The guys is almost 80 73, he’s an old man.
He’s been very successful in his tenure, carried out great anti-corruption campaigns, overseen a pivot to green energy, helmed China as it has retaken its place in the sun.
At the same time there’s a lot of foreign policy stuff that leaves some wanting. There’s still cliques of liberals (as far as I understand, which is very little, which is why I ask) that are working towards something very different (I hear Shanghai is really bad?) not to mention some impending economic doom, according to some China posters here.
Whatever the case is, Xi has been monumental and at the forefront of a great wave of change. One must Imagine he has planned for his retirement, moved things around to ensure some of His Guys are in good positions to take over.
Or maybe not?
So what happens when he goes away? Who is likely to take his spot? What will happen on the world stage?
Is that something that can be seen occurring at the moment in China?
“At the moment” is a non-sequitur.
Xi Jinping isn’t dead yet. He is 73.
Average life expectancy in China is 79 years. We should adjust this number, since he is not the average person. I would suggest +1 Standard Deviation (SD) - but I can’t find that.
Absent of other information we are looking at.
At the rate things are going, where the world is looking to China rather than the US, where the world is turning away from the US, where we have a midterm election this year, where we have a full election 2 years from now, where Trump faces jail upon losing, where MAGA talks up a civil war, etc - do you think Chinese liberals are going to have an easy time promoting US-style politics?
Power faces many dynamics, and the global trend is away from liberalism.
You make some really good points, but I couldn’t help but laugh at:
The administration would still have that as a fear.
It’s part of the reason why Joe Biden preemptively pardoned Hunter.
But no one would go after Joe Biden hinself. It is literally baked into executive privilege as defined by the Supreme Court.
You have to understand, we struggle to bring even basic law enforcement officers to justice here in the states, the executive branch is both de-jure and de-facto off-limits, especially once they are out of office. If Nixon, Obama or H.W. Bush (or hell basically any sitting president in the last 130 years) didn’t serve a single day in jail, there is 0% chance that Donald Trump will. He is the Republican Party now and everyone knows it. To arrest him post-presidency is literally to incite civil war, and liberals are far too big on civility to invite that kind of strife.
Trump will issue blanket pardons to his family (well maybe not Eric or Don Jr.) and cronies, but he does not need to issue one for himself, because he is already covered.
As you speak to our ignorance of the Chinese system and ways of thinking, I implore you to understand your own ignorance in terms of how the American system operates, part of the reason it has stood for so long is because the elite political class are completely insulated from all consequences of their governance. They do not truely hold each other accountable, therefore there is no real elite infighting that causes the normal kind of cracks that could be exploited. They are ruthless and cynical, but only to those outside of their class, and in their class, only in so far as it is about internal jockeying for positions.
Just to be clear, I am Iranian and not Chinese.
I am not ignorant on this and I agree with your assessments.
Right. The various bourgeois factions protect each other from the consequences of corruption. The factions they represent (financials, big tech, military, big tech, agri, meat, ziolobby, retail, etc) don’t want a war amongst the politicians that can hurt their interests. The factions pay both parties.
The factions want a controlled political landscape to reduce risk and increase profits. Politicians from one party arresting another for representing factional interests isn’t possible*, because the other party is also getting paid by the same people - and was brought into power by the same people.
The hypothesis here is that if you personally went out and successfully got elected, that they might arrest you - because you wouldn’t fall within that dynamic.
But this dynamic doesn’t eliminate risk. There is no honour amongst thieves. People can push the envelope in their attempt to fuck over other politicians.
There is a limited number of seats. Not everyone gets in. Elections do happen, but everyone recognizes you need money and connections for favourable media and advertising. You need the sponsorship of a faction to make it. If you refuse the money of an organization, they will try to fuck you. If you refuse all the factions, they all try to fuck you.
It’s a completely bought and paid for election system, with conspiracies occurring within the electoral structure to illegally purge candidates who actually want to improve things.
But once you show that you are on team bourgeois and can rally votes - the money starts coming in. As they make bets on who wins.
So we have an inherent dynamic of competition and an inherit dynamic of cooperation.
*Trump and his team cannot be certain that the dynamic of cooperation will prevail over the dynamic of comptetition. Especially with how he set things up.
In the event of a loss in the elections, because of the stakes, they would be willing to take serious risks. We already saw this happen with January 6th.
This will happen again.
The very real risk of jail motivates more erratic behaviour, which undermines US political stability, which gives China more things to contrast itself with.
So I argue that my original statement is correct.
My apologies on the misidentification of your nationality, you simply speak of American politics like many Chinese people I know.
I completely, and absolutely, disagree.
You are completely mistaken on the nature of January 6th, with your revolutionary vision clouding your judgement and the appearance of events.
We do not know how to wage a real revolution, reactionary or otherwise, in this country. We have all been taught incorrectly, mostly from our spectator nature of color revolutions. We only know reformist politics, and spectacular actions, with no in-between. January 6th was a spectacular action, with no chance of actually accomplishing anything substantial. And the reforms came from the state and federal court appointments that Trump did.
Due to this, I am firmly of the opinion that we, at most, will experience the same “Will they, won’t they” cycle that we did after the first term, however, there is no way in hell Trump will spend a single day in prison.
Trump has capitulated to the only real, sustained power in Washington, the National Security/Military Industrial Complex. Therefore, he will be just fine.
I meant I’m not Chinese, as in I am not an authority figure commenting on my own culture. I believed I accidentally misled you, not that you made a mistake on that part.
That doesn’t mean his administration won’t be concerned about the potential for prosecution or about losing the elections and try to suspend them.
They want to cover their bases. My point is that covering their bases undermines the stability of the USA.
And my point is that the idea that they would be prosecuted beyond a slap on the wrist is extremely ahistorical. Even within Nixon’s administration, which was extremely conspiratorial, bordering on and often surpassing the legal definition of treason, only got smacked because it withheld information from both the Democrats, Republicans, AND the wider security state, and even then, they were pardoned or given minimal fines and sentencing.
Trump and his lackies wouldn’t just have to be ‘covering their bases’, they would have to be insane on a level rivaling Pol Pot or Jim Jones. And I don’t think they are. They know they are protected, they know who butters their bread, and they will not get in the way of elections.
As someone who lives in this country, and understands how people within it operate politically, it would be genuinely shocking if Trump suffers any consequences, and I will, literally, boil and eat my boots if he cancels elections, which I will probably have to anyways since everything would go to shit immediately if he did. It simply isn’t going to happen.
Mostly, it is clear that the full liberalized economic model (ala Japan, South Korea, and Singapore) that was the model that the IMF supposedly based their financial progress against, is clearly flawed (in that it doesn’t take into account the sheer amount of free money that was pumped into those economies to get them started, and that they are clearly slowing down or at a stand-still while China is continuing to accelerate, in spite of similar population demographics).
The success of several different versions of Socialism with __ characteristics is extremely compelling.
To be fair, the economy of Japan slowed down in large part due to the Plaza Accords handicapping economic development