China's Ambitious Plans

In the May number of The Atlantic is an article on China by H. R. McMaster, who is both a retired United States Army lieutenant-general and a former national security advisor for the White House. It is either an eye-opening article or a deceptive one. I think the magazine fact-checks its articles, so I expect that this one is honest and eye-opening. Basically, it strips China of its clothes of respectability. And when I say China, I mean the Chinese Communist Party leadership. The author describes the Trump visit to China in 2017, a visit in which the author took part. Things he heard said that I had not previously seen reported reiterate that China is aiming to set itself up as the go-to nation of the world, with other nations as its tributaries. McMaster recounts the premier of China, Li Keqiang, asserting that America’s role in this new order was to provide energy and raw materials to China. Hewers of wood and drawers of water is the Chinese vision of Americans. 

The article affirms my already formed opinion that China has given up on looking respectable now that other nations are catching on to her. It’s full steam ahead to economically conquer a major part of the globe before China’s population ages into senility. Decades of the one-child policy is a demographic disaster. The ratio of workers to those that need support will tax China’s viability. A nation like Japan that has advanced artificial intelligence and robotics to sophisticated levels can cope with the decline in worker numbers. China doesn’t have the tech creativeness to do that. China’s technological innovation comes through theft and coercion. Is that because the Chinese are less intelligent than other people?  Not at all. One has only to see what 23 million Taiwanese have accomplished to know that Chinese are intelligent and industrious people. The problem with communist China is that it is communist. Initiative is stifled. When the CCP finally goes the way of other feudal regimes, China will likely break up into several sovereign jurisdictions, but after the inevitable famines and civil wars, the Chinese will produce intellectual stars.