Red China's Big Problems

Some of you will recall George Friedman from his days at Stratfor.  He left that firm in 2015 and founded Geopolitical Futures.  He writes a bit about Red China.

The Chinese People’s Liberation Army has begun minor operations to try to quell the unrest in Hong Kong. This is a step that the Chinese hoped to avoid. For one thing, they wanted to portray the unrest as minor, not requiring their intervention. For another, they did not want issues raised about Chinese human rights violations, which inevitably emerge in such interventions. At a time when China is trying to portray itself as the global alternative to the United States, it doesn’t want other countries, particularly those in Europe, noticing human rights abuses.

This strategy took another huge blow with the leak over the weekend of government documents describing in detail a broad Chinese assault that has been underway for several years on the ethnic minority Uighur community in the western province of Xinjiang. The documents gave detailed accounts of massive detention camps for “retraining” purposes and the separation of families on a scale that is startling even for China. Beijing clearly wants to break the back of Islam in the province....

The documents to which he refers are flat-out damning of the Red Chinese government.  This comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with Totalitarianism, of course.

Anyhow, the repression of the Uighur Muslims is nasty business, and releasing documents about that business is serious.  So who released them?

Friedman suspects that it was a dissident faction within the Central Committee, which is Xi's boss.

...The Central Committee is the ultimate arbiter of what China does, particularly if the president weakens and loses his way. ... The Central Committee is usually opaque, as it is now, but if there is opposition developing to Xi, and it is hard to imagine there is not, then release of these documents merely turns a known event into a global event, further showing Xi’s incompetence....

Xi was supposed to 'handle' US Presidents.  That was easy with someone who could be purchased (Clinton), who was a bit......ahhh........stupid (Bush), or who was stupid AND gutless (Obama.)  But Trump is none of the above, and Trump knows what those bastards in Red China have done to the USA--and he wants it fixed.   Now.

Xi is not up to the task of "handling" Trump.  As a result, the country is bleeding money, losing sales, and its banks have become models of instability.  There is insurrection in Hong Kong, the Dalai Lama is not going to shut up.......and now, China is forced to purchase US pork and TEA!!

The AOSHQ's question is simple:  what if Trump IS as smart as he thinks he is??