Emperor Xi says, Next!

 Russia’s Putin to meet China’s Xi in Beijing from May 19-20, Beijing and Moscow say

Trump cares as little for freedom in Taiwan as he does in Ukraine

 Trump told Xi ‘I don’t talk about’ whether U.S. would defend Taiwan from China

Biden meanwhile publicly committed to the defense of Taiwan right out of the gate in 2021 after a U.S. freedom of navigation exercise in the South China Sea by the USS Theodore Roosevelt strike group in late January, and multiple times thereafter in 2021, 2022, and 2024.

Trump is truly disgraceful.

Barron's/AFP, Feb 5, 2021:

... The new US administration has said its commitment to Taiwan is "rock-solid," with officials in Washington signalling that they will not tolerate any expansionist moves by Beijing. ...

 

There is almost nothing Athenian about China, nor Spartan about the United States

But here we are.

Does THE GRAUNIAD even know that Sparta won that war?

Does Xi? 

Meanwhile "Make America Great Again" handed our adversaries the rhetorical cudgel of decline wielded by Xi against Trump. 

America is great when it stands for human freedom, something Trump is too shallow to grasp. The very word strikes terror into the hearts of the Chicoms, and is our greatest weapon against them.

But under Trump America has betrayed freedom in Ukraine, and acted more like imperial Athens in the Persian Gulf than like Sparta.

The attack on Iran is looking more and more like the failed Sicilian Expedition every day. 

Aftermath: Trump Is Wrecking the U.S. Military

If Xi wants to win, he'll act more like Sparta and let the real Athens destroy itself. 

 

 

 

Trump only wishes he could be leader for life like dictator Xi

 Trump to Xi: "You're A Great Leader. Sometimes People Don't Like Me Saying It."

 

One man is about to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Venezuela

 The more the Uniparty changes, the more it stays the same.

Bush invades Iraq. Putin invades Ukraine. Trump invades Venezuela. 

Expect Xi to invade Taiwan at any minute.

One big happy family of invaders, carving up the world.

 

U.S. Sending Aircraft Carrier Strike Group to Waters Off Latin America

 

The Wall Street Journal's Greg Ip observes America under Trump becoming more like China under Xi

The U.S. Marches Toward State Capitalism With American Characteristics: President Trump is imitating Chinese Communist Party by extending political control ever deeper into economy

 Greg Ip Aug. 11, 2025 at 10:16 am

Recent examples include President Trump’s demand that Intel’s chief executive resign; the 15% of certain chip sales to China that Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices will share with Washington; the “golden share” Washington will get in U.S. Steel as a condition of Nippon Steel’s takeover; and the $1.5 trillion of promised investment from trading partners Trump plans to personally direct.

This isn’t socialism, in which the state owns the means of production. It is more like state capitalism, a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises. 

China calls its hybrid “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The U.S. hasn’t gone as far as China or even milder practitioners of state capitalism such as Russia, Brazil and, at times, France. So call this variant “state capitalism with American characteristics.” It is still a sea change from the free market ethos the U.S. once embodied.

We wouldn’t be dabbling with state capitalism if not for the public’s and both parties’ belief that free-market capitalism wasn’t working. That system encouraged profit-maximizing CEOs to move production abroad. The result was a shrunken manufacturing workforce, dependence on China for vital products such as critical minerals, and underinvestment in the industries of the future such as clean energy and semiconductors.

The federal government has often waded into the corporate world. It commandeered production during World War II and, under the Defense Production Act, emergencies such as the Covid-19 pandemic. It bailed out banks and car companies during the 2007-09 financial crisis. Those, however, were temporary expedients.

Former President Joe Biden went further, seeking to shape the actual structure of industry. His Inflation Reduction Act authorized $400 billion in clean-energy loans. The Chips and Science Act earmarked $39 billion in subsidies for domestic semiconductor manufacturing. Of that, $8.5 billion went to Intel, giving Trump leverage to demand the removal of its CEO over past ties to China. (Intel so far has refused.)

Biden overrode U.S. Steel’s management and shareholders to block Nippon Steel’s takeover, though his staff saw no national-security risk. Trump reversed that veto while extracting the “golden share” that he can use to influence the company’s decisions. In design and name it mimics the golden shares that private Chinese companies must issue to the CCP.

Biden officials had mulled a sovereign-wealth fund to finance strategically important but commercially risky projects such as in critical minerals, which China dominates. Last month, Trump’s Department of Defense said it would take a 15% stake in MP Materials, a miner of critical minerals.

Many in the West admire China for its ability to turbocharge growth through massive feats of infrastructure building, scientific advance and promotion of favored industries. American efforts are often bogged down amid the checks, balances and compromises of pluralistic democracy.

In his forthcoming book, “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future,” author Dan Wang writes: “China is an engineering state, building big at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States’ lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad.”

To admirers, Trump’s appeal is his willingness to bulldoze those lawyerly obstacles. He has imposed tariffs on an array of countries and sectors, seizing authority that is supposed to belong to Congress. He extracted $1.5 trillion in investment pledges from Japan, the European Union and South Korea that he claims he will personally direct, though no legal mechanism for doing so appears to exist. (Those pledges are already in dispute.)

There are reasons state capitalism never caught on before. The state can’t allocate capital more efficiently than private markets. Distortions, waste and cronyism typically follow. Russia, Brazil and France have grown much more slowly than the U.S.

Chinese state capitalism isn’t the success story it seems. Barry Naughton of the University of California, San Diego has documented how China’s rapid growth since 1979 has come from market sources, not the state. As Chinese leader Xi Jinping has reimposed state control, growth has slowed. China is awash with savings, but the state wastes much of it. From steel to vehicles, excess capacity leads to plummeting prices and profits.

The U.S. hasn’t fared any better. Interventions made in the name of national security or kick-starting infant industries lead to boondoggles like Foxconn’s promised factory in Wisconsin or Tesla’s solar-panel factory in Buffalo, N.Y.

State capitalism is an all-of-society affair in China, directed from Beijing via millions of cadres in local governments and company boardrooms. In the U.S., it consists largely of Oval Office announcements lacking any policy or institutional framework. “The core characteristic of China’s state capitalism is discipline, and Trump is the complete opposite of that,” Wang said in an interview.

State capitalism is a means of political, not just economic, control. Xi ruthlessly deploys economic levers to crush any challenge to party primacy. In 2020, Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, arguably the country’s most famous business leader, criticized Chinese regulators for stifling financial innovation. Retaliation was swift. Regulators canceled the initial public offering of Ma’s financial company, Ant Group, and eventually fined it $2.8 billion for anticompetitive behavior. Ma briefly disappeared from public view.

Trump has similarly deployed executive orders and regulatory powers against media companies, banks, law firms and other companies he believes oppose him, while rewarding executives who align themselves with his priorities.

In Trump’s first term, CEOs routinely spoke out when they disagreed with his policies such as on immigration and trade. Now, they shower him with donations and praise, or are mostly silent.

Trump is also seeking political control over agencies that have long operated at arm’s length from the White House, such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve. That, too, has echoes of China where the bureaucracy is fully subordinate to the ruling party.

Trump has long admired the control Xi exercises over his country, but there are, in theory, limits to how far he can emulate him.

American democracy constrains the state through an independent judiciary, free speech, due process and the diffusion of power among multiple levels and branches of government. How far state capitalism ultimately displaces free-market capitalism in the U.S. depends on how well those checks and balances hold up.

This number seems wei tu lo

 

IMF Warns Trump Could Cost the World a Trillion Dollars

The Guardian

 

Is that all?

 

World GDP in 2023 was $106.2 trillion according to the World Bank, whose graph shows that the 2009 Great Recession contraction was $3.34 trillion. The Grauniad is worried that the Trump trade war will cost a third of the 2009 contraction, based on an analysis by the IMF, "the most sober of global institutions" lol.

 

Meanwhile there was a 2015 contraction in global GDP which was much larger, $4.55 trillion. That was much worse than the so-called Great Recession. And much worse than the global impact of COVID in 2020, which was $2.39 trillion according to the World Bank's data.

 

Why isn't this popularly discussed?

 

AI laughably tells me "global GDP did not actually contract in 2015".

 

 

 

 

 

But the World Bank itself traces the 2015 global GDP hit to a massive contraction in trade, at the heart of which was the forced restructuring of the Chinese economy under Xi Jinping, who is a communist reactionary.

 

The sizes of the tariffs of Donald Trump, which far exceed those of the Smoot-Hawley era, especially with trade hegemon China, seem uniquely poised to wreak havoc on a world whose experts today can't draw the obvious parallel to the right year.

Xi Jinping orders halt to mass killings, news about which Chicoms find increasingly difficult to censor despite police state conditions

 

The attacks, where drivers mow down people on foot or knife-wielding assailants stab multiple victims, are not new in China. But the latest surge drew attention. ...

In November alone, three took place: A man struck people at an elementary school in Hunan province, wounding 30, after suffering investment losses. A student who failed his examination stabbed and killed eight at a vocational school in the city of Yixing. The most victims, 35 people, resulted from a man mowing down a crowd in the southern city of Zhuhai, supposedly upset over his divorce. ...

In eastern Anhui province, a ruling Communist Party leader ... said they must “thoroughly and meticulously investigate and resolve conflicts and disputes,” including in families, marriages and neighborhoods. ...

The Ministry of Justice promised to curtail conflicts by looking into squabbles over inheritance, housing, land and unpaid wages.

Ha ha ha, good luck with that.

More.

Xi Jinpingpooh masters The Art of Unserious American Political Cycle Maintenance

 

When you ignore the collection of vermin who paid to eat with Xi

 Ramaswamy: You Know What's "Vermin"? What Newsom Cleaned Up In San Francisco For Xi's Visit

Titans of American business pay to have dinner with genocidal dictator Xi Jinping

Elon Musk was there, too, but this story never mentions it:

Xi’s 10 years as president are marked by a genocide against China’s Muslim minority, attempts to wipe out Tibetan culture, and persecution of Christians and followers of Falun Gong – not to mention a crackdown on democracy, religious freedom, and civil rights in Hong Kong. 

Yet, during official and unofficial meetings this week, there was no mention of the long list of atrocities. Instead, Xi received an unusually warm reception. 

On Wednesday night in the confines of San Francisco’s Hyatt Regency ballroom, America’s corporate chieftains gathered to fete Xi as a “guest of honor” at a banquet drawing nearly 400 attendees. The gala took place on the sidelines of the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, a gathering of 21 member countries to support free trade and business ties. 

The executives were so excited to share the room with the Chinese president that they gave him two standing ovations before Xi uttered a word. American titans of business, including Apple’s Tim Cook and Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman, Black Rock’s Larry Fink, Boeing’s Stanley Deal, and Pfizer’s Albert Bourla, joined Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to rub shoulders with Xi and a cohort of Chinese officials. 

Tickets for the banquet started at $2,000 each, with several companies shelling out $40,000 to buy eight seats at a table in the ballroom and one at Xi’s table. After Xi’s remarks, attendees provided yet another standing ovation, according to Reuters. 

Some executives made no attempt to hide their gushing. On the way into the Hyatt, Bridgewater Associates hedge fund founder Ray Dalio told the Financial Times that he was “excited to have this relationship [with Xi].”

If Dalio entered the hotel from the main lobby, he couldn’t have avoided the polar opposite scene and messaging. A Tibetan student activist named Tsela had strapped herself to a flagpole and was waving the Tibetan flag when Xi and his entourage arrived. Other activists from Students for a Free Tibet chanted “Murderer” at the Chinese leader, “Down with the CCP,” and “Human Rights in Tibet.”

Lyin' commie Xi Jinpingpong is in town saying China seeks no sphere of influence lol

Massive new Chinese military capabilities built up in the South China Sea say otherwise, but the west coast tech traitors just clap, and clap, and clap some more for this guy.

Meanwhile grandpa poopy pants at the pope party had a similar, brief, and extremely unfortunate truth eruption in front of the press, calling Xi a dictator, spoiling the moment for the Chicoms.

The whole thing stinks, even after cleaning the streets in San Francisco for once, and yes, Gavin Newsom was in the middle of this. 

San Fran Freako would be cleaner if Xi Jinpingpong visited more often

 'They're clearing out homeless': San Fran gets ready for arrival of world leaders...

Xi's 'Old Friends' from Iowa Invited to Dinner With Him...

Chicoms give fellow traveler Gavin Newsom warm welcome

 

China's Marxist vision of state control and redistribution never went away

 

What is a communist? One who has yearnings

For equal division of unequal earnings.

Idler, or bungler, or both, he is willing

To fork over his penny and pocket your shilling.

- Ebenezer Elliott (1781-1849)

 

… it’s back, says Rudd, and Xi’s Marxist vision means greater control over the private sector, an expanding role for state-owned enterprises and industrial policy, and the quest for “common prosperity” through redistribution — all of which is likely to shrink economic growth, he concludes. Rudd is the current Australian ambassador to the United States. …

Stevenson-Yang is … one of the few who isn’t puzzled by what’s happening in China, after living there for more than 20 years. The CCP “was always going to decouple. Once the party had acquired enough power, enough resources, enough money, it was always going to decouple,” she told CNBC.

The reforms that began in 1979, she says, “were always meant to be temporary, in order to bring in more resources.”

More.

Rahm Emanuel: Deceit and deception are traits that run through everything China does . . . That’s unacceptable

 

America's Warrior Diplomat, Rahm Emanuel, Takes On China's Xi Personally...

 

 Can't wait until he calls Xi Jinping a commie retard.

 

Trump has learned nothing, still admires the strong man of China

 

“Think of President Xi. Central casting, brilliant guy. You know, when I say he’s brilliant, everyone says, ‘Oh that’s terrible,'” said Trump during the event. “Well, he runs 1.4 billion people with an iron fist. Smart, brilliant, everything perfect. There’s nobody in Hollywood like this guy. I got them to pay us $28 billion because they screwed our farmers for years.”

Here.

Not even Asian Americans like China, including Chinese Asian Americans.

 

 

Joe Biden is obviously not in charge: Calls Xi Jinping what he really is, a dictator, one day after his Secretary of State tries to soothe relations with Taiwan remarks

 Biden calls Xi 'dictator,' fueling Chinese anger... 

Blinken Tells Xi Jinping U.S. Does Not Support Taiwanese Independence, After Meeting To Quell Tension

The always feckless Barack Obama makes speeches abroad for $1 million, blames threat of China on Trump when he himself failed to recognize the new threat in Xi Jinping from 2012

 The vacuum was all his.

Here's Obama:

“With my successor coming in, I think he saw an opportunity because the U.S. president didn’t seem to care that much about a rules-based international system,” Obama said, the Daily Mail reported. "As a consequence, I think China’s attitude [is], 'Well, we can take advantage of what appears to be a vacuum internationally on a lot of these issues.'"

 

It was Obama who never cared about the rules, never challenged China's military expansion in the South China Sea under Xi, and telegraphed nothing but weakness to China. 

Here's Xi Jinping as early as 2014:

Tabled by the popular ultranationalist blogger Zhou Xiaoping, the plan would authorize the assassination of blacklisted individuals—including Taiwan’s vice president, William Lai Ching-te—if they do not reform their ways. Zhou later told the Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao that his proposal had been accepted by the conference and “relayed to relevant authorities for evaluation and consideration.” Proposals like Zhou’s do not come by accident. In 2014, Xi praised Zhou for the “positive energy” of his jeremiads against Taiwan and the United States. ...

But the most telling moments of the two-sessions meetings, perhaps unsurprisingly, involved Xi himself. The Chinese leader gave four speeches in all—one to delegates of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, two to the National People’s Congress, and one to military and paramilitary leaders. In them, he described a bleak geopolitical landscape, singled out the United States as China’s adversary, exhorted private businesses to serve China’s military and strategic aims, and reiterated that he sees uniting Taiwan and the mainland as vital to the success of his signature policy to achieve “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese ethnos.”

In his first speech on March 6, Xi appeared to be girding China’s industrial base for struggle and conflict. “In the coming period, the risks and challenges we face will only increase and become more severe,” he warned. “Only when all the people think in one place, work hard in one place, help each other in the same boat, unite as one, dare to fight, and be good at fighting, can they continue to win new and greater victories.” To help the CCP achieve these “greater victories,” he vowed to “correctly guide” private businesses to invest in projects that the state has prioritized.

Xi also blasted the United States directly in his speech, breaking his practice of not naming Washington as an adversary except in historical contexts. He described the United States and its allies as leading causes of China’s current problems. “Western countries headed by the United States have implemented containment from all directions, encirclement and suppression against us, which has brought unprecedented severe challenges to our country’s development,” he said. Whereas U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has emphasized “guardrails” and other means of slowing the deterioration of U.S.-China relations, Beijing is clearly preparing for a new, more confrontational era.

On March 5, Xi gave a second speech laying out a vision of Chinese self-sufficiency that went considerably further than any of his previous discussions of the topic, saying China’s march to modernization is contingent on breaking technological dependence on foreign economies—meaning the United States and other industrialized democracies. Xi also said that he wants China to end its reliance on imports of grain and manufactured goods. “In case we’re short of either, the international market will not protect us,” Xi declared. Li, the outgoing premier, emphasized the same point in his annual government “work report” on the same day, saying Beijing must “unremittingly keep the rice bowls of more than 1.4 billion Chinese people firmly in their own hands.” China currently depends on imports for more than a third of its net food consumption.

In his third speech, on March 8 to representatives from the PLA and the People’s Armed Police, Xi declared that China must focus its innovation efforts on bolstering national defense and establish a network of national reserve forces that could be tapped in wartime. Xi also called for a “National Defense Education” campaign to unite society behind the PLA, invoking as inspiration the Double Support Movement, a 1943 campaign by the Communists to militarize society in their base area of Yan’an.

In his fourth speech (and his first as a third-term president), on March 13, Xi announced that the “essence” of his great rejuvenation campaign was “the unification of the motherland.” Although he has hinted at the connection between absorbing Taiwan and his much-vaunted campaign to, essentially, make China great again, he has rarely if ever done so with such clarity.

One thing that is clear a decade into Xi’s rule is that it is important to take him seriously—something that many U.S. analysts regrettably do not do. When Xi launched a series of aggressive campaigns against corruption, private enterprise, financial institutions, and the property and tech sectors, many analysts predicted that these campaigns would be short-lived. But they endured. The same was true of Xi’s draconian “zero COVID” policy for three years—until he was uncharacteristically forced to reverse course in late 2022.

Xi is now intensifying a decade long campaign to break key economic and technological dependencies on the U.S.-led democratic world. He is doing so in anticipation of a new phase of ideological and geostrategic “struggle,” as he puts it. His messaging about war preparation and his equating of national rejuvenation with unification mark a new phase in his political warfare campaign to intimidate Taiwan. He is clearly willing to use force to take the island. What remains unclear is whether he thinks he can do so without risking uncontrolled escalation with the United States.

LOL, back to back stories curated by Drudge say Xi Jinping did not, or did, appear at the Winter Olympic Games, take your pick

 

CLAIM: Xi suffering from deadly brain aneurysm... 

Troubles mount in China ahead of bid to stay in power... 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The UK Sun:

Rumours about the state of Xi's health have been swirling for years, with fresh speculation sparked by his unexplained absence from the Beijing Winter Olympics. 

LA Times:

When Xi Jinping strode into the Bird's Nest Olympic stadium in the winter, waving and bundled in a black jacket and mask, hundreds of Chinese spectators and performers cheered in what was meant to be the start of a victorious year for their nation's president.