What Just Happened to Hu Jintao?
BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-10-22 Sa
CONDITION: I Think This Makes It Impossible for Xi Jinping to Ever Retire…
Igor Sushko: ‘Former President & General Secretary of China, Hu Jintao , Xi #Jinping's predecessor, has been physically removed from Communist Party Congress and has since disappeared…
Must-Read: The (Slight, So Far) Extent of U.S.-China Decoupling:
Chad Brown Jones: Four years into the trade war, are the US and China decoupling?: Imports declined immediately after tariffs were imposed, falling further beginning in March 2020 as global trade collapsed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and have since recovered only slowly.…US imports from China (red line) remain well below the pre-trade war trend (dashed line), as defined (conservatively) by US imports from the world…. China is now the source of only 18 percent of total US goods imports, down from 22 percent at the onset of the trade war. In comparison, current US imports from the rest of the world are 38 percent higher than pre-trade war levels and are even above trend (blue line). With a few exceptions, these imports were not hit with new US tariffs. They have also recovered strongly following the onset of the pandemic…
& Very Briefly Noted:
Andrew Keen: Moisés Naím on the Global Spread of Authoritarianism and Its Dangers: ‘The author of The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century…
Susan Shirk: China in Xi’s “New Era”The Return to Personalistic Rule: ‘Deng Xiaoping… sought to prevent “the overconcentration of power”… fixed terms of office, term limits, and a mandatory retirement age; delegating authority… to government agencies… holding regular meetings… to decentralize authority, regularize political life and check dictatorial power. The centerpiece… was… regular peaceful leadership succession…. Xi Jinping is taking China back to a personalistic dictatorship...
Minxin Pei: China: From Tiananmen to Neo-Stalinism: ‘The development strategy formulated by Deng Xiaoping to modernize the Chinese economy under one-party rule generated endemic corruption and regime decay… failed to institute genuine and enforceable political reforms…. China's great leap backward since 2012 may dim the hopes of gradual evolutionary regime transition, but the pitfalls of strongman rule, dissipating economic dynamism under state capitalism, and escalating strategic competition with the United States will most likely reduce the long-term odds of the survival of the Chinese Communist Party…
Minxin Pei: China: Totalitarianism's Long Shadow: ‘he Leninist party-state has in recent years reverted to a form of neo-Stalinist rule…. Democratizing a post-totalitarian regime is far more difficult than democratizing an authoritarian regime because post-totalitarian regimes… possess far greater capacity and resources to resist and neutralize the liberalizing effects of modernization. However, the medium-term success of these regimes may only ensure their eventual demise…. Socioeconomic transformation… empowers social forces and greatly increase the odds of revolutionary change when these regimes undergo liberalization…
Michael Davis: Hong Kong: How Beijing Perfected Repression: ‘A complete hollowing out and abandonment of the city's liberal-democratic constitutional model that Beijing had promised to let stand…. Does this hollowing out of constitutional guarantees represent the oft-discussed PRC alternative to Western liberal democracy?…
Yuen Yuen Ang: How Resilient Is the CCP?: ‘The CCP still commands a high-capacity and selectively adaptive bureaucracy; it has tightened political control; and U.S. animosity toward China has inadvertently helped Xi rally the party and nation behind him. Yet Xi's concentration of personal power has reintroduced the risk of succession battles and amplifies the effects of his ideology and decisions, which are felt not only within the PRC but around the world…
The going stories right now are 1. It's nothing, Hu is just ill. 2. This was a publicly scripted put down. No humans around Hu in those videos reacted as humans would to an old man who is ill, just sayin.