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China, Again

I’ve been warning for a couple of weeks now that the signs were coming out of China that China itself is not all that stable… That something large was happening in terms of it’s leadership…

Seems I was correct [1].

..Notably, Xi used to dominate state-run newspapers’ front pages and the state.broadcaster CCTV’s news bulletins on a daily basis but has in recent weeks made fewer public appearances. “He can’t shift the blame, so he’s responding by taking a lower profile,” Cheng said.

The challenges so far aren’t seen as a threat to Xi’s grip on power, but for many Chinese, the government’s credibility is on the line.

First of all the AP’s bias can be seen here. Not a threat to his grip on power? When the government is so paranoid that they have to ban Winnie the Pooh because of comparisons between the bear and Xi, (as I mentioned last week [2]) I’d say there are desperate concerns within the current hierarchy about Xi being able to maintain his grip on power.

I also suggested that the tarrifs being imposed by the Trump Administration were, to a large degree, of the cause of the problems within China… that the president’s actions in the matter were precisely correct.

Well, what do you know…

Of greatest concern to many is the trade war with the U.S. that threatens higher tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese exports. Critics say they’ve yet to see a coherent strategy from Beijing that could guide negotiations with Washington and avoid a major blow to the economy. Beijing instead seems to be opting for defiance and retaliatory measures of its own.

Both the stock market and the currency have weakened in response and the Communist Party itself conceded at a meeting last month that external factors were weighing heavily on economic growth.

It would seem that Mr. Trump has a firm grasp of the situation, after all, even if as we know the Press would never say that.