 China. Obviously, China is the rising superpower right now. China has probably got the second most powerful military in the world. I think it's probably more powerful than the Russians, although it is not exactly battle-tested. The Russians are, at least the Russian weapons systems have been battle-tested around the world. They're not very good. It's the ultimate, I think, manifestation of that. But I think there's good reason to believe that Chinese are more technologically advanced in terms of their weapons systems than the Russians. China, of course, is a much, much bigger economy than Russia. It can devote significantly more money to its military. And in spite of all of that, just to put this into perspective, China still has a military that is significantly inferior both technologically and the quality of its weapons systems, its quality of things like its aircraft carriers, the quality of its navy, the quality of its air force, and, of course, the quality of the battle-testedness. That's not a word, but you know what I mean. The experience, then the United States. The United States, by far, has the mightiest military force on the planet today. Militarily, we don't want to get into a war with China because, again, you don't want to confront a country that has nuclear weapons. But the United States, I don't think, would fear conventional war with China. I think we are significantly stronger. And I think our nuclear capabilities are significantly greater than the Chinese, but that's not something you ever want to have to test. The Chinese are asserting themselves in various parts, certainly on the Indian border, where there's a section of the border that is in conflict, where they have disagreements about it. They're asserting themselves inside China Sea. After all, it is the South China Sea, so it is in their backyard. You can understand why I think the Chinese would be interested in asserting their power in that part of the world. It's not clear that the United States can or should do anything about that. We're really going to go to war with the Chinese about their naval activities in what's called the South China Sea, which is, in a sense, their sea. Probably not. So in terms of our military confrontation, I don't think the Chinese want military confrontations. I don't think they're interested in war right now. They've got, we'll talk about this in a minute, they've got a lot of problems internally. China is certainly not interested in going to war with the United States. It can only lose from that. It has nothing to gain from it. China is trying to assert itself in the world in other means, trying to use diplomacy, money, and money in order to gain allies all across the world, particularly in areas rich in natural resources, all across Asia with a Belt and Road Initiative, which is supposed to link China with Europe over land through Asia. It is also building ports all over the world. But the fact is that if you really look at the Belt Initiative and what is it actually achieving, it is super expensive for the Chinese, super expensive. It is draining resources from them. It is actually turning many countries that are dealing with China against China. The quality of the infrastructure being built is not very good. These countries are going into debt to China, and the Chinese are squeezing them, which these countries do not like. You're seeing the popularity or the attitude towards China in terms of people around the world. That is in decline because China has been strong-arming country after country after country, and people don't like to be strong-armed. China is not gaining many friends around the world through the strategy that the Chinese are engaged in right now. The Chinese are, I think, in an ever weaker position vis-à-vis their foreign policy. They want to become a power. They want to become the go-to country that is challenging the United States, and yet I think the position in the world ultimately is going to weaken, not strengthen. It's going to weaken again because this Belt and Road Initiative is being done in a way that is alienating the world against them. But on top of that, the real problem is going to be that China just doesn't have the resources to devote, to subsidizing the rest of the world, and to building infrastructure in the rest of the world purely at its own expense. Here it brings me to the fact that I think that Russia, that China generally has major problems inside China that are going to hamper its ability to project its power, its strength around the world. Again, why I think people overestimate the threats of China, overestimate the economic power of China. They overestimate what China is capable of doing. A number of things with regard to China. One is economic growth in China is slowing. It's still much higher than it is in the United States, at least according to the official numbers. But it is significantly slowing. And that is a consequence of bad economic policies that are being brought to the forefront by Xi. President Xi, I would say over the last seven years, he's been president and he looks like he's now basically there for life. Xi Jinping is basically a failure. He's a failure from the perspective of China. He has governed over a dramatic slowdown in economic growth in China. He has governed over several significant financial and real estate crises in China. And I fear that from the perspective of China, we haven't yet seen how bad it can get. I think it could get a lot worse. And his economic policies, which include to a large extent, they include the increased regulation and control of private companies, the increased reliance on state-owned enterprises, the increased role of the state in the economy, all of these policies are losers, are policies that are going to lose, the policies that are going to diminish the economic success of China, the economic policies that are penalizing the most successful parts of the Chinese economy. His crackdown on industries are not going to be, you know, they're only going to bring negative consequences. There are going to be no positive consequences. In position of more industrial policy, a more central planning, a more involvement of the Chinese Communist Party is only going to continue to slow down economic growth and to make the Chinese economy more susceptible to crises than anything else. So I view China economically as entering into a next decade of real economic challenges. Now, I think that's true of the U.S. I think it's true for other reasons of Europe as well. But China is not going to be this success story. It's not going to be this country that is growing at note with no end. It's not going to, and I don't think it can avoid internal strife. I don't think it's going to avoid the kind of you know, citizenry that is upset by the fact that they're not rising into middle classhood as fast as they were promised, that they're not as free as they expect it to be. I think you will see growing resentment within China over Chinese policies and we'll get to COVID in a second because I think that's part of the problem that Xi is going to is going to have to live with. So China is entering a period of real economic uncertainty and real economic challenges. Second, as I mentioned, China has, there's a lot of anger and fear at China and a lot of angst about China because of the Belt and Road initiative. China is taking over ports but those ports are not profitable. So they're going into debt in order to run those ports. They have amassed huge amounts of debt to build up this infrastructure, the debt that the countries can't pay back. So even though the Chinese then take over the infrastructure and own it, the infrastructure is not profitable. They can't pay back to themselves the debt. So in terms of net economic value, these are all negative investments and that is only going to come bigger and bigger. You can read on the ultimately the failure that the Chinese have encountered in the port in Sri Lanka, the rail projects in Africa, a whole host of projects in Malaysia, where these are not turning out well for the Chinese, for the Chinese and even their investment in Pakistan. Now they confront this issue of to what extent do they support the Taliban and do they build projects in Afghanistan? But on the other hand, if they do that, they're supporting the Islamists, the Taliban are Islamists who are allies, potential allies to the Muslims within China. China has a massive Muslim problem. That's why they have these concentration camps in Western China by emboldening Pakistan and by emboldening Afghanistan. They're being pragmatists long term. They're going to suffer the consequence of emboldening Muslims and ultimately they will feel the consequence on their western border. So China has a tricky relationship internationally and particularly with the Muslim neighbors that they have to their west. So this does not, the reputation of the world has taken a massive hit because of COVID, but also because of the way they practice diplomacy out there, the arrogance and given I think the weakness that she actually has, the economic weakness that he's going to experience over the next decade, I think this is only going to hurt him even more diplomatically and further. And then finally COVID, COVID is a disaster for China. It's a disaster partially because of the lockdowns. It's a disaster because China went for a zero COVID policy. We talked about this with Amish yesterday. The idea was, well eradicate COVID, we'll get rid of it. You can't do that. You know, you can shut down this city, you can shut down that city. There's still, we don't hear about this in the west, but there's still towns and cities being shut down periodically in China because of COVID. This has hurt production. This has hurt the economy. This has hurt employment. This has hurt wealth creation. Another reason why the Chinese economy has slowed. Well, it's done better than the west. Fewer people in China are immune. China vaccines have proven to be unbelievably inefficient, ineffective. They're actually scrambling right now to develop their own mRNA vaccine because they realized mRNA vaccines are so far superior to what the Chinese developed themselves. They tried to export these vaccines to other countries. Lots of countries bought these vaccines. They turned out to be horrible, horrific, terrible. The problem with China and COVID is how now do they reverse course and accept the fact that COVID is something we're going to have to live with? Given that so few people in China have had COVID, given that so few people in China have been vaccinated with an effective vaccine, the country is in turmoil internally. There are a lot of social unrest. There's a lot of social unrest that goes unreported in the west over restrictions that have to do with COVID and over the complete failure of Xi Jinping's COVID policies within China. I think China is still going to get richer because economic growth will still be positive, but it's going to face real challenges. Remember that GDP per capita in China, even adjusted for purchasing power, is average, is a third of a developed country. China is still, for the people in China, still a poor country. It might be by some measures a large economy in the world, but at the same time, it's also, from a standard living perspective, one of the poorest countries in the world. China is, I think, in real trouble. I think it's real trouble. They're stuck with Xi Jinping unless somebody within the Communist Party is willing to challenge him and overthrow him, or unless you get significant internal strife, demonstrations, social unrest, significant social unrest in China. It looks like Xi Jinping is going to be there for a while. That's not good for China. He's a failed leader in every dimension. He is strong in terms of his control over China, but he's failed China in every aspect. COVID is just the last way in which he's failed. However, COVID came to be, whatever the source of COVID ultimately turns out to be, the way China has dealt with it is the wrong way. The way China is dealing with it is the wrong way. They will not be growing their power globally. I think that power has probably peaked. Again, the only reason China, that it might not have peaked, the only reason there is any chance that China could be still successful from a foreign policy perspective is the weakness of the United States. That is the one theme that runs through all of this. The United States is weak. Go to patreon, subscribe star, locals, and just making an appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. 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