2018-03-06

Xi Eliminates Term Limits for Same Reason Twitter Purges Right-Wing Accounts

Occam's razor says Xi Jinping's elimination of term limits was a rational response to ongoing political and economic threats. Term limits were a recent invention and was largely ceremonial. The President isn't the real power, it's the Chairman of the CCP and head of the military. Jiang Zemin held onto power beyond his term, making Hu Jintao a relatively weak president. Xi was stronger and quickly consolidated power. China and the CCP have reverted to traditional form because China sees trouble ahead. Populism and nationalism are rising across the developed world. China whipped up nationalism among the youth in the 1990s and is at risk of its own populist explosion. The credit bubble exceeds that of the 1920s USA. If it doesn't pop on its own, a trade war with the United States or most of the developed world could pop it. Consolidating power and ratcheting up social control is a proactive response to these developments.

The Western establishment is behaving in largely the same way. In the United Kingdom and other nations, people are jailed for complaining about Muslim immigration. Twitter used the excuse of a bot-purge to wipe out right-wing Twitter accounts en masse. YouTube is carrying out a similar purge of right-wing channels. (Both companies say they're only removing hate speech, but when it is always right-wing voices that get silenced and not a mix of left and right. It is obviously not an objective standard, but a subjective political standard.) The establishment in China, Europe and the USA are behaving very similarly.

Alhambra: China Going Boom
This is the altogether disgusting state of the world. China’s Communists are doing more honest assessments in words as well as action than any of the Western so-called democracies. That those actions by and large appear more and more authoritarian only adds to the revulsion. Not only do they know more about the dollar than any US Treasury official, they also appear capable of learning in a more forthright manner about the drastic implications of it.

This difference is easily explained by Economics. In the West, Economists hold all influence about economic (small “e”) opinion. Having spent decades creating Economics, they will not easily surrender it, which they would have to do if they ever admitted there was no recovery and worse the reason for that state is right in their own back yard (global money). Thus, they talk up the results of using the Economics textbook more forcefully as time passes and those results remain overall dangerously deficient (feeding distrust in the process). No one can figure out why China is moving backward.

The Chinese have only borrowed Economics for what they thought was a permanent path to modern prosperity. Since 2011, that dream has been snuffed out, the flaws in Economics, particularly of the monetary variety, all-too-evident. Thus, Chinese Communism can be more easily transformed devolved back toward more China and less Western Economics. If the latter no longer works or has been proved it can’t work and may never have to begin with, then why not go backward toward the former.

Xi Jinping more and more seems to be searching for the path of Mao Zedong. It was, all along, China’s pre-crisis growth baseline that appears to have kept him off of it. As it disappears into the past without hope for the future, this choice might end up being unforgiveable, but in honestly assessing China’s economy it is at least understandable. Not just for and in China.
In the West, there's no admission of failure, no shift in strategy. The failures of establishment economics, ruling political ideology, central banking, free trade ideology, mass immigration and the basic ability to govern continue unabated:
As I’ve said before, you don’t get Hitler because of Hitler — there are always potential Hitlers hanging around. You get Hitler because of Weimar, and you get Weimar because the people in charge of maintaining liberal democracy are too weak and corrupt to do the job.
Xi is secure in power now. Political repression is possible among the upper levels of the party, but less likely in the wider society. In the West, the establishment is still insecure because it holds power through faith. Like the child in the Emperor's New Clothes, a single dissenting voice can cause a preference cascade. The risk of authoritarian repression against the general public is far higher in the West as established authority collapses. It is being carried out through official channels in Europe and unofficial channels in the United States, but the intent and goals are the same. Liberal democracy is in retreat because of establishment behavior.

Since social mood is still in decline and the problems of 2008 were papered over instead of solved, this is still the early stages of political revolt. Given the time scale involved (already a decade into a crisis and only UK and USA having made a concrete political change), the coming political shift will at minimum be as large as the 1920s and 1930s. Although China is at great economic risk, it faces far less political risk because of recent political changes. China may be an oasis of political stability in the coming global turmoil.

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