Today, Xi Jinping ordered the Chinese Army to prepare for a war. What does it mean?
Mar 16, 2023
It means feces has already hit the fan in China and the country is going south.
Hopefully not this south
China has been living on borrowed time economically and demographically for decades now. Their demographic time bomb is either the worst in history, or else the second worst in history after that of Japan. Their debt situation is the worst in history, the financial situation of their provinces makes Greece in 2007 seem like a model of fiscal responsibility.
It was never a question of whether this will negatively impact the Chinese future. The question was when it was going to happen and how it was going to play out. The ‘election’ of Xi to the status of Dear Leader for life and rampant militarism the last several years signalled something was bound to happen soon. Ordering the military to “prepare for war” is the latest in the line of signals that China needs her people distracted from rising domestic problems the Party is utterly unable to solve.
A democratic country facing such a serious crisis might go through a rough patch of political instability, new parties would rise and fall, careers might end and so on but that would be the worst of it. Historically such problems in China were resolved in only one way: a civil war, that also became the bloodiest war in history, for a time. Save for the two world wars, the worst wars in history were Chinese civil wars.
Xi wants to avoid that, so he orders his military to prepare for one, hoping the (permanently) “upcoming” war with Oceania will keep Estasians in line. It works for the Kim dynasty, after all.
