Trump doing to China what Reagan did to the USSR?

quote:

---

The last emperor of the Ming Dynasty in China was Chongzhen. He presided over an empire bloated with bureaucracy, drowning in lies and desperately trying to stave off the inevitable. In the end, as the system crumbled around him, he rang the bell in his palace to signal his ministers to assemble before him. No one came. He was alone, and the empire was no more. He hung himself in despair.

Perhaps things have not yet reached quite that point for Xi Jinping. They may yet, however.

For decades now the world has told itself the lie that China represented the future, that its society and government were liberalizing, that the Chinese people supported their government and its policies. The coronavirus crisis has exposed that lie in all its monstrosity.

The Chinese Communist Party is not the vanguard of anything. It is a brutal, thuggish syndicate more akin to a criminal mafia than a political party. It oppresses its people with ruthless efficiency. It feeds on lies, false statistics and meaningless claims of success and progress. It is hopelessly incompetent at everything other than oppression.

The Chinese economy is at a standstill. Factories are shuttered. The Caixin/Markit Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) showed factory production and new orders collapsing to the worst levels on record last month, while employment also took a nosedive. Satellite images published by NASA show a massive drop in air pollution over Chinese cities consistent with an 80% drop in industrial activity and traffic.

Nothing is being produced. No one is moving.



Chinese efforts to force workers back into factories and restart industrial production have met with limited success. Undeterred the bureaucracy has simply decreed that factories will use minimum amounts of electricity daily and report those results to party officials. Factory owners and managers have responded to the mad edict by simply turning on equipment and allowing it to run continuously, using electricity, producing nothing and feeding the gargantuan bureaucracy the meaningless statistics on which it feeds.

---