceptional’ nation leading the globe with its ‘superior’ values and democratic-Capitalist system, until the end of time. But reality unfolded in a completely different manner to the sophomoric delusions of pseudo-intellectual Western think tanks. It took merely 20 years before the West and its foreign policy interventionist class wore out its welcome and the non-western world (Global South), led by a strategic Russia-China alliance, began to divorce from the American-dominated Atlanticist system. The world began to bifurcate into blocs again.
Contrary to wild proclamations otherwise, after the first cold war history did not ‘end’ and peace did not break out. The American imperium, instead of disbanding NATO as a goodwill gesture in response to the disbanding of the Warsaw Pact, escalated a brazenly militarist foreign policy. Foreign interventions sky rocketed over 4-fold compared to the cold war. American pro-imperial strategists like Brzezinski and Kagan advocated for using peace-time to aggressively expand NATO towards Russian borders and escalate American involvement in rogue, unilateral interventionism all over the world, starting with the breakup of Yugoslavia. The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) advocated for a haughty self-anointed carte blanche on US imperial machinery to operate with impunity all over the globe and cut down any potential rival to size, irrespective of any fallout from brazen crimes against humanity and acts of war against entire societies and economies. The 1990s were the last decade the US had free reign over the globe before a series of unfortunate false flag attacks, systemic ruptures and strategic mistakes began to cripple the American imperium and triggered the Global South to run for the hills. America’s greatest threat always came from itself and its poor foreign policy establishment. It was an inside job, not an external threat, that would ultimately exhaust it as an empire.
Fascism is a system that is well described by Lawrence Britt’s 14 defining characteristics. It is a system rooted in an excessive focus on ‘national security’, militarism and one where a strong marriage exists between corporate power and government. A private sector is a prerequisite for Fascism. The European flavor of Fascism, ‘National Socialism’, during WW2 is well known. After WW2, Fascism survived by merging with American imperialism, and laying low in Europe. It was not truly defeated: it merely migrated to the United States, Israel and continued to fester in parts of Europe, most notably in Ukraine. The modern form of Fascism in the US is less ethno-supremacist than its counterparts in Israel and Ukraine. It nevertheless piggybacks off the American sense of ‘exceptionalism’, but hardly for patriotic reasons: the ruling class of America pledges allegiance to the whims of private, borderless wealth accumulation, not nationalism. It has many faces but only one motive: to impose American military and economic might onto domestic and international ‘threats’ to maintain power and accumulate wealth for the Western plutocracy. The many faces of American Fascism are represented by the many factions vying for influence, all predicated on their self-anointed sense of superiority, whether they be Anglo-American, Zionist, Liberal, Conservative or Globalist. They all share the same zest for wealth accumulation and preservation: the plutocracy in America are descendants of the wealthiest ruling dynasties and aristocratic families in the Western world. America being the dominant empire, albeit in terminal decline, is their contemporary domicile and ‘host’.
Imperialism is known to attract civilizational parasites due to the wealth accumulation effect of its plundering machinery. However, the parasitism becomes burdensome, draining resources away from the core towards the imperial periphery. Eventually, sustaining a militant empire proves to be a liability for the imperial core. The special interests vying to hijack the steering wheel of the imperium, misallocate resources towards narrow projects not aligned with the national interest. China does not suffer from a Zionist infestation for example, nor does it have a demanding military-industrial complex to pander to, as there are no global protection rackets to bankroll for any vassals dependent on military aid. Instead, China’s trading partners are tied to the Middle Kingdom by mutually beneficial infrastructure and investment projects, mostly through the Chinese banking system. Imperialism for America is increasingly an expensively crippling enterprise, whilst China has untied its hands from such a burden. Vassals can go rogue and become emboldened with a sense of impunity, taking reckless decisions with confidence that the US security umbrella will bail them out or backstop their economies when things go wrong. Israel, Ukraine and various European states have all exploited the US protection racket this way and are proving to be liabilities for the welfare of the American people.
Enter The Dragon
After its accession into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 during an era of globalization, China rose rapidly to become the world’s largest economy by purchasing power parity (PPP) within 15 years. Its peaceful rise triggered alarm and hostility from the US – how could anybody rise quicker than the US economy and without the ritualistic shedding of blood so typical for New World evangelism? It was mind-boggling, especially for American elites, who had bludgeoned and blackmailed their way to the top and rode on the backs of German and Japanese defeats. Old World China had a few tricks up its sleeve. China’s bloodless coup against America’s attempted monopolism over the globe was a tough lesson to swallow for America’s ruling classes: a rejuvenated Chinese dragon now stared them in the face and offered a viable alternative economic and social system to American corporate Capitalist Fascism: Chinese state Capitalist Socialism. The Trump presidency in 2016 took note and began to shift focus on containing China as a foreign policy imperative. US imperial elites put the bull’s eye on China and it became public enemy number one, overtaking the obsession with Islam during the influential reign of post-911 Zionist fundamentalists.
In order to ‘compete’ with China, the US in essence had to shed parts of its identity to become more like China. This was the major reason for the final coup de grâce against ‘democracy’ and ‘Capitalism’ as they were once known in the West: ‘Democracy’ was revealed as Oligarchy, ‘Capitalism’ was revealed as Feudalism, ‘freedom of speech’ was trampled with wanton censorship and Fascism emerged as the West’s most comfortable configuration. Democracy and free market principles were holding America back, they were roadblocks to the totalitarian whims of Western elites. The US could never really compete with China if it adhered to its founding principles, because its economy and society were not geared for it. Decades of crony corporatism, financialization and Zionist infestation have hollowed out the US from within, offshoring its manufacturing base and rewarding non-productive parasites to operate on bad incentives. This put the US at a strategic disadvantage against China.
Consequently, China found itself in the position of implicitly leading over America, where America was forced to bend like a reed and adapt to China’s system and react rather than lead, a very embarrassing notion for a global hegemon. Imposing tariffs, subsidies, expanding governmental interventionism, waging trade wars and recklessly engaging in sanctions and the weaponization of the US dollar became the knee jerk lash out against China, and all went against ‘free market’ principles that were once America’s selling points. Their sudden proliferation arose at a time when the pro-globalization faction in the Neoliberal school of thought among the American foreign policy establishment lost its influence against a more belligerent anti-globalization, anti-China faction, roughly coinciding with the Trump presidency. At that juncture, the realization dawned on the latter faction that the globalization movement from 2001 onward had tremendously empowered China at the expense of America. The perceived extent of China’s empowerment threatened the imperial ambitions of the US not only in Asia-Pacific but the world at large. Prominent anti-China business hawks like Peter Zeihan and Kyle Bass began to push for the rupture of ‘Chimerica’ within the investor class.
The reason for such paranoia was not only Chinese initiatives like the supermassive Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the ‘Made In China 2025’ policy, but rapid advances in China’s technological, manufacturing and military-industrial capabilities. Chinese breakthroughs in quantum computing, AI, its lead in electric vehicle (EV) production (60% of global production) and a narrowing in the semiconductor chip race with Western firms have spooked the one-upmanship tendencies of US foreign policy makers and American exceptionalists, prompting knee jerk tariffs to be slapped by an increasingly anti-competitive Europe and America. For the first time since 1991, the US was being challenged again, only this time, by an economy that had already surpassed US GDP by purchasing power parity (PPP) in 2016. China produced more steel, cars, ships and electricity than the US. The Chinese behemoth exported more goods than the US to the world and contributed more in foreign direct investment (FDI), thanks to its sprawling and strategic BRI project. China also graduated more STEM and PhD students than did the US. Even president Trump’s ‘America-first’ MAGA hats were made in China. Furthermore, Chinese monopoly on rare earth metal exports put America’s military supply chains at risk in the event of war, since a large proportion of critical US military technology sourced Chinese rare earth metals. China has even found ways to dominate Bitcoin’s mining hash power (>60%) thanks to comparatively cheaper energy costs, at least until its ban. In 2021, China’s dominance in Bitcoin’s hashing power slumped when the Politburo banned Bitcoin mining, causing miners to flee China. In 2024, 25% of Fortune 500 companies, or 128 out of 500, were Chinese. Only 139 were American. The gap between China and the US in wealth concentration is reaching parity. However, the distribution of wealth between both behemoths remains different.
Now we will delve deeper into why the Chinese economy became more structurally sound than the US economy and was able to remain at a competitive advantage. It is important to understand the structural and ideological differences between the American and Chinese economies. In both systems, Capitalism is adopted, however, neither have pure Capitalism. The result of such dynamics inevitably make arguments for the Chinese system being superior to the American one, by various metrics. The 1990s saw various reforms implemented to streamline the Chinese economy. For one, local governments in provinces were incentivized to grow GDP by investing in infrastructure so that land values appreciated, hence tax revenues. Land taxes formed a significant component of state income in China. This fiscal policy was known as ‘Land Finance’. The goal was furthered by cutting red tape to help attract foreign FDI into China to build up factories, land development and technology transfer. Investments were made in education so that the workforce could grasp and master the new technologies streaming in. Local officials were promoted based on the economic growth of their province. The right incentives were set in stone, despite risks of overheating land values and inflating property bubbles.
Another policy dubbed ‘Grasping the large and letting go of the small’ involved the Chinese central state taking over the core of strategically important sectors of the economy by the promotion of state owned enterprises (SOEs). In effect, SOEs were corporations run and funded by the state that would oversee the management of China’s natural monopolies (utilities), banking system and industrial production capacity. The point was to downsize the state and decentralize government authority to lessen its stranglehold over the economy in the way a typical Socialist government would do. It was the application of Deng Xiaoping’s ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ married to elements of American Capitalism – the result being China’s hybrid model as a mixed-market economy with better efficiencies than the overly-centralized Soviet economy. By the end of the 1990s, over 114,000 industrial SOEs were shifted to local governments, privatized or shut down – this was ‘letting go of the small’. A few thousand remaining SOEs would remain and consolidate within Chinese state control – this was ‘grasping the large’. Chen Yun, a colleague of Deng Xiaoping’s, described China’s hybrid economic system as a ‘birdcage economy’ – meaning Capitalism was a bird in a Socialist cage, with the bird never allowed to be truly free. Such metaphors would go on to highlight the unique fusion of Socialism with Capitalism in what essentially amounted to a form of State Capitalism albeit with Chinese characteristics. Such a system stood to pose a seriously viable alternative to the American one, for Global South nations. The export version of Chinese State Capitalism could be tailored for Global South sovereigns not wishing to be subjugated by American Corporate Capitalism: Chinese characteristics tailored to the Chinese civilization state could be replaced and fitted to the relevant country in question.
Despite the emphasis on SOEs, they only contributed roughly 25% of Chinese GDP, but over 60% of market capitalization by 2019. Privately owned enterprises (POEs) contributed the bulk of Chinese GDP, with over 60% of Chinese GDP driven by them. POEs were considered more efficient than their state-owned counter-parts, allowing the economy to reap the benefits of innovation. Many analysts overlook this fact and believe that the Chinese state is fully centrally planned and owns most enterprises in China, which is incorrect. Much of the Sinophobic conservative ‘Right’ in the US still wrongly believes that China is Maoist or Stalinist when in actual fact, the reality is far more complex and nuanced. Maoism had been largely discredited by the Chinese Politburo after the ‘Cultural Revolution’ and ‘Great Leap Forward’ reforms in the 1970s. Cults of personality have given way to a much more pragmatic approach birthed by the great minds of Deng Xiaoping and Zhou Enlai, which began to institute elements of Western Capitalism into China’s Socialist system in the 1970s, just as the Soviet Union was beginning to calcify into centrally planned stasis. The Chinese had great respect for Stalin but after Nikita Khrushchev’s repudiation of Stalinism, the two Socialist giants had an ideological falling out and their economies began to diverge. Deng and Zhou implemented the ‘Four Modernizations’ reforms, the concept of a ‘Xiaokang Society’ and free economic zones. These reforms aimed to 1) promote dual-use technologies in civilian and military sectors 2) ‘open up’ and liberalize parts of the Chinese economy to Western investment and 3) grow a Chinese middle class. China was a peasant-driven agrarian economy prior to the reforms. In their wake, it morphed into a manufacturing powerhouse. Deng reformed the economy in the wake of the Soviet Union’s economic calcification to pit China on a more sustainable trajectory. It was no wonder then, why Deng was regarded as the ‘father’ of modern China and why the CCP outlasted the CCCP.
The genius of SOEs was their strategic importance to overall Chinese productive capacity and supply chains. Today, Iran, Russia and many other Global South nations emulate this system and Western governments have started to shift in the same direction as well, albeit with a slightly different ‘flavor’ and configuration that I will get into shortly. SOEs own upstream sectors in the economy which keep production costs low for downstream sectors in the economy. In order to understand the broader ‘value added’ of such a configuration, making Chinese products ultimately more competitive than those of their global peer rivals, one must understand the types of benefits SOEs reap from the Chinese state in the first place. Many SOEs are able to get deep discounts and subsidies from the state: in addition, SOEs are granted cheaper financing from the state owned banking sector by securing lower interest rate differentials than the official rate. If raw material focused SOEs were able to gain such advantages, the cost savings would be passed down to capital-intensive sectors of the economy like chemical processing, manufacturing, construction, energy extraction and mining. Ultimately, their end products would be more competitive than peer rivals such as the US, where nodes along the value-added chain are each driven by profit maximization, not a broader harmony.
Comparing Chinese and American Systems
China maintains the world’s highest fossil fuel subsidies, at over $2 trillion in 2022. The intent here is to keep consumer energy prices low, thus inflation. Some subsidies kick in when oil prices go over $130 a barrel, to keep fuel prices affordable for consumers and to tame domestic inflation. Fiscal policy is thus utilized in ways to reduce the inflationary burden on monetary policy, whereas in the US, monetary policy is at greater mercy to external energy price shocks. The US spent over $700 billion on fossil fuel subsidies in 2022, but their focus laid more on tax breaks given to oil and gas producers especially in the shale fracking industry. This was largely thanks to shale industry lobby efforts rather than any concern for consumer welfare by the US government. It highlights some of the major differences between the Chinese and American systems. China generally does not suffer from the problem of excessive corporate lobbying because there is no competition between a voting constituency and corporate vested interests. SOEs dominate all the core industries instead of private mega corporate conglomerates in the US, which seek narrower aims such as profit maximization and shareholder returns rather than wider social responsibility and furthering national strategic goals. Special interest lobbying and rent-seeking behavior is minimal in China, while in the US, this form of parasitism is a systemic feature, distorting incentives to the extent of nullifying any notions of governmental sovereignty and public welfare. Government authority is instead steered by private interests, for private interests, above that of public welfare.
Both Chinese and American economies tend towards Oligarchy, consolidation and centralization of government. What China does with SOEs, America does it with public-private partnerships i.e. mega-corporations. The American business community has been talking up the mantra of ‘Private-Public Partnerships’ as an alternative way of financing Western backed initiatives which compete with China’s BRI, such as the Blue Dot Network. In essence, private Western financial institutions will work with governmental organizations and sovereign wealth funds to push Western vulture Capitalism under the guise of feigning concern over environmental and societal imperatives. As most energy assets have already been nationalized by major sovereign governments and pried out of the hands of Western firms, the work-around is to team up with Western private equity and governmental organizations in emerging markets with ties to Western institutions, to purchase stakes in strategic infrastructure assets. In particular, Blackrock has been on a quest to purchase assets that closely proxy SOEs in global supply chains. Agricultural land, ports, airports, factories and strategic corporations are being bought up by Blackrock money and its subsidiaries including Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP). The goal is to compete with China’s BRI by wielding influence in infrastructure sectors among emerging markets, pushing Western virtue signalling tropes of ‘zero carbon emissions’ and ‘green investments’ which mask their true purpose of ultimately seeking to control emerging economies and degrading their sovereignty.
At least the battle of influence is narrowing to the comparatively more peaceful domain of economic development. If we zoom out to the bigger picture, China is leading and the West is forced to bend like a reed in order to compete with China’s focus on infrastructure investment and development. The best antidote to terrorism, hatred and war is to foster employment and economic development and reduce conditions conductive to desperation, which in turn engenders conflict. Western foreign policy has been rooted for far too long in fostering conditions conductive for hatred and war, especially in Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. This is done cynically to justify Western military stranglehold over those regions. By forcing the West to bend and focus instead on competing in more peaceful domains such as investment and trade, China has a positively taming effect on Western imperial hegemons, forcing them to play along with the game of investment and economic development rather than wielding around barbaric displays of strength. Such ritualistic shock tactics do nothing but exhaust their global standing and wastes tremendous life and resources for everybody except a small circle of super-wealthy merchants of death and ideologically perverted policy-makers.
The market in China serves the state, which ultimately serves the working class, not the plutocracy: in America, the state serves the market, which ultimately serves the plutocracy, not the working class. These are the major differences of how market principles are applied between the American Corporate Capitalist system and the Chinese State Capitalist system. Ideologically and pragmatically, China is fundamentally Socialist at heart, while America is Fascist. Both economies evolved in their own separate ways. Their differences today are much less striking than most people think. In the past, their differences were much more pronounced: after the 1917 revolution, Socialism appealed to peasant, agrarian societies in the third world, contrary to the expectations of Karl Marx. Fascism appealed more to manufacturing powerhouses with established private sectors. Today, both China and US have private sectors and strong, central governments. The way their governments interact with the market and how they distribute wealth, forms the crux of their differences.
When it comes to the stock market, parity is a still a while away between both economies. This is because stocks are regarded differently in China than in the US. The US stock market is much more mature and advanced than China’s. But due to the US dollar’s reserve currency status, the American stock market is not any ordinary stock market: it siphons up excess US dollar inflation sloshing around the world during cycles of monetary expansion. The US economy is highly financialized, where banks, funds and derivatives clearinghouses have a high political, economic and social impact. The negative consequences of over-financialization were evident in the 2008 American financial crisis and its aftermath – leading to the expansion of US government intervention in markets. Excessive speculation in the economy leads to frequent asset bubbles, volatility and crowding out of investment away from real, productive uses. Excessive speculative activities in derivatives markets can affect spot market prices in the real economy, leading to price uncertainty, which the Chinese state prefers to avoid fomenting in its economy. The 4 largest banks in the world by assets under management are all Chinese SOEs, with the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) leading the way. As of 2023, services contributed to 54% of value added to GDP in China, whilst in the US they contributed to 77% of GDP. The Chinese economy is still based on real, productive industrial capacity more so than the American economy. Due to the over-financialization of the US economy, it is logical for financial markets to play a much greater role in the economy, acting as clearinghouses for wealth transfer in an economy largely based on services. The US stock markets are the biggest, most liquid stock markets in the world. Their function is important within the US imperium – it is the world’s largest wealth transfer mechanism, attracting wealth from all the world’s criminal classes and billionaires, especially those in the West and pro-Western vassals, who recycle and invest ill-gotten gains into American stocks. From the US government perspective, attracting global capital this way allows for soft power projection and the perception of US primacy as useful for the global plutocracy. British-administered Caribbean tax havens work in tandem with the US stock markets to facilitate not only wealth accumulation and preservation, but tax evasion. The US stock markets can also be considered as giant sponges which absorb spare capacity in exported US dollar inflation abroad: in their absence, the US economy would be suffering from hyperinflation. Alongside American stock markets, US capital markets (Treasuries) and the unregulated Eurodollar market serve to further absorb excess US dollar inflation sloshing around the world and in need of a domicile.
The CSI500 is China’s equivalent to the American S&P500 composite stock index. The divergent performances of both indicate their relative importance to each economy. The CSI500 has a relatively more flat performance chart than the S&P500, signifying lower profitability. This is because the stock market in China is not so important to the economy. The private sector does not engage in speculative activities in the same way as the private sector does so in the US. Many Chinese investors and traders prefer to conduct such activities in US financial markets instead. Stocks in the US are a strategic asset for the Western Oligarchy, a tool for lessening inflationary impacts (stocks are not counted in the CPI basket) and a source of American soft power. Often, American ruling classes like to gauge the health of the US economy by the performance of its stock market. Such comparisons are red herrings however: foreigners own over 35% of US stocks and the remaining 65% of stocks held by Americans are not reflective of the vast majority of the population since only 10% of American households own 90% of stocks. For China, such concerns are simply not relevant at the present moment. The Chinese stock market is less mature than its American counter-part, still over-regulated and less liquid. Most participants come from the retail market, while in the US most participants hail from the institutional market. The Politburo does not hold speculative activities in the economy in high regard, it prefers to increase the wealth of the middle and working classes rather than rent-seekers. Rent-seeking behavior is central to the US economy, with private oligopolies owning the bulk of natural monopolies and infrastructure, while in China the state takes ownership of said enterprises. Why introduce non-productive activity and volatility in China’s markets when Chinese investors can game the American system instead?
The American imperium provides the US ruling classes unique advantages that China does not yet have – dominant reserve currency status and an influential financial system. By blackmailing the world into providing an artificially high demand for its currency, the US avoids punishment and consequences for reckless deficit spending where most countries would suffer from collapsing exchange rates and credit ratings. The US is thus able to print its currency and invoice purchases with the rest of the world without any exchange rate risk because it has spent the last 80 years perfecting a giant racketeering scam which ensures artificially strong demand for its currency irrespective of its reckless monetary and foreign policy. Even China has piggybacked off this system by maintaining a fixed exchange rate regime against the US dollar, in what is undoubtedly a mercantilist posture. China has accumulated a vast reserve portfolio of US Treasuries, – US debt instruments, keeping the Renminbi undervalued to boost its exports. The 2020s has seen China liquidate a significant portion of its US Treasuries in anticipation of future trade wars, sanctions and the weaponization of the US dollar system as shown by the recent Russian experience. At some stage, the Politburo will have to float the Renminbi and no longer rely on reserves of US Treasury holdings. This will be a time when China decouples from the US and relinquishes its mercantilist posture. The Renminbi will then strengthen and consume a greater share of the global reserve currency pool.
In the US, the parasites in question are groupings of unproductive rent-seeking policy influencers living on the backs of the productive class, – individuals which clump together into nepotistic power factions, each with their own ideological resonances, think tanks and media outlets. They use crony corporate connections to extract rents from the economy, and are masterful ‘crisis actors’, taking advantage of social and economic turmoil to consolidate their wealth. The 2019 Global Pandemic saw US billionaires increase their wealth by 70% thanks to carefully placed investments in Big Pharma and Biotech stocks well ahead of time, and coupled with the collapse of small businesses and the commercial office market, allowed them to buy assets on the cheap. The aim in general, was to juice as much wealth out of the empire for themselves and their cronies as much as possible. Wealth disparity figures in the US show evidence of such a hollowing out: the top 10% own over 90% of all stocks and the top 1% own over 35% of wealth. The factions rotate their influence over American politics and enrich themselves in the process, using several ways. The first way is using a monopolistic ‘Uniparty’ system pretending to be a ‘2 Party System’. Much effort and resources are wasted on staged charades and political kayfabe, where Democrat and Conservative parties pretend to be at odds with each other to divide and conquer the American population in what amounts to a tweedle dee and tweedle dum politico-entertainment complex. In actual fact, both parties are far more identical in policy – their major ‘differences’ are often exaggerated by the ‘Fourth Estate’ – the mainstream media. One only needs to observe how ‘bipartian’ both parties become when it comes to all things relating to support of Zionism, foreign policy imperialism and crony-corporatism.
The ‘Fourth Estate’ in America no longer serves a genuine node in the vaunted ‘separation of powers’ – in effect, the American-Jewish owned mainstream media is de facto the semi-official propaganda mouthpiece of the Washingtonian Beltway. Deliberate ‘leaks’ and ‘scoops’ are often transmitted through favored media corporations to sway domestic and foreign policy-making and debates, with the help of internal intelligence agency plants, commonly editors and ‘journalists’ in said media corporations. Often, CNN, Axios, New York Times, Financial Times, Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal are used in this way. The other way American politicians are incentivized to enrich themselves and at the same time, peddle ‘influence’, – a common characteristic in the American system, is the nature of ‘pay-to-play’ in the American system. This is a system of institutionalized bribery and entrenched corporate lobbying otherwise known as ‘campaign finance’. Politicians including presidential candidates, House representatives and Senators, take ‘donations’ from private lobbyists. Behind closed doors they become purchased and blackmailed, ‘selected’ before they become ‘elected’. Nepotism and cronyism are both common to the Chinese and American systems. In the American system, the design is geared to prioritize private interests – often in direct conflict with national welfare, with everybody in the ‘influence chain’ squeezing out unbridled cuts of wealth for themselves, politicians and corporate donors alike. China’s system prioritizes the self-preservation of the CPC and national welfare above grotesque personal enrichment, striving to instill discipline among party members. CPC officials make their money mostly with official salaries and gifts stemming from political favors given to SOEs.
In China, corruption operates within a system where parts all move in the same direction; towards the national welfare of the Chinese state and civilization. The prime motive for the CPC is to steadily steer the Chinese behemoth in a way which seeks an egalitarian distribution of wealth among its large population and keeps all moving parts in its complex economy developing in harmony as much as possible. This is no easy feat and a very serious task at hand. Additionally, the CPC regards China as a responsible international power in the global economy, by lifting the tide for all, all boats can rise and grow together. No country in the world has lifted so many people of poverty, – hundreds of millions in merely decades, as China has. China’s miracle, according to the CPC, is to be shared with the world. The US on the other hand, prefers to lift itself up by keeping others down. A winner-take-all approach is instead favored: US elites do not hide the fact that they seek one-way deals with their partners, overwhelmingly favoring American interests ahead of non-American interests. The American view of the world is one where non-American interests are not respected or regarded on equal terms with American interests.
This is where the Chinese attitude in foreign affairs outshines the American attitude. Strategic empathy, strategic patience and mutual respect are lacking among American foreign policy cliques, especially after 1991. Sovereignty is even construed as a threat to American interests for the every fact that foreign governments can dare to prioritize their own national welfare above that of Western vulture corporations. This is unfortunately the nature of interventionist imperialism and predatory corporate Capitalism – there is always a need for ‘prey’ to be devoured. In America, personal enrichment is incentivized and rewarded above any over-arching nationalist interests. Personal enrichment inevitably promotes a short-sighted and unstable system, with various factions pulling in all sorts of directions, successive administrations undoing legislation and policy from their predecessors to the point of counter-productive stasis. While the prime motive seems to always be corporate wealth accumulation and preservation, the unstable and chaotic nature of policy-making in the US stands in stark contrast to the steadiness of policy-making in China. China’s system is undoubtedly not only more stable, but relatively more rational and mature.
In America, its plutocracy views ‘democracy’ as a tool and as an investment: they spend a large upfront sum of cash purchasing political officials, then expect quid pro quos and preferential treatment for their favored private corporations if elected, recouping many times their initial investments. Corporate lobbyists, representing private interests, frequently write government legislation and policy. They are known in the Beltway as ‘K-street’ and hold a much stronger sway over the daily lives of Americans than the representatives the American people vote for. The Washingtonian Beltway favors ‘lawfare’ as a weapon and is over-saturated with lawyers. In addition to that, spies, business and international relations graduates from Ivy Leagues are most commonly found in the Beltway. American political officials are incentivized to make personal gains within the American political system. Often, they make much more wealth than official salaries suggest. This can be due to various nepotistic and crony practices of the corrupt American system, which unlike China’s, does nothing to instill self-control and discipline among insiders. Insider trading for example, is legal for Congress members. Congress members often invest in the very corporations they work for, making large profits trading stocks in anticipation of announcements and mergers to which they are privy to. Defense industry stocks are an all-time favorite investment for American Beltway insiders – war mongering is one of the most profitable industries in the US especially for Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin stocks. Other routes to personal enrichment include involvement in setting up personal foundations – the Clinton and Bill Gates foundation come to mind. Revolving door politics offers political insiders opportunities to score highly paid gigs in the corporate sector, leveraging off their intimate knowledge of inner government workings. Of course, any working knowledge of government regulations will be used to benefit corporate employers in skirting around them. It is not unusual for the head of the SEC to revolve into the banking industry or the head of the FDA to revolve into Big Pharma. Such cozy intertwining between private and public among political officials highlights the corporate Fascist nature of the American system, where the state serves the private sector. Personal enrichment can also come to American political officials through the ‘pay-to-play’ system, but there are nuances. Active law-makers – Senators and House representatives – cannot conduct official foreign lobbying. However, if they are no longer serving, they can register themselves as ‘foreign agents’, taking payments from foreign lobbies in exchange for pushing their interests at the Beltway. Since 2000, it has been found that at least 90 former member of Congress were paid foreign agents for almost 90 countries. AIPAC is curiously excluded from being regarded as a foreign agency thanks to the deep Zionist infiltration of America. Israel is the greatest beneficiary of unofficial foreign lobbying in America. China too uses the American ‘pay-to-play’ system and is the greatest beneficiary of official foreign lobbying in America, spending over $400 million since 2016. The corporate marionettes in the Senate and House merely rubber stamp legislation and policy, – they do not draft legislation and policy themselves – that is the work of private corporate lobbyists. In China, the National People’s Congress (NPC) and Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) legislate laws. There are no private corporate interests sneaking preferential treatment in bills at the expense of Chinese state interests. The people and welfare of America always come second place to private interests. In China, the reverse is true.
In China, there is no ‘campaign finance’, no ‘pay-to-play’ and private corporate lobbyists do not write legislation or policy. There is no Zionist infestation, no pretenses of ‘elections’ and no sudden appearances out of the blue, of murky political figures. The CCP or CPC as it is currently known, commands almost 100 million members and it takes a long proven track record of governance and experience, to be able to rise to the top and compete for upper echelon positions. The overall structure to the Chinese CPC is pyramidal and authoritarian, with strong base level support. The CPC is led by the National Congress, a plenary meeting held every 5 years. During the plenum, the Congress votes for candidates within the party including members of the Central Committee. The CPC adheres to mandatory retirement ages and members who are not promoted within the party based on meritocratic achievements will generally reach termination in their careers. The Central Committee is the highest executive organ of the CPC when the National Congress is not in session and convenes at least once per annum to decide on policy matters. There are 205 members and 171 alternative members in the Central Committee. Drafting 5 year plans is often the remit of the Central Committee, with final approval given by the National Congress. The Central Committee in turn elects a Politburo, including the General Secretary of the CPC, to report to the Central Committee, consisting of the highest executive decision-makers within the CPC. The cadence of meetings for the Politburo is more frequent, with monthly meetings held to discuss policy changes and often, foreign affairs. The outer Politburo consists of 24 members. Within the outer Politburo lies an inner Politburo, – the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC). The PSC consists of the 7 most powerful members in the wider Politburo, including the General Secretary. They are in effect the most powerful men in the CPC and China. Their decisions are often binding with the force of law, which is why PSC meetings are closely monitored by Western officials. The General Secretary of the CPC is the highest position in the Chinese government. The Central Committee and the Politburo decide China’s policies and laws, while the State Council led by the Premier, runs the day-to-day administrative duties of the Chinese government. The Premier is the second highest position in the Chinese government and is perceived to be the manager of the economy. Many administrative councils, commissions and some SOEs are managed by the Premier’s State Council.
The Chinese system champions itself on meritocracy and stability, producing strong leadership with long term forward horizons, in order to implement ambitiously complex and multifaceted socioeconomic plans that only the Chinese state can successfully pull off. Unlike America, where the feature of the system is churning out presidential candidates who dance to private interests and are easily corruptible, a reasonable presidential candidate emerging from the American system is a once-in-a-blue-moon event – a bug in the US system. The short cycle of American elections does not favor quality control over candidates, it instead favors short term thinking, high turnover in policy and a fair amount of bickering. Election campaigns produce crass soundbites and low IQ public debate that skirts around the important issues, pandering to the lowest common denominator, 3 syllable sloganeering, over-emotional and costly advertisement charades and incessant dishonesty. To an outside observer, it would appear that the American system is a loud, boisterous system that thrives off publicizing its dramas and problems. The Chinese system is the exact opposite, opting instead for quietly resolving dramas and problems behind closed doors and minimizing public spectacles. The American system is a gerontocracy with no upper limits on age in the House and Senate, while the Politburo has a 68 year upper limit on top positions. Informally, aspiring Politburo officials retire around 65 if they fail to reach the ministry.
Where The Showdown Is Heading
From the Marxist-Leninist view, Capitalism ultimately commits suicide and tends towards monopolist, rent-seeking behavior, exploitation and ultimately imperialism. The Marxist-Leninist diagnosis of Capitalism here is quite accurate. What it failed to grasp however, was that the anti-Capitalist revolution would not begin in industrialized economies as it predicted. Instead, it arose out of the agrarian economies of Russia and China. There were theories which alleged that Western industrialists and intelligence agents, namely from Germany, Britain and America, supported Lenin and Marx as agents to subvert Tsarist Russia. Marx and Engels were after all, German-born but spent most of their intellectual years in England and hailed from wealthy Capitalist families, alongside notable British socialists like John Ruskin for example. The main crux of Marxism was that Capitalism caused social tension between the proletariat (workers) and the bourgeoisie (ruling class) because of the exploitative nature of the bourgeoisie, which arose out of their monopolistic control over the means of production in the wake of the first and second industrial revolutions in England, which Marx and Engels witnessed first-hand during the mid-to-late 19th century. At the same time in America, the ‘robber-baron’ era was unleashing exploitation and ‘wild west’ social tensions in American society as wealthy industrialists amassed wealth using unscrupulous practices. Mao Zedong and the CCP were inspired from Marx, Lenin and Stalin. China was always too big for Western style democracy. Socialism’s greatest success has been China, but there is a nuance to that assertion. The period from the ‘Great Leap Forward’ until Mao’s death was generally considered disastrous for China. It was only under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping from 1978 onward that ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ steered China onto a stable, prosperous path and ultimately towards over-taking the US economy.
It is noteworthy to point out that many American Capitalist plutocrats, from the likes of the Rockerfellers to more recently, the Soros financial empire and many wealthy Democrat donors, have been avid donors and backers of Socialist movements and Socialist group-think, both at home and abroad. Some domestic movements within the US includes the Black Panthers and Antifa. Why might this seemingly contradictory stance be pursued by supposed ‘Capitalists’? The short answer is that Western Capitalist Oligarchs are actually anti-Capitalists. Seeking to entrench monopolistic positions is by definition against free market principles, and this is what these people stand for. They are merely confidence tricksters, who hide behind ‘Capitalism’ but subsist behind crony Capitalism or Socialism-for-the-rich i.e. privatizing profits and socializing losses. America is built on myths and pretenses of free markets and Capitalism. It should be also stated that any individual which accumulates billions in any currency seldom does it with honesty and hard work: it is almost exclusively a job of nepotism and corruption. Elon Musk, George Soros, Larry Fink, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos have all amassed their wealth either through family inheritances, collusion with government power or a combination of both. There is a pervasive myth in American society that they lived the ‘American Dream’ and attained billionaire status through hard work. This is a dangerous delusion, somewhat similar to the thinking that if one voted for a billionaire like Donald Trump, he would look out for the little guys. Well-placed insiders in the US often use cozy connections with lobbyists and political ‘representatives’ to wield US legislative machinery against their competition in order to carve out monopolies for their businesses.
This is where China differs with the US – China does not allow its Oligarchs to run amok and use government resources to suppress competition. In the US, this is extremely common, so common in fact, that it goes well beyond a sport, – it is an elite art. Private interests in the US all too often exploit US government power and its various imperial machinery – financial and military, to cut down competition at home and abroad for the interests of private corporations, uber alles. We see this base behavior behind many orchestrated conflicts, in Ukraine for example, where Blackrock investments are protected by Western military assets and proxies. The true face behind American pretenses of ‘democracy’ and ‘Capitalism’ is actually cold and ruthless Fascism – the marriage of corporate power with government power. This is why Western ‘Capitalists’ support Socialism – they strive for totalitarian control, and they would happily mislead Socialists in the West and abroad to encourage bloc confrontation and domestic social unrest to scare the Western middle class into supporting more government – to realize the ultimate dream of totalitarian control over all aspects of society. There is very little difference between Socialism and Fascism in their methods. Western ‘Capitalists’ will happily support Socialism, – so long as they do not get off the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ stage. Expect Western societies to become much less free in the coming years.
Today in 2024, China and the US have mutually decreased FDI to their respective countries, indicating a decoupling at play. The Anglo-American imperialist ‘Five Eyes’ cartel has declared China as the biggest threat to their imperial interests, alarmed at China’s rapid advancement in technological and military spheres, the expansion of its cyber and espionage capability and its growing global clout and alliance with other anti-imperial nations like Russia, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela. As Anglo-American policy-makers are trapped in their own sense of entitlement, they inevitably fall towards a Thucydides Trap with China and the rogue province of Taiwan will see a coming clash where a Chinese victory will be all but inevitable, given the mainland’s superior logistics and proximity to the province. The Americans have already began to slowly onshore Taiwan’s semi-conductor chips factories to the US mainland in anticipation of a Chinese takeover. However, the Chinese elite does not under-estimate the ruthlessness of the Anglo-American imperial machine and the potential damage it can cause to China’s economy – the golden goose of its legitimacy with the Chinese people. China is stockpiling critical imports ahead of time when prices tend to be favorable – gas, oil, minerals and chips included. Deepening political, economic and social links with multilateral organizations such as BRI, BRICS+ and SCO serve as an insurance policy towards any economic assault from America and its servile imperial vassals, by locking in business contracts and trade agreements to sustain continuity in trade turnover and buffering against potential losses due to sanctions and attempted embargoes. Legally, the ‘Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law’ serves as a tit-for-tat weapon in its arsenal to counter coming waves of American sanctions by introducing its own long arm jurisdiction and secondary sanctions mechanism. Militarily, China is pressing ahead mercilessly with its buildup in naval assets, set to overtake the US blue water navy by gross tonnage and vessel numbers as soon as the early 2030s, to effectively stymie any potential naval blockades. In addition, an expansion of nuclear arsenals to over 1000 warheads by the 2030s serves to stifle American nuclear posturing – this is likely done in coordination with Russia and North Korea to form a nuclear protection umbrella over the bulk of Eurasia.
What the US is doing on its end is also a military buildup in and around Taiwan and fostering regional anti-China alliances using easily corruptible governments especially in the Philippines, Australia, South Korea and Japan. Levying massive tariffs on Chinese goods and eventually a sanctions attack to hurt the Chinese export-based economy is already underway, aiming to ‘correct’ the US-China trade imbalance, at least on paper. Various fiscal initiatives such as the ‘Chips Act’ and ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ serve to resuscitate America’s broken industrial base and ‘friendshoring’ supply chains away from China to other jurisdictions such as India, Vietnam and Indonesia is being done in the name of reducing risks for the US. The war in Ukraine could also be viewed from the prism of great power competition, an extreme form of brutality to smash and grab the European economy away from China and Russia, essentially reducing it to an appendage of the American economy so that the US can position itself as more ‘competitive’ against China.
In reality however, many of the American initiatives are being cleverly blunted by China. Europe has been reduced to servicing both American and Chinese economies, as its industrial base gets cannibalized by both superpowers. Europe will likely revert at some point in the future when enough brains awaken, back to relying on cheap and reliable Russian energy. There is absolutely no economic sense to be importing LNG from the US which is anywhere from 3-10 times more expensive than Russian piped gas – for this was precisely the reason for the NATO terrorist attack against the Nordstream II pipeline in the first place. American attempts at ‘friendshoring’ to Vietnam instead of China has not benefited the US in any way, in fact, it has benefited Vietnam tremendously, hardly an ‘America-first’ policy. China and Vietnam have a free trade agreement, so China can cheaply export its good to Vietnam first and then to the US. The process only adds one more node in the trade chain and Vietnam shares a border with China. The US economy is not very competitive and its industrial base is too broken and neglected despite various fiscal policies and investment pledges to build factories. In order to compete with China in a meaningful way, the entire chain of supply needs to remain cost-competitive as costs are cumulative along the supply chain. China has a superior education system, its SOE’s receive tax exemptions and subsidies that go much further than those in the US system, due to full alignment with Chinese strategic goals, not the short-sighted and capricious desires of Oligarchs and their special interest groups, who act as parasites. But above all, the entire Chinese system works in the same general direction – for the benefit of China and its people. The same cannot be said of the US system.