What Beijing wishes to avoid at all costs

In the battle for world power, Beijing is trying to make the US think China is not dangerous. As long as that opinion prevails and the US remains reassured, it hopes the White House will not act. China is particularly keen to avoid is that the US should restrict free trade with China because, with its production costs still kept below 50% of US costs, that free trade ensures China can export more and more and thus can become richer and richer. Chinese exports already exceed its imports by more than $800 billion annually. In the process, China is becoming master in ever more markets such as, recently, with electric cars. China’s trade surplus will therefore continue to grow, predictably becoming $1trillion soon. It is already huge now.

Any article published in the US indicating that China is not dangerous is therefore in the interest of Beijing. Notable in this regard is that, on many of those articles, (co)authors were born in China and still live there today or, living here, are now even naturalized Americans. For decades these authors have been writing that things are going wrong in China when, in reality, the Chinese economy has been growing faster than anywhere else. One wonders whether these reassuring predictions, continuing every year and obviiously wrong, are coincidence or that they are, maybe, quietly steered by Beijing. This article will not goninto that now. See for that my soon to be published book about China. For now, we’ll look at what is being published in the US and I will look at two recent articles.

1 - The prestigious Washingtoin Post, today 17/1/‘23, published "China's population falls for a 2nd straight year as births drop even after end of one-child policy". https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/01/16/china-population-births-deaths-covid/dd589156-b4dd-11ee-b285-0853d4d1b92f_story.html, and

2 - On CNN we find "China's population declines for second straight year as economy stumbles". Anyone reading that article will conclude that China is now in economic trouble. But that is false information!  https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/17/economy/china-population-gdp-decline-2023/index.html.So let’s  look at that CNN article.

One of the two authors is Laura He, who lives in HongKong. By the way, you can only live there safely these days if the regime sees you as 'China friendly'. So that must be her position there.

The first paragraph says "China reports a record low birth rate in 2023, while the population has shrunk for the second year in a row. This trend marks a demographic problem that will have significant consequences for this world's second-largest economy." But "significant consequences is an inaccurate prediction, because it ignores that China still has a reserve of more than 200 million poor citizens who can work hard but do not yet participate in the production process and thus do not appear in the statistics. Those 200 million are conveniently being forgotten in this article.

The population drops from year to year by 2 million out of 1.4 billion, the article says. So a decline of 0.4%. That's not that big a drop! A decline might even be beneficial. There are perhaps, even in the eyes of China itself, a little too many Chinese. A little reduction certainly does no harm.

And then: "China's 'National Bureau of Statistics' confirmed that the Chinese economy grew by 5.2% last year, compared with a government target of about 5%, still one of the country's worst economic performances in more than three decades." A worst economic performance? What the authors fail to mention is that more than 5% growth is extremely favorable for this already huge economy. If we had that in the EU, we would be cheering! In other words, this article has double standards.

- And then: 'Chinese stocks have collapsed '. This is certainly true, but it has no bearing on the still ongoing enrichment.

- "China's GDP growth will decelerate to 4.1% in 2024 ". Perhaps true, but even a growth of 4.1% is still very good.

- "The price of new homes has dropped". This is actually beneficial, as it means young working people in China can finally hope to own their own home again one day. That went wrong recently, it became far too expensive. So that is coming down nicely and this is a positive reversal.

- "The falling birth rate coincides with a shrinking labor force". As above, that is patently false if one takes the two hundred million into account.

As a whole, this article breathes the message 'things are going badly over there', while anyone who takes the trouble to look at the figures sees that things are actually going very well. So the negative tone of this article is rubbish! That there are big problems internally is correct, but that is also normal when there are internal shifts. In reality, the Chinese economy is running like clockwork! The message 'things are going badly' is the typical false information of all those Chinese-written articles. The unsuspecting reader of course believes it. This looking away from reality is in Beijing's interest, and the Americans fall for it so much that even American authors participate in this misinformation and write that China is doing badly.
 May I be a bit sarcastic here? If you write about China going badly, you reassure everyone and that makes you a good American, doesn't it?

The question is, what’s wrong with the previously so highly praised American intellectual world? American thinking no longer seems to function properly. Authors only write about the election and Trump. There is no proper thinking in the US anymore and that is dangerous.

January 18, 2024