The Great Wall of China was built over hundreds of years to fortify China against the risk of invasion of outsiders. Protecting against the outside world, whilst maintaining control of the population, is standard procedure for whoever rules the lands of China.
The wall effectively runs along the northern border of China, which is shared with Mongolia. Over the years, whomever was sitting in the driver’s seat of China, constructed additional segments to this fortification to beef it up and give themselves a greater sense of security and control.
Under the rule of President Xi, this authoritarian imprisonment has been accelerated. Beyond any steps previously taken by his predecessors, Xi oversaw measures which brought this insulation and control much closer to home for the lives of the 1.4 billion Chinese people.
Instead of laying more bricks and mortar, he built a wall around the digital lives of every citizen through a combination of legislation and technology, fittingly named “The Great Firewall”. A modern-day segment of the Great Wall.
This draconian censorship of the internet allowed him to exert excessive control of the population by shoving any narrative he wanted down their throats.
Every aspect of the digital lives of any Chinese citizen is controlled. The history books have been carefully rewritten, removing anything that would not bode well for the ruling Communist Party.
For example; searching online for images of Tiananmen Square within the borders of China, as opposed to outside, yields vastly different results.
Because this digital lockdown wasn’t enough for Xi, when Covid-19 arose, the opportunity to exert further control on the population was oh-so-tempting for the control-horny Chinese man.
Locking people inside apartment blocks to contain the virus while the building burns is a level of obsessive control which points towards a darkening future.
To understand how we got to this point, let’s take a quick spin down memory lane.
With a booming population that seemed out of control, in 1980 China enforced the one-child policy. This caused the demographics of the country to go askew with more boys than girls.
With less girls for the boys to wed, competition for boys to stand out exponentially increased. Girls, and their families, no longer simply look at the good looks of the young Chinese lad, but rather his bank account and his assets. The level of dowries demanded in exchange for daughters increased and young Chinese lads resorted to buying superfluous assets to impress.
This caused a boom in the housing market. Chinese started buying 2nd, 3rd, 4th houses - all to impress.
For the Irish lads thinking the new Farah shirt bought during the week will be enough to impress the ladies at the weekend, hang your heads in shame.
Irish readers will know exactly what I mean when I mention “Ghost Estates” – whereby housing developments were splurged on, built for a population not currently present.
In China’s case – they have “Ghost Cities”.
This bloating of the economy was all fuelled by debt and has resulted in some of the largest property companies in the world such as Evergrande tethering on the brink of collapse due to being completely leveraged to the tits.
Entire cities are going in and out of lockdown, causing the economy to throttle up and down. About to go into their 4th year of this mess, people are getting fed up.
Adding fuel to this increasingly hot fire is the World Cup ongoing in Qatar. The TV coverage the Chinese are receiving is very different to that anywhere else in the world. The Chinese state is doing everything they can to prevent showing the crowd in any of the stadiums.
Doing so would not only reveal a horrifying lack of beer, but also a distinct lack of face masks. Hence proving that among this meeting of nations from around the world, China is the outlier.
By hitting the population of China with a double dose of lockdowns – home lockdowns and digital lockdowns - anger, dissent and social unrest is building.
China has quite a different view of how society should be run when compared to the West. While the west prioritizes the rights of the individual, China embraces the collective over the individual.
This has been the story the ruling party has been selling for years now – do as you’re told and we’ll make you better off.
The only way the people can be made “better off”, is if the Chinese economy continues expanding and growing. That ideology could have been maintained, up to the point where Covid tore a new arse in the world’s economies.
But don’t think that President Xi is any fool, he is fully aware of the beast he is straddling and knowing that any sign of a loss of control could spell disaster.
He has been preparing for this since 2013.
That year he launched the “Belt and Road Initiative”. A grandiose plan to project power to nations often forgotten by the US. They provided funding for big infrastructure projects in countries everyone else viewed as too risky or too dodgy to do business in. In return for funding, the Chinese would get their hands on mandated use of the country’s resources such as access to ports.
Take Sri Lanka in 2017, a small island off the tip of India (a great rival of China’s) who wanted to build a port. Studies were done and it was evident the port would be as successful as building a helipad in 2010 Ireland. This didn’t faze the Chinese – a big loan was handed over to Sri Lanka and building commenced. The Sri Lankan government weren’t long falling behind on payments so a deal was made - they handed over the port in a 99 year lease to the Chinese along with 15,000 acres of land surrounding the port, as a luck penny I guess.
As quick as that, the Chinese had a deep-water naval base on its rival India’s backdoor.
Besides from an expanding military presence around the globe, China seeks another favour in return for financing projects in developing countries - guarantees of favourable votes from at the UN council. JUST in case China does something mean to someone, and the world votes on whether it was actually an arsehole-move or not, the Chinese-funded countries wouldn’t be likely to vote to condemn China.
Why bother with any of this if you have no plans on being an arsehole?
Well, President Xi has been quite outspoken in his ambitions of absorbing Taiwan. Along with this he has further ambitions of taking ownership of the South China Sea – hence ensuring control of the vital shipping lanes that are the artery connecting his country to the rest of the world.
With his own economy nearing the end of puberty, with so many people packed into tightly congregated cities, an eruption of civil unrest could be on a scale not yet seen in history.
This could endanger Xi’s plans for further expansion, the Communist Party existence, and even the unity of China as a single state.
The CEO of Airbus, recently stated that “a break-up of economic areas is unthinkable”.
The phrase “too big to fail” comes to mind here. If something that could potential put the world’s economy on its head is “unthinkable” - to me that is most definitely a signal to actually START thinking about it.
Staying on the aviation theme, I wonder has the Airbus CEO heard of the emerging signs from the world of aircraft leasing, that certainly point a timid finger towards the “unthinkable”.
Ireland is the world’s leader in aircraft leasing. In recent years, there has been a rise in Chinese lessors, backed by cheap money from their domestic market, that have been able to undercut any rents offered by anybody else. Chinese lessors hence gobbled up market share and got their fingers in many pies around the globe. As a very recent development, Chinese lessors have begun pulling back from writing new leases to any airline not from China.
This on-shoring of business is a worrying sign; perhaps insulating their domestic specialised finance arms of banks against future western sanctions. It’s pretty easy to dodge restrictions placed at the border for doing business overseas, if you never cross the border in the first place.
So, what next?
Looking to history, when a ruler is under pressure to maintain control, creating a crisis to hoard power is chapter one of “Staying in Power for Dummies 101”. This is one of the oldest tricks in the book. Julius Caesar launched wars across Europe to escape troubles at home in Rome. Keeping the state on a war-footing and hence in a state of crisis allowed him to bend the rules to stay in power.
In October 2022, Xi announced an unprecedented (excluding Mao, another prick) third term to remain in control.
The Chinese military report directly to Xi himself, not the Communist Party.
Recently he even appointed a few lads that specialize in Taiwan to the top of the Chinese army.
With so much trouble brewing at home, the risk of launching an attack on Taiwan to put their country onto a war-footing and hence to stay longer in power, is dangerously high. This would allow for the implementation of Martial Law, further tightening his grip on power and giving him additional tools to quell unrest – far beyond his current means to do so. A scary thought.
So what is Xi waiting for?
If taking Taiwan is actually his goal, waiting for the West to pour their last penny and bullet into Ukraine, could be the window of opportunity he’s looking for.
While he waits for Western political and financial support for a foreign war to exhaust over the fields of Eastern Ukraine, in the meantime he can continue to arm his nation to the teeth, quell further unrest and consolidate more power.
Launching a war can also spark employment and rapid domestic industrialization in supporting the war machine as the aggressor can funnel more resources and materials back to the motherland to kickstart the economy.
But due to the size and scale of China, instead of kickstarting a Honda 50, attempting a stunt like this would be more akin to trying to kickstart a Combine Harvester.