China, Hong Kong and The Art of Blinking
Captain Chaos definitely does not have the cards – which as even South Pacific penguins know, are all made in China.
SHANGHAI and HONG KONG – So, predictably, Captain Chaos did blink first. As much as he – and his sprawling media circus – could not possibly admit it.
It all started with “tariff exemptions” – from smartphones and computers to auto parts – on products imported from China. Then it veered towards carefully manicured leaks implying tariffs “could” be reduced to a range between 50% and 65%. And finally a terse admission that if there’s no deal, a “tariff number” will be unilaterally set.
China’s Ministry of Commerce was unforgiving: “Trying to trade away others’ interests for temporary gains is like bargaining with a tiger for its skin – it will only backfire”.
And it got fiercer. The Ministry was adamant that any Trump 2.0 claims of any progress on bilateral negotiations have “no factual basis” – de facto depicting the US President as a purveyor of fake news.
Tigers, tigers burning bright: the image does not recall poetry superstar William Blake, but Mao’s legendary depiction of the US Empire as a “paper tiger” – a flashback that struck me over and over again last week in Shanghai. If the US Empire was a paper tiger already in the 1960s, the Chinese argue, imagine now.
And the pain will increase, not only for the paper tiger: any dodgy deals made by foreign – vassal – pussycat governments at the expense of Chinese interests simply will be not be tolerated by Beijing.
Last week in Shanghai I was reminded over and over again – by academics and business people – that the weaponized Trump Tariff Tizzy (TTT) goes way beyond China: it is a desperate offense ordered by the US ruling classes against a peer competitor that scares the hell out of them.
The best Chinese analytical minds know exactly what’s going on in Washington. Take for instance this essay originally published by the influential Cultural Horizon magazine breaking down the “triangular power structure” of Trump 2.0.
We have all-power Trump forming a “super-establishment”; Silicon Valley money politics, represented by Elon Musk; and the new right-wing elite represented by VP J.D. Vance. End result: a “governance system that is almost parallel to the federal government.”
European chihuahuas – caught in the crossfire of Trump 2.0 – are simply incapable of such synthetic and precise conceptualization.
Paper tiger
Article from LewRockwell
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