Sarah Paine

China's nightmare scenario is the collapse of China.

It's two different ways, two different things to worry about.

And the Chinese face a conundrum

If you no longer believe the economic theories on which communism is based, well, how do you justify one party rule?

And the Communist Party has tried to soldier on without solving that problem.

And the Chinese have, I think, learned a great deal from watching Russians as they play around with big ideas.

And I think they learned a great deal from Mikhail Gorbachev when he tries to fix communism, but he winds up killing the patient.

And the Chinese, I think, their takeaways from what Gorbachev did is, don't hesitate to deploy the tanks.

If you got unrest in the streets, you just send tanks.

Tanks against civilians, it's a really quick fix.

and you want to focus on economic reforms to the extent you can, certainly not political reforms, and you really want to sinify your minorities.

Why?

In the Soviet Union, the Russians had had this fiction that all these occupied minority people

wanted to be there and had equal rights, and so they would sponsor all the nice folk dances and the language classes, and they'd have a bunch of token minorities in traditional dress and various political institutions, but basically they had no power.

But it meant when the Soviet Union shattered, there were plausible divisions already set up on an ethnic basis, and that is how you get places like Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, etc.,

China's like, no way.

So this helps explain the genocide of the Uyghurs that's ongoing now.

I think this is their rationale for doing it.

And then what you want to do, and you can see Xi Jinping doing it, is you want to prioritize maintaining the monopoly of the Chinese Communist Party over economic efficiency when those two things run at cross purposes.

And that, I think, helps explain some of Xi Jinping's growth-depressing choices that he's making.