China becomes the Global Economic Power Part 2 (of a 3 Part Series)

Should China succeed, the U.S. would lose its ‘magic weapon’ of monetary dominance.

For the United States, it is fundamentally an economic defeat. The sanctions policy showed that the financial power of the West was not omnipotent. The Americans were reminded of the fragility of their military industry. The people at the Pentagon know very well that one of the limits to their action is the limited capacity of the American military-industrial complex. That America is in the midst of a serious revolution, right now – easily comparable to the end of the USSR – is understood by a few. Yet our preconceptions – political and intellectual – often prevent us from seeing and assimilating the import of this reality. The reality of the prospect of U.S. economic ‘defeat’ was clearly spelled out by Paul Volcker, former chair of the Federal Reserve, when he said that what holds the entire globalist system together had been the massive flow of capital from abroad – running to more than $3 billion every working day – that sustained America’s comfortable, low inflationary lifestyle. Today, with the U.S. in an era of unsustainable structural budget deficits, Trump is laser-focused on America’s financial core: The Treasury bond market (America’s lifeline) and the stock market (America’s wallet). Both are fragile. And any external pressure could trigger a chain reaction: in short, America is no longer confident in its own financial fortress. And China is no longer playing by the old rules. This isn’t just a trade war — it’s a war for the future of global finance. This is the reason Trump threatens war on anyone seeking to supplant or bypass the U.S. dollar trading monopoly. Trump’s “reciprocal tariffs” therefore were never about balancing trade. What they amount to is an attempt to restructure creditors. “It’s what you do in bankruptcy”. The demands for greater contributions from NATO states is precisely an exercise in demanding creditor revenue – as was Trump’s Gulf trip a. The purpose of the New Cold War primordially consists in choking off China’s rise. This aim effectively represents common ground amongst all factions of the Establishment – protecting the dollar system from collapse. The notion of the U.S. recovering its former position as a world-class manufacturing center is largely a diversion narrative crafted for domestic purposes. In 1950, the U.S. manufacturing labor force made up 33.7 percent of the domestic economy – a figure that has dwindled to less than 8.4 percent today. To revert would take a generational shift.

In this context, the pursuit of a New Cold War against China precisely is centered on U.S. anxiety – primarily the China’s building of a digital ‘super highway’ for money will prove to be much more advanced than the rickety road that is the American dollar road. Today that super-wide highway may not be so widely used. That’s now. But already there is a migration from the old road to the Chinese Super highway. For the American Establishment-and its head, the Rockefeller Empire – the Chinese ‘super-highway’ constitutes a ‘clear and present’ danger to its hegemony. The anxiety is not really about Chinese intellectual property or ‘IP theft’. It is the fear that the U.S. cannot keep up with the new financial ecosystems being constructed by China, or the sophistication of the digital Yuan. This anxiety is aggravated – not least – because the Fintech overlords of Silicon Valley are at daggers drawn with the big Wall Street clearing banks (who want to preserve their antiquated systems). China has the advantage here, as it’s financial and tech sectors are fused, as one. Should China succeed, the U.S. would lose its ‘magic weapon’ of monetary dominance: And here is the ‘revolution’: No fireworks, no Western headlines. Just one quiet early morning in Beijing where the dollar’s crown slipped. The world’s financial plumbing just got a reroute—through the China super highway. For the first time ever, China’s CIPS (Cross-Border Interbank Payment System) surpassed SWIFT in single-day transaction volume. A red banner flashed across Bank of China’s HQ at 1:30AM on April 16, 2025. CIPS processed a jaw-dropping ¥12.8 trillion RMB in just one day—roughly $1.76 trillion USD. That volume, if verified, overtakes the greenback-dominated SWIFT system in sheer daily cross-border throughput. Yes – It’s all about money.

China’s Mineral Export Ban Disrupts US & Industrial Supply Chain

China’s export restrictions on rare earths delay US weapons systems, drive up costs, and expose the Pentagon’s reliance on Chinese critical minerals. China’s escalating restrictions on are causing widespread disruptions across the US defense industry, with some weapons manufacturers reporting months-long delays in production and soaring material costs. With China producing around 90% of the world’s rare earths, the price of some materials has surged. Even major defense contractors like Lockheed Martin are feeling the pressure. The Pentagon recently agreed to pay $400 million for a stake in MP Materials, operator of the largest rare-earth mine in the Western Hemisphere, to accelerate domestic magnet production for the F-35 and other advanced weapons systems. But such efforts won’t bear fruit for at least another year. More than 80,000 components in US weapons systems depend on critical minerals now restricted by China. Not only in the military-industrial sector, but even car companies in the US are closing down due to a lack of critical inputs from China, along with broken supply chains. China is choosing cooperation while remaining the undisputed leader in the rare earth sector. The US, for its part, has once again been forced to return to the negotiating table due to its strategic shortcomings.

5 China vs. America

Obviously, nothing like this has ever previously happened in the history of the world.The greatest factor behind China’s tremendous success had obviously been the high ability and hard work of the Chinese people, together with the clear competence of their government and its leadership. For decades, international testing has shown that China has the world’s highest average IQ, and this finding has dramatic implications at the top end. The greatest resource was the large number of its highly-intelligent and well-educated citizens. It’s not just Chinese consumers spend less to get same, they actually consumer quite a lot given the nominal per capita GDP is less than 20% of US:

China has the largest global retail goods sales, 20% larger than US, at dollar value without adjusting for purchasing power
China auto sales was 30 million units in 2023 compared with 15 million in the US
13 million residential units were sold in China in 2023 (after 3 years’ negative growth) compared with 4 million sold in the US
China accounts for 30% global luxury goods sales, even in economic downturn, 2X of US
China is the largest outbound tourist country with 200 million outbound trips made a year
China leads the world in sales of mobile phones, LED TV, home electronics, sporting goods and a lot of other consumer goods by a wide margin
China consumers 1/3 of electricity generated in the world, reaching 8000 terawatt hours last year compared with 4000 terawatt hours for the US
China has surpassed the US in per capita daily calorie and protein intake
Chinese life expectancy is 78.6 compared with 77.5 in the US, when 18% of US GDP is in the healthcare sector and 7% in China
Chinese graduates over 5 million STEM college students a year verse 800,000 in the US
Chinese total household debt is $11 trillion vs. $17.8 trillion in the US
Chinese total household savings is $2 trillion vs. $911 billion in the US
According to the Federal Reserve, 40% Americans cannot cover a $400 unexpected expense. I don’t know any comparable number for the Chinese

Based on data, it’s safe to argue Chinese consumers don’t underspend compared with global average or even over-consumption countries like the US. They certainly have a bigger cushion in the form of savings and much less indebted. One difficulty that China currently faced was finding suitable employment for large numbers of its college-educated youths, who are unwilling to work in the factories as so many of their parents had done. Therefore, there are 30 million unfilled manufacturing jobs in the country. As a result, China has the world’s highest adoption of robotics – 50% of all robots sold in the world is in China. Meanwhile, American society has solved this same problem by providing an enormous number of highly-paid service jobs, but it’s unclear whether most of these actually create any net value for the society and economy: The US does produce a lot more service industry jobs (80% GDP) vs. China (55%). There is clearly more bankers, lawyers, accountants, consultants, insurance agents, PR specialists, stock brokers, computer programmers, real estate agents, health workers in the US. As a result, the average American consumes a lot more services offered by these professions. China produces more (manufacturing GDP at 32% GDP) than US (10%). Therefore, Chinese consumers buy a lot and the country also exports a lot.

America’s reigning neoliberal dogma had always maintained that government-owned enterprises were inherently inefficient and uncompetitive, so denouncing China for having many such state-owned enterprises that were successfully outcompeting private Western corporations merely demonstrated the bankruptcy of that ideological framework. The ultimate ownership structure of such companies mattered less than whether the marketplace in which they operated was sufficiently competitive, and in many sectors such widespread competition was far more the case in China than in America: In all these fields, China is pulling ahead or improving faster than the US for a critical reason – the marketplaces are simply more competitive in China. Ownership simply has no effect on enterprise/industry competitiveness.

In the electric automotive sector, the US has one big player Tesla while China has BYD, Cherry, Great Wall, Nio, Xpeng, Li, Huawei, Xiaomi, and dozens more as well as Tesla.
In mobile phones, the US has one single player Apple while China has Huawei, Xiaomi, Honor, Vivo, Oppo, and also Apple and Samsung.
In ecommerce, the US has Amazon (with eBay at a distant No 2 with a fraction of Amazon’s market share) while China has Alibaba, JD, PDD, Douyin/TikTok Shopping and also Amazon and eBay (before they pulled out after losing the competition). Same is true for almost all other critical industries.

The secret of economic success is NOT ownership but rather the presence of competition (i.e. market). Competition leads to intense pressure to innovate, improve quality, and reduce costs. It leads to an expansion of capacity and scale as businesses try to compete and win. It leads to true meritocracy – i.e. may the best player win.

On the other hand, lack of competition leads to monopoly and stagnation as the players underinvest, pursue barriers against competition, and raise margins/prices. You can do an industry by industry analysis for US businesses and find out the level of concentration (thus lack of competition) very easily. The severe consequences of such lack of market competition in America were most obviously apparent in the military sector. One interesting manifestation of the US problem with its monopolistic private sector is its inability to keep up weapons production to support the Ukraine war. Its military industrial complex is plagued with under capacity, high cost, and low efficiency despite having the world’s largest military budget (by an enormous margin). The consolidation of the vaulted military-industrial complex into 5 giants (all of whom are in the Rockefeller orbit) has led to a lack of competition and accountability in most parts of the defense acquisition system. It has led to under capacity and extreme high costs (of course high margins). Today while these private defense contractors boast the highest revenue and market cap globally, the US cannot even produce sufficient basic ammunitions such as 155′ artillery shells let alone missiles, warships, fighters and other sophisticated weapons at scale. If the US cannot outcompete production against Russia, what is its chance against China, the world’s largest industrial powerhouse? China’s “overcapacity” issue is indeed a nightmare for the US.

The headline GDP figures seized upon by Western media outlets failed to consider numerous crucial elements: Ignoring the obvious difference in nominal market exchange GDP vs. Purchasing Power Parity GDP which puts the size of Chinese economy a third bigger than the US already, I have focused only on nominal GDP comparison for simplicity. Here are some interesting factoids I uncovered (everything can be referenced from sources such as Statista, US Bureau of Economic Analysis, and China National Bureau of Statistics):

Imputations: this refers to “economic output” that is NOT traded in the marketplace but assigned a value in GDP calculation. One example is the imputed rental of owner-occupied housing, which estimate how much rent you would have to pay if your own house was rented to you. This value is included in the reported GDP in the US. Another example is the treatment of employer-provided health insurance, which estimates how much health insurance you would pay yourself if it was not provided by employer. Again, this imputation is included in GDP calculation in the US. As of 2023, such imputations account for $4 trillion in US GDP (round 14% of total). In China, imputation to GDP is ZERO because China doesn’t recognize the concept of imputed/implied economic output in its statistics compilation. Too bad your house is not assigned an arbitrary “productive value” once you buy it in China
Construction: in the US, construction contributes to 4% GDP (roughly $1.1 trillion) while in China, construction contributes to 7% GDP (roughly $1.2 trillion). However, China pours the same amount of concrete in 3 years as the US did in the last century. China imported $128 billion worth of iron ore in 2022 and US imported $1.15 billion in 2021. China produced 1.34 billion tons of steel in 2022 vs. 97 million tons by the US in the same year. China built 45,000 km high speed rail in the past decade and US built none. Considering all the ports, highways, bridges, apartment buildings China builds every year vs. the US, the almost identical construction value in GDP seems laughable. This shows the non-sense of comparing US GDP vs. China.
Professional services: services such as law, accounting, tax, insurance, marketing, etc. account for 13% US GDP ($3.5 trillion) while it accounts for 3% Chinese GDP ($0.5 trillion). There are 1.33 million lawyers in the US vs. 650,000 in China; 1.65 million accountants and auditors in the US vs. 300,000 in China; 59,000 CFAs in the US vs. 4,000 in China. 20,000 lobbyists are registered in Washington DC alone while China has no such profession. And of course, the pay for these jobs is much better in the US, ergo the higher GDP value. There are definitely more lawsuits, insurance transactions, annual tax auditing, and congressional lobbying happening in the US vs. China. But it is unclear how that translates into national power.
Manufacturing and services: 38% of Chinese GDP comes from manufacturing and 55% from services. In the US, 11% and 88% respectively. Very literally, China is a much more productive force of “hard goods” while US is a post-industrial economy tilted overwhelmingly as a “soft goods” producer. If the day comes for a hot war between the two countries, China is far better prepared for a hard power confrontation.As an example of the ridiculous factors behind these misleading Western GDP statistics, we point out some of the items that the British had chosen to include in their own GDP: I refer to a Financial Times report just for a laugh. In 2014, UK started to include prostitution and illegal drugs in its GDP reporting to the tune of 10 billion pounds a year. This raised the reported UK GDP by 5% in an effort to help the government raise its debt ceiling.To derive at this number, the statistics bureau had to make some assumptions: “The ONS breakdown estimates that each of the UK’s estimated 60,879 prostitutes took about 25 clients a week in 2009, at an average rate of £67.16. It also estimates that the UK had 38,000 heroin users, while sales of the drug amounted to £754m with a street price of £37 a gram.”

Thus, Western economists have adopted a bizarre framework in which rising levels of crime contribute to the official economic measure of national prosperity. The service sector of an economy can be easily manipulated. Certainly many service industries are absolutely legitimate, necessary, and valuable in a modern economy. But that sector can also be artificially inflated without limit by including the output of individuals who spend their days trading meme stocks or crypto currencies back-and-forth, or who hire each other as diversity-coaches. So it is quite enlightening to exclude services and compare the two economies by focusing entirely upon the productive portion of the GDP. The use of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) statistics is much more realistic. If we combine these two approaches, the disparity between the real productive GDP of the two countries turns out to be enormous. We find that the total size of China’s real productive economy—perhaps the most reliable measure of global economic power—is already more than three times larger than that of the U.S. and also growing much more rapidly. Indeed, according to that important economic metric, China now easily outweighs the combined total of the entire American-led bloc—the United States, the rest of the Anglo sphere, the European Union, and Japan— an astonishing achievement, and something very different from what most might assume.

– Deregulation – instead of government providing oversight on businesses so that they adhere to basic rules of consumer protection and product safety, the government delegates such oversight to the businesses they are supposed to regulate. A case in point is Boeing, who issues its own airworthiness certification on behalf of FAA. Similarly, most healthcare legislations are written by lobbyists working for healthcare insurers and big pharm on the Capitol.

– Privatization – according to the same free-market economic philosophies, governments in the west have pursued aggressive privatization of public services and infrastructure with disastrous results – higher prices, poorer services, and job losses. The US government has privatized basic state functions such as prison system and war fighting (e.g. Blackwater mercenaries). The UK government privatized Thames Water, the water utility for greater London, which has led to increased water prices, poorer water quality, lack of maintenance and a variety of other issues for its 13 million customers. Exasperating the situation, private equity is running rampant buying up low-cost housing, nursing homes, medical practices, etc. The highly leveraged buyouts and takeovers have directly contributed to increasing cost of living and reduced services in affected businesses.

– Profit obsession – as stock price becomes the sole criteria to evaluate business performance, executives are focused on cost cutting, outsourcing, and financial engineering (loading up debt or share buybacks) to improve the bottom line. This profit obsession has also led to the kind of management practices as with the railway operators. They have reduced the number of workers per train, increased the railcar length and weight, cut back on maintenance and safety measures and implemented so-called precision scheduled railroading (basically maximizing the hours worked by the staff). The direct result is repeated rail accidents .The US reports 10,000 railway accidents per year, which makes it the worst performing rail safety country in the world behind India.

– Weak leadership – the profit focus of US shareholder capitalism has directly led to the rise of professional managers with background as bean counters rather than engineers or technologists, who barely understand the products of their own companies. As the goals of businesses have increasingly become purely financial, financial engineers are becoming CEOs rather than real engineers. This is what happened to once iconic companies like GE, Intel, and Boeing which all have such financially-oriented CEOs preceding their decline.

Just as China was outperforming America economically, trends also favored China in the technological competition between the two countries. Mr. Wang Huning is the 4^th highest ranked Chinese official and widely acknowledged as the brain trust for the Chinese leadership in the last 3 decades. Mr. Wang pointed out “to surpass the US, you must surpass them in science and technology”. China currently leads in 57 of the 64 technologies in the 5 year period between 2019 and 2023. US leads in 7. There has been a stunning shift of research leadership over the past two decades from the US to China. China led 52 of the 64 technologies in the 5 year period between 2018 and 2022 in the 2023 report; it took the lead in 5 more technologies one year later US led in 60 of the 64 technologies between 2003 and 2007. China led in only 3 of the 64 technologies between 2003 and 2007. The leadership competition for these critical technologies is basically between China and the US. Europe and rest of Asia (Korea, Japan, India, and Singapore) play a secondary role. In most fields, the lead China and US have over the rest of the world is massive. China now leads the world in many of the most important future technologies. The success of its commercial companies in telecommunications is directly built on such R&D prowess. Similarly, the Chinese military’s modernization is built on the massive technological development of the country’s scientific community and its industrial base. With its lead in science and technology research, China is positioned to outcompete the US in both economic and military arenas in the coming years.

During the nineteenth century, China had greatly suffered at the hands of countries with far smaller economies: Closer to home, in 1840, the Qing Dynasty had a GDP that was 6 that of Britain and 20 times of the US. But it lost badly in the Opium War and as a result, China suffered a hundred-year humiliation. China’s economy was much larger than Japan when it lost the Jiawu War (also known as the First Sino-Japanese War) in 1895. It had to cede Taiwan to Japan until 1945 when Japan was defeated in WWII. The brutal reality is China must focus completely on winning the hard power competition with the US. The best outcome is of course winning without fighting a hot war. But that is unlikely to happen as no hegemon in history has chosen to fade without fighting with everything it has. Nothing in US rhetoric and behavior today or its short but violent history in the past gives hope that it wants to pursue co-existence with adversaries, real or imagined, anywhere in the world. It is clear that the US doesn’t want a multipolar world unless forced to live in one.

A War is Coming

For China, Russia, Iran or any other countries who want to remain sovereign, it is a choice between living on your knees and fighting with a stiff spine. The choice taken by the US vassal states in Europe, Asia, Australia, and elsewhere is neither desirable nor practical. So, whether we want it or not, things are coming down to a life-or-death fight, most likely in less than a decade. Given these serious concerns, we summarize some of China’s major advances in military technology. An incomplete list of the more noteworthy weapons includes

China test launched its DF31AG ICBM successfully last month, making it the only country with a successful recent test performance in long-range (12,000 kilometer) nuclear attack capability. China also has DF41 in its arsenal, a Mach 25 18,000 km hypersonic ballistic missile that carries 6 times more nuclear warheads than DF31. These, together with submarine-launched JL-3, serve as a strong deterrent to US nuclear blackmail.
China 5th-gen stealth heavy fighter J20 has upgraded its engine with WS15. It now outperforms F22 (let alone the smaller F35) in speed, maneuverability, and longer beyond-visual-range air to air missile (PL17). Its stealth, avionics, radar, EW capability, speed, range, and firepower far exceeds F35, a medium-size jack-of-all-trades cheaper fighter which is now the main aerial combat platform for the US. China produces 100 J20s a year and the US has stopped producing F22 due to its high cost. China has fielded multiple hypersonic missile systems such as DF17, DF26, DF100, YJ21– , while US has yet to field any, falling behind not just China and Russia but also Iran in this critical future military technology. Russia shocked the west with its hypersonic Oreshnik, while the Oreshnik is still an experimental weapon, China’s DF17 or DF26 are mature systems tested many times over the years and have been deployed in the Rocket Force for half a decade. China has conducted twice more hypersonic missile tests in the past decade than all other countries combined.
On the naval front, US Navy openly acknowledges China’s ship building capacity is 230 times of that of the US. The US Navy is now resorting to outsourcing navy ship building and maintenance to Korea and India.
China can produce conventional precision-guided rockets at the same unit cost (USD4-5000) as US builds dumb artillery ammos like the 155mm shells. China’s defense budget has a 3 or 4 to 1 advantage against the US in procurement value for money. Given its industrial base, China can not only produce more cheaply but in much larger volume as well. As we can see in Ukraine and the Middle East, quantity has a quality of its own when it comes to high intensity modern warfare. In a hot war, the cost exchange and quantity exchange will heavily favor China.
China is the only country in the world that can mass produce CL-20, the most destructive non-nuclear explosives. Imagine CL-20 explosive warhead on DF17 in an attack on US aircraft carrier – a hit translates into 5000+ KIAs and $14 billion capital asset excluding aircrafts on board. The much-acclaimed “mother of all bombs” that the US dropped on the hapless Afghanis will pale next to that meteorite strike.
China’s PHL16 multiple launcher rocket system is a high mobility high precision attack platform similar to HIMARS but it has a range of 500 KMs vs. 300 km for HIMARS with higher payloads and higher precision (guided by the Beidou satellite system, which is itself far superior to the outdated GPS system the US military relies on). Unlike the HIMARS system which is treated as a scare miracle weapon by the west, China has deployed the PHL16 system to more than 40 army battalions in 4 provinces close to Taiwan. PHL16 alone can conduct blanket precision strikes on any point in Taiwan on road-mobile TELs. The Chinese call such cheap saturation strike weapon as “all-you-can-eat buffet” in a Taiwan pre-landing bombing campaign.6 new unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs), – including three tailless full-stealth models; all 6 are expected to serve alongside manned fighter jets as AI-powered loyal wingmen. In comparison, the US has yet to field its first collaborate combat aircraft (CCA) despite having announced such a plan years ago
2 XLUUVs: HSU100, AXJ002 super-sized unmanned submarines for deep sea surveillance, patrol, and attack. Comparisons are made with the Russian Poseidon system. Assorted unmanned weapons from unmanned battle tanks, drones, robotic dogs, to unmanned surface combat ships and submarine-hunting helicopters
3 directed energy weapons (DEWs): LY-01 ship borne air defense laser, a truck-mounted laser weapon against drones and missiles, and a microwave weapon system against drone swarms.
China also showcased its “nuclear triad” for the first time with the air-launched JL-1, submarine-launched JL-3, road-mobile DF-61 and DF-31BJ, and silo-based DF-5C ICBM. These nuclear ballistic missiles can cover the entirety of continental US.

Interesting, many of China’s superstar weapons displayed in the last military parade in 2019 to celebrate the 70^th anniversary of the founding of PRC were absent from the Sept 3 parade. The fact that none of them made an encore shows the rapid progress in weapon system upgrades. It is hardly an exaggeration to say a military conflict is a high probability event between China and the US in the coming decade. There are flash points in the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea and the East China Sea.Rhetoric from the American officialdom and media clearly signals the US plans to militarily confront China and stop its economic, trade, and technological developments. Its fleets of ships and airplanes are constantly circling Chinese shore. It is mobilizing its lackeys in the region to fight on its side. This won’t be a WWI type of sleepwalking into a war. Everyone knows a showdown is coming. Let us now focus upon the industrial factors that were likely to dominate such a conflict, and China’s strong superiority in that regard:

The Ukraine war and the Middle Eastern conflicts have shown that modern wars between peer belligerents will be long, bloody, expensive, and above all, highly dependent on war production and logistics.
China has a 3 to 1 advantage versus the US in overall industrial capacity and an unquantifiable advantage in surge capacity. China’s share of global manufacturing output is 35% vs. 12% for the US. China has idle or mothballed capacity for almost all major industrial products from steel to electronics to vehicles to ship building to drones.
Such capacity advantage applies to the defense industry.
Much of Chinese industrial capacity is state-owned and can be easily mobilized for defense production. All major defense firms are state owned and produce for purpose, rather than profit.
China’s cost, speed, and scale advantages in industrial production are not in dispute while the US suffers from well-documented cost and production schedule issues in its military industrial complex.
It’s safe to say China enjoys the same pole position in its capacity to sustain a long war as the US enjoyed in WWII. China has an overwhelming industrial superiority that the US has never experienced with any adversaries in its history.
The war will be fought in China’s shores or near abroad – possibly Japan and the Philippines. Much of the action will happen in a radius that can be covered by Chinese intermediate range missiles and land-based bombers and fighters.
The nearest US territory will be Guam, 4,800 kilometers away. The US does have military bases in Japan, Korea and the Philippines. But these countries will take the risk of being bombarded by China if they allow these bases to be used against China. One can talk tough now but act quite differently when facing certain destruction.
In essence, the war will be one between a landed fortress and an expeditionary air and maritime force. For most of the history of war, ships lose to fortress. All of America’s many wars since World War II have been fought against technically inferior opponents against whom the US military possessed enormous superiority and could operate with near total impunity. However none of these US military assumptions apply in a war with China and will be a liability rather than asset. The muscle memory of the US military will be deadly to itself in the coming war.
Chinese military doctrines have been honed for the last 70+ years around territorial defense and Taiwan reunification. The explicit mission of the PLA is to ensure the success of a war in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea.
The specific war doctrine for these scenarios is called Anti Access Area Denial (A2AD). The essence is to deny enemy access to the theater of war and inflict unacceptable losses for any intervention.
These assets bear no resemblance of anything the US military has fought against before. China’s national support for a war fought so close to its own homeland would be enormously greater than America’s ideological commitment to its continued imperial adventure more than six thousand miles away in East Asia.
One often overlooked aspect of war is the will to fight. It comes down to why the military is putting their lives on the line. In a peer to peer situation, the party that can endure the most pain for the longest will prevail.
China is fighting for its territorial integrity and its national pride. It has the collective will of the population firmly behind it. The US is fighting to maintain its hegemonic rule in an imperialist adventure. The pain threshold of its society is much lower. Put it bluntly, China is much more casualty tolerant than the US will ever be in a war at China’s door step.
Cost of failure calculation differs completely. For the Chinese, losing a war is an existential threat. No government can hope to retain its legitimacy if it backs down from a war when the barbarians are at the gate. For the US, it’s just a chess board move in the “great game”. Losing a war in Taiwan or SCS is a setback but doesn’t represent an existential problem.

Finally, America’s own military track record over the last three generations had hardly been impressive:

The US has a very spotty track record in wars after WWII despite having a military budget that dwarfs the rest of the world. It practically lost every war except the 1991 first gulf war against Iraq.
Interestingly, China was the first country that broke the US string of military successes when China pushed the US back from the Yalu River to the 38^th Parallel and fought the US and its allies to a standstill in the Korean peninsula in the early 1950s.
China did that when it had to send a poorly equipped peasant army after 4 years’ bloody civil war. China’s GDP in that time was less than 5% of the US, which was at the pinnacle of its military and economic power after WWII.

Therefore it is very difficult to disagree with the ultimate conclusion: When you consider the capacity for war, the geography, the will to fight, the military doctrines and the two countries’ track record against each other, it is an easy bet who will prevail in the next war.

Xi destroys Western corruption and Neo – Liberalism in China

Chinese President Xi Jinping had successfully established his personal authority in China to an unprecedented extent, sidelining all his potential Communist Party rivals and making himself the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao. Xi also managed to remove the reelection term limits for his office and although he is now 69, his father lived to 88 while his mother is still alive at 96, so he could still remain China’s paramount leader through the 2020s and into the 2030s. Anti-corruption, Poverty reduction and common prosperity, RI – the belt and road initiate, Made in China 2025;Prioritize science and technology, Pollution and safety, Military reform, Crackdown on tech monopolies;Burst the housing bubble, Cultural and civilizational revival.

The first item on the list was the anti-corruption drive that Xi launched soon after beginning his leadership in 2013. Chinese corruption had reached huge levels at that point and was widely regarded as the country’s biggest problem. But Xi then launched a massive anti-corruption drive in which huge numbers of officials were punished: When Xi took the helm in 2013, the country suffered from a deep-rooted severe corruption problem at all levels. Corruption was named as the single most critical issue facing the country. Xi has run the longest anti-corruption campaign in Chinese history (ongoing to this day). In his first 5 years, over 1 million officials from national to local government, state-owned companies, banks, and military were prosecuted and punished. More vice-minister and above level officials were removed and prosecuted in the 5 years than the previous 60 combined.The average Chinese citizen expressed great satisfaction over such widespread punishment of corrupt officials, which seemed perfectly plausible.

Chinese corruption is retail, individual and punishable Xi made the issue his No. 1 domestic policy priority when he took power in 2013 and hasn’t taken his foot off the brake to date. Xi’s corruption drive took down hundreds of thousands of officials at national and local government level, including members of Politburo, defense ministers, foreign minister, railroad minister, provincial governors, and mayors of major cities, bank CEOs, state owned company executives, military procurement officials, hospital administrators and countless others.
On the other hand, such corruption is legalized and therefore protected. Such corruption is not even recognized as prima facie corruption. In the US, corruption is wholesale and institutionalized. As a result, American corruption is systemic, wholesale, and unreformable. It is large scale, open, risk free, and unaccountable. There is no shame involved. In the US, corruption carries very high rewards and a strange sort of “honor”.

Xi’s famous statement that “houses are for people to live in, not for speculation” is exactly the sort of sensible idea that American officials should have followed prior to our own 2008 financial collapse. Xi put an end to property speculation and deflated the housing bubble. Western nihilist liberalism took root among many so-called intellectuals. Many became openly subservient to western values and interests. Some started to advocate them blindly without understanding. As the west led by the US started to confront China’s rise, these societal changes, if unchecked, represented a significant internal weakness that could be exploited to damage China’s interest and advance our adversaries’. The riots in Hong Kong were a case in point. The west desperately wanted to exploit any internal weaknesses and polarization to promote color revolution and regime sabotage as part of their long-practiced playbook. Therefore, Xi and his leadership team began strongly pushing back against these potentially dangerous Western cultural influences and had instead promoted traditional Chinese culture, very much like Russian President Vladimir Putin had been doing in his own country for similar reasons. As a result, Chinese consumers now increasingly favored their own traditional literature rather than that advocated by leading Western cultural figures and domestic films rather than those produced by Hollywood.

The story continues in Part 3.