Tuesday, July 23, 2019

Hong Kong is Not China



China is in the same condition as the late stage of the Soviet Union: on the outside it seems invincible, the largest military in the world, second largest economy, a state-run ideology that academics worship, and yet on the inside it is dying. China's economy is based on selling cheap shit to the United States, just like the Soviet Union's economy was based on exporting oil. Three global oil crises gutted the Soviet economy. Yes, they had the world's main supply of certain materials, like titanium, that the West needed, but that couldn't save them. China, too, has a near monopoly of a few resources the West needs, but that will not save them. The Chinese economy is a house of cards built in mid-air. People, Chinese bots and anti-American communists, like to say that the US economy is crap and based on debt too, but while you will find crumbling roads in America and an economy that was stagnant for about a decade following the real estate bubble, you won't find ghost cities built on debt designed to keep America's economy from disintegrating.

China is using debt to create the largest number of construction projects in the history of the world, creating cities full of high rises where units costing millions of dollars remain unattainable by the Chinese people, malls don't attract any retailers, and nail houses made of plywood and loam divide highways. In China there are cancer cities, where pollution is so bad the incidence of cancer is thousands of times higher than it otherwise would be. In China the grass has to be painted green because nothing will grow there. The Chinese Communist Party is doing everything it can to keep tens of millions of people employed by creating public works projects that serve absolutely no function other than make-work.

And, just like America in 2008, China is sitting on the most massive real estate bubble in the world, and all the currency manipulation and outright lying to global investors will not save it from collapsing.

And sitting in the middle of this is Hong Kong, what was once the autonomous enclave and one of the most robust economies in the world in its own right, China is pulling a Tienanmen and is cracking down on the autonomy of Hong Kong. The only way the CCP can meet its goals is by cannibalizing Hong Kong and invading Taiwan (Formosa) before the population of the mainland becomes too old and obese to maintain a functioning military.

And as with so many of China's seizures of territory and crackdowns on human rights, the world will turn a blind eye on the most brutal regime in human history as it cracks more skulls and enslaves another group of once independent people.