HatTip to Ben for calling attention to this remarkable story.
Essentially China’s “Belt and Road” initiative is a system of China putting massive infrastructure investment funds into a targeted country in exchange for their ability to extract resources needed for Chinese expansion. However, several nations are now rising up against the Chinese influence as it surfaces in the lives of the citizens.
Angola is a case study in China investing billions and with the investment a large number of Chinese citizens arrive set up businesses there. Over time resentment against the Chinese has been building. Then a flashpoint with a massive jump in gas prices. Suddenly, anarchy erupts, and all the Chinese businesses are looted, some even killed in the violence.
[READ STORY HERE]
China is now evacuating some of the 300,000+ Chinese citizens from the region, and the Chinese embassy is urgently warning people about the escalating crisis.
Remember when Tunis erupted at the origin of the “Arab Spring”? That was a combined economic and cultural flashpoint. This escalating problem in Africa has a similar theme to it.
People often talk about the ‘strength’ of China’s economic model; and indeed within a specific part of their economy -manufacturing- they do have economic strength. However, the underlying critical architecture of the Chinese economic model is structurally flawed and President Trump with his current economic team understand the weakness better than all international adversaries.
Lets take a stroll and lightly discuss.
China is a central planning economy. Meaning it never was an outcropping of natural economic conditions. China was/is controlled as a communist style central-planning government; As such, it is important to reference the basic structural reality that China’s economy was created from the top down.
This construct of government creation is a key big picture distinction that sets the backdrop to understand how weak the economy really is.
Any nations’ economic model is only as stable (or strong) as the underlying architecture or infrastructure of the actual country.
Think about economic strength and stability this way: If a nation was economically walled off from all other nations, can it survive? …can it sustain itself?
In the big picture – economic strength is an outcome of the ability of a nation, any nation, to support itself first and foremost. If a nations’ economy is dependent on other nations’ for it to inherently survive it is less strong than a nation whose economy is more independent.
You might not realize it, but China is an extremely dependent nation.
When the central planning for the 21st century Chinese Economy was constructed, there were several critical cultural flaws, dynamics exclusive to China, that needed to be overcome in order to build their economic model. It took China several decades to map out a way to economic growth that could overcome the inherent critical flaws.
Critical Flaws To Exploit:
♦Because of the oppressive nature of the Chinese compliant culture, the citizens within China do not innovate or create. The “Compliance Mindset” is part of the intellectual DNA strain of a Chinese citizen.
Broadly speaking, the modern era Chinese are not able to think outside the box per se’ because the reference of all civil activity has been a history of box control by government, and compliance to stay (think) only within the approved box. The lack of intellectual thought mapping needed for innovation is why China relies on intellectual theft of innovation created by others.
American culture specifically is based around freedom of thought and severe disdain of government telling us what to do; THAT freedom is necessary for innovation. That freedom actually creates innovation.
Again, broadly speaking Chinese are better students in American schools and universities because the Chinese are culturally compliant. They work well with academics and established formulas, and within established systems, but they cannot create the formula or system themselves.
♦ The Chinese Planning Authority skipped the economic cornerstone. When China planned out their economic entry, they did so from a top-down perspective. They immediately wanted to be manufacturers of stuff. They saw their worker population as a strategic advantage, but they never put the source origination infrastructure into place in order to supply their manufacturing needs. China has no infrastructure for raw material extraction or exploitation.
China relies on: importing raw material, applying their economic skillset (manufacturing), and then exporting finished goods. This is the basic economic structure of the Chinese economy.
See the flaw?
Cut off the raw material, and the China economy slows, contracts, and if nations react severely enough with export material boycotts the entire Chinese economy implodes.
Insert big flashy sign for: “One-Belt / One-Road” HERE
Again, we reference the earlier point: Economic strength is the ability of a nation to sustain itself. [Think about an economy during conflict or war] China cannot independently sustain itself, therefore China is necessarily vulnerable.
China is dependent on Imports (raw materials) AND Exports (finished goods).
♦The 800lb Panda in the room is that China is arguably the least balanced economy in the modern world. Hence, China has to take extraordinary measures to secure their supply chain. This economic dependency is also why China has recently spent so much on military expansion etc., they must protect their vulnerable interests.
Everything important to the Chinese Economy surrounds their critical need to secure a strong global supply chain of raw material to import, and leveraged trade agreements for export.
China’s economy is deep (manufacturing), but China’s economy is also narrow.
China could have spent the time to create a broad-based economy, but the lack of early 1900’s foresight, in conjunction with their communist top-down totalitarian system and a massive population, led to central government decisions to subvert the bottom-up building-out and take short-cuts. Their population controls only worsened their long term ability to ever broaden their economic model.
It takes a population of young avg-skilled workers to do the hard work of building a raw material infrastructure. Mine workers, dredge builders, roads and railways, bridges and tunnels etc. All of these require young strong bodies. The Chinese cultural/population decisions amid the economic builders precluded this proactive outlook; now they have an aging population and are incapable of doing it.
This is why China has now positioned their economic system as dependent on them being an economic bully. They must retain their supply chain: import raw materials – export finished goods, at all costs.
This inherent economic structure is a weakness China must continually address through policies toward other nations. Hence, “One-Belt / One-Road” is essentially their ‘bully plan’ to ensure their supply chain and long-term economic viability.
This economic structure, and the reality of China as a dependent economic model, also puts China at risk from the effects of global economic contraction.
This should be emcouraged, even in the US. If the CCP owns it, sack it.
So you want to sack the RINOs.
So the black dude on the right in the cover photo stole bicycle inner tubes? ‘;-) !!!
One man’s inner tube is another man’s heavy duty slingshot.
The dude with the bicycle inner tubes might actually be someone who does swipe work boots during a riot?
Serious question: why do we never see White people looting stores when things get out of control?
Does it not happen? Does the MSM only report when Blacks do it because they want to stir up racial tension?
Or is there some cultural rule that says it’s okay for them to break the law without impunity while others go to prison?
Asking for a racist friend. 😬
My take on John’s question:
Ever since the 1960 with the riots in Detroit and other cities, the movement of MLK the communist backed civil rights movement we have praised the fighting spirit of Rosa Parks and others. Much of it is perhaps good, but the message taught in schools since them is that rioting is what the good and righteous do when they are being persecuted. Privileged white people do not have the right to rebel and riot.
Sum Ting Wong
Bang Ding Ow
To be fair, while China has more than its share of taking advantage of the world the US did the same way back when the US did the same thing to the Chinese by bringing them in as labor for the railroads and the mines. They were treated poorly during that time.
All the railroad workers were treated badly. The Irish were imported to build all the railroads east of western Utah. About 90 percent of American railroads. Treated as badly as the Chinese The Railroads in California were built by Chinese. Not the railroads in Oregon and Washington. Irish also built the railroads in Mexico. Treated as badly as the Irish and Chinese who built the American railroads.
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Excels in construction… Is that why when China went into Tajikistan to do some deals, it put up buildings in Dushanbe with fancy facades made of styrofoam?
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Can’t innovate, but they’re first in class at reverse engineering.
As if Chinese bosses operating in any African country was ever a good idea.
The chicoms are Capitalists as long as the ruling class gets their large cut of the profits.
I’ll give you a good example of China’s economic bullying as it applies to securing raw materials. China has a “rogue” deep sea fishing fleet that travels the world exploiting off shore fishing in and around Africa, South America, and a lot of the Pacific. A number of countries have had to resort to sending out naval ships to drive them off. And, we’re not talking about a few guys in boats. The Chinese fishing fleet is estimated to number upwards of 15,000 vessels.
What happened is that the Chinese overfished their own waters, and had to go with a “distant waters” fleet that dwarfs most of the country’s entire fishing fleets where they exploit (a lot of the time illegally) off shore waters. China is the world’s largest seafood exporter, and the world’s largest consumer. China consumes about 38% of the world’s global seafood.
So, this very issue fits in perfectly with Sundance’s excellent explanation of China’s economic bullying.
The US Coast Guard has several patrol vessels based in Guam and is planning for two larger cutters to conduct fishery patrols with our treaty partners in that area. It’s a massive stretch of ocean and the USCG is stretched thin.
But what good is a best-in-the-world anything if one can’t be in the right place to apply it?
When the internet grew out in the 1990’s and 2000’s, I thought it would become the Great Liberator and spread democracy across the globe. It’s been my great disappointment that it became anything but.
I really thought that when Google entered China that the internet would be wide open, instead they learned how to censor everything, and the other tech companies followed suit. I mean, look what happened here at CTH.
(It never really dawned on me until much later that Google was co founded by a former Soviet citizen.)
The ChiComs want two things, power and money. I don’t understand how we can do business with them when fought Communism on so many fronts and on so many levels for the last century. I get why, I mean, watch YouTube videos of appliance ads from the 80’s, my tv costs less now without inflation than they did then. I just don’t understand how we gave up on the moral high ground just because of money.
I don’t think the Henry Kissingers of the world thought it would work out this way when Nixon normalized relations with China.
The internet did open the eyes of the Chinese people especially the younger generations to look towards capitalism. Xi and the CCP adopted capitalism but changed it to their preferred system. It has changed China in a huge way but the side effects are also huge. China has taken control of the narrative with their social credit system.
It cannot be discounted that a big chunk of the younger population yearn for the freedoms we have in the US and other parts of the world. That’s why so many students go to foreign universities.
Agree, mostly.
To be clear, Chinese students are sent to foreign universities. Yes, they are programmed to want to go, especially to the Ivies. I have hosted a Chinese high school student in the past, and if you think Ivy League-itis is bad here, it is even worse among Chinese elites.
Never forget that nothing and no one leaves China that the government did not allow, and that all Chinese emigrants are sworn to obey the CCP, and that the CCP has set up police stations around the world to ensure compliance.
Xi, I’ll see your 300 “kwanzas” and raise you 300; and here, a “kwanza” is supposed to be a holiday, so Happy Kwanza.
It is always about the resources, power, control, money, sex, and race. I reckon human nature will never change.
That was a terrific, concise, and readily-understood summary!
In a few paragraphs, CTH gives the broad outline of the pros and cons of Mainland China’s economy!
Seems the Chinese never learn. From 2011;
An unintentional comedy with gold in the video’s comment section.
Holy Smokes that guy’s Chinese is Really. Good.
Japan suffered the same way, leading to their invasion of China and Indochina in the 1930s. Historians argue that the Roosevelt oil embargo of Japan left their government with the belief that they had no choice but to attack the United States. Thus, Pearl Harbor.
As in the Japan of old, it is a small, powerful cadre of “leaders” and a well armed military that they use to assert their power. When in fact it is fear that drives them to behave that way. I guess the Angolans, who are very familiar with brutality, gave the CCP pause to rethink their strategy there.
Japan learned from their past mistakes. The chinese still haven’t figured it out.
They figured out, like the postwar japs, that you can get away with stealing intellectual property and putting up trade barriers as long as Wall Street makes money.
China needs resources one way or another. Angolans may not have a choice.
not only oil. But metals also………
Remember Biden went to Angola before the end of his potemkin presidency
Why?
Didn’t remember that but you are right
https://china.usembassy-china.org.cn/fact-sheet-president-bidens-trip-to-angola/
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-bidens-visit-to-angola-matters/
Quite likely on behalf of his CCP owners.
It’s hard not to remain in suspicious cat mode.
Any chance this is the opening act of a CIA-instigated color revolution, designed to open another front in their proxy war against Trump by triggering the PLA of China to “send military advisors” along with naval support to Africa to quell the violence?
How would UN Security Council members react to China putting boots on the ground in Africa?
How would Trump respond to a sudden Chinese naval presence in the Atlantic?
You know the beauty of this which is what SD has already surmised. The Chinese do not even have the naval strength to do that. Africa knows this and I am sure our “hopefully reformed”(after losing 37 top secret clearances) CIA is telling them not to worry. React? The Chinese will NEVER put boots on the ground in Africa. Americans would not even have to get involved. It would be a blood bath and the Americans would just be invited in to partner up with the Africans in real partnerships and conduct moping up operations and start financial business partnership operations where the host country would make money. Not just those on the top.
The chinese already have boots on the ground in Djibouti. If they want to send troops to Angola, have at it! The chinese are not known for their military prowess. It won’t go well for them.
A billion plus citizens is a huge asset if Chinese government can move them.
Move them where?
(India has a larger population than china. Having a large population is not an achievement).
“You might not realize it, but China is an extremely dependent nation.”
Do you know who understands this?
Donald John Trump.
Why isn’t this story all over the news?
Perhaps because China’s victims are African.
I’ve never been there and I can’t argue your points, but they built an infrastructure that is far superior in many ways to our aged, decaying, poorly maintained infrastructure. They have their big problems but I don’t think the average citizen has to worry about mugged on a city street or their daughter raped by an immigrant.
Your knowledge of China seems to be based on what you hear from the mainstream media (which mostly comes from the CCP). Folks who know China know that the society is corrupt. Parents don’t leave their children alone because there is a huge risk they will be kidnapped. Street vendors have folks walk right up and take their goods without paying for it. Watch the daytime videos of the skyscrapers and you will see that they have metal cages on the patios to keep people from climbing up and breaking in…and it goes all the way up the building. They video themselves sleeping to record anyone breaking into their home when they sleep. Concrete structures recently built already show signs of crumbling because the contractor rushed construction using plastic rebar and crumbling concrete. Their infrastructure is a lot of smoke and mirrors made to look good but is of extremely poor quality. And most of the videos will be taken at night so you don’t see the extreme air pollution. Every society has problems, no doubt, but don’t believe what you see from the CCP. It is for show to make you feel badly about your country.
There is a reason they call the goods coming out of China Cheap Chinese Chit.
Traditional Chinese culture for 4 thousand years. Remember when Chinese were paying a fortune for baby formula from Singapore Philippines because Chinese made baby formula was toxic? Or the cough syrup that killed some kids in S America?
… and they have cameras with facial recognition everywhere spying on their own citizens.
What a paradise!
I highly recommend this video channel (and the two blokes comprising it) for current, shoes-on-the-ground info and ‘trvth’ about what is taking place in China –
https://www.youtube.com/@thechinashow
These guys cover the social unrest, the Tofu Dreg (poor) construction, the failed and failing NEW infrastructure owing to poor materials and poor management of same …
China isn’t the paradise on any front that you claim …
And let’s not forget SerpentZA’s excellent coverage as well
Yes; He’s a member of that 2-man team on The China Show! He and C-Milk/Laoway86 do an excellent job!
You do realize the infrastructure Sundance is talking about is nit merely roads and buildings right?
Do you mean like the record number of power plants they’re building, or their massive dam projects, one complete, one on its way? Their mines, their ore refineries? New ports and upgrades to ports? Shipbuilding facilities? Internet everywhere?
”
Is Chinese Military a Potemkin Village
The term “Potemkin village” refers to an elaborate facade designed to hide an undesirable reality, originating from the alleged actions of Russian statesman Grigory Potemkin, who supposedly created fake villages to impress Empress Catherine the Great. Today, the phrase is used figuratively to describe situations where appearances deceive observers about underlying weaknesses.
Some analysts have raised concerns that China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), might resemble a “Potemkin military,” drawing parallels with Russia’s armed forces before its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which appeared strong but underperformed due to corruption and incompetence. Observers point to Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s repeated anti-corruption campaigns within the military, including a purge that removed over a dozen senior generals and defense executives, as evidence of systemic issues. There are reports of serious fraud, such as missiles being filled with water instead of fuel, with officials allegedly pocketing the funds meant for maintenance and readiness.
Concerns also stem from the nature of civil-military relations in authoritarian systems. In China’s Leninist system, political loyalty is prioritized over military competence, with extensive party control mechanisms like political commissars embedded throughout the armed forces. This coup-proofing strategy may undermine operational effectiveness, especially in high-pressure combat scenarios. Additionally, in such regimes, leaders often receive only favorable information, making it difficult to assess true military readiness—a problem exemplified by Vladimir Putin’s misjudgment of Russian military capabilities before the Ukraine war.”
Let us hope this is so.
“One-Belt / One-Road”= IF YOU DON’T TAKE OUR ROAD, WE WILL BELT YOU
No country can sustain itself to survive as a Great Power unless it can provide four essential needs:
Lacking any of those essentials makes a country dependent on others to survive over the long term. It can never be a Great Power because it is hostage to others. It might become rich and temporarily powerful or powerful within a specific corner of the world but it will always have a fatal vulnerability it cannot eliminate.
China fails this test on 3 out of 4 needs and perhaps all four. China must import food and fuel. The PRCs’ demographics are broken because the One Child rule aborted the girl-babies they need to reproduce. China has massive manufacturing capacity to churn out armaments but must import key materials and key components like high-performance aircraft engines it cannot make itself.
Europe and Japan are severely lacking in multiple areas. They will never again rise to the status of Great Powers in the foreseeable future.
The US has historically had all four bases covered. America’s four-fold dominance won World War Two by supporting a simultaneous massive military efforts in two theaters at once, all while also providing much of the the food, fuel and weaponry used by ALL of our major allies including Russia and China.
Outsourcing, “Green” insanity, the “peace dividend,” the LGBT movement and crash in birthrates have imperiled America’s ability to hold up all four crucial requirements.
Making America Great Again is the best chance the USA has to regain its former strength in all four essentials.
Russia is the only other country in the world, other than the US, who can provide itself all four essentials.
Food do you know that China imports rice from America, actually California? The California rice was originally imported from China. So it’s basically Chinese rice. And China buys it from the USA.
Vertical collectivism apart from the leveling effects of ~free-market capitalism (not corporatism) always descends into tyranny.
It would be nice to see Canadians give the CCP and their own totalitarian government the boot.
Excellent summary. Chinese who arrived in Africa with other migrant flows do well but those who came later do not integrate.
Serpentza on YouTube has an excellent channel highlighting the problems in China. Boots on the ground coverage as he lived there and has a Chinese wife
My answer to China is so wonderful is. If China’s so great why do they swarm to America? From the richest and brightest to the restaurant and sweatshop coolies? Or to Italy to work in the underground clothing industry?
There is a lady on YouTube suggesting that China does not in fact have over 1 billion people. She takes the baseline population from 1990, and then runs forward using birth rates and mortality rates. She comes up with a number just under 1 billion, somewhere between 600 and 900 million. She uses India as a control, and finds the method works well for predicting the current official reported population and demographics of India, but not for China.
China is fudging population numbers upward, overstating their population by as much as 40%.
Then, she questions exactly how many Chinese died during Covid. Tens of millions? Hundreds of millions? How much excess death did the Chinese population absorb during the pandemic?
So, what is the truth? Hard to say. But when you look at China’s vital statistics over the last 30 years, the math doesn’t add up.
https://youtube.com/shorts/WrclhCW00cc?si=BAbOPccY4tceUjbX
To get the total,
There is population living in the c c p homeland
plus
the population already living in other places ( infiltration) – and untold serving a purpose for c c p homeland?
Imho
Lets put it this way. Pretty much everything China brags about is a lie.
So, if China is in a world war, it must defend thousands of points of supply not only against their engaged adversary, but also against the indigenous peoples at each point in the chain? Wow-I can’t believe I just saw that!
You can’t do business with a 70 IQ population and not end up in a COUP, Africa is destined to remain in its current state forever.
The chinese operations in Africa follow an established pattern:
Set up some enterprise be it a farm, factory, mine or what have you.
Find out in very short order that africans are very low IQ, have zero work ethic, punctuality, impulse control or competencies
Try to instill those values by basically mocking the employees in an overtly racist manner
Give up and import chinese workers to replace the africans
Fired africans torch the business
Rinse, repeat
Check out the Carnival cruise line videos. The Asians who are the employees just flee the scene. Shaking my head.
I am not surprised that the Angolans have had enough of the belt and road strangling them about the neck. A few years ago I was in Dominica and talking with a gentleman there who told me what happened once the belt and road agreements were inked. The CCP brought in Chinese workers to replace the Dominicans and took over businesses or started their own to replace the Domincan suppliers. It remains a mess.
“In the big picture – economic strength is an outcome of the ability of a nation, any nation, to support itself first and foremost. If a nations’ economy is dependent on other nations’ for it to inherently survive it is less strong than a nation whose economy is more independent.
You might not realize it, but China is an extremely dependent nation.”
” The lack of intellectual thought mapping needed for innovation is why China relies on intellectual theft of innovation created by others.”
I have been waiting a very long time to see this put in writing. The whole crux of the matter.
Can’t remember if it was Hayek or Mises who wrote it first. I think it was Hayek. But it has been “in writing” for decades.
MAGFTFT
Make Angola Great For The First Time
“…China has recently spent so much on military expansion etc. …” and I find that “expansion” worrisome.
The little and generally facile coverage of the months long, daily protests in Serbia also fail to identify the popular resentment of Chinese infiltration into their country as the primary driver.
“importing raw material, applying their economic skillset (manufacturing), and then exporting finished goods. This is the basic economic structure of the Chinese economy”
That is exactly how ALL WEALTH is created unlike the USSA that just seems to be shuffling houses around at ever higher prices all based on more and more borrowing.
If only someone had warned them.
So many issues with this article, its not even worth responding to.
This was nearly a complete miss, Sundance. Incorrect premises, faulty reasoning, erroneous conclusions mixed with some things that are vaguely right, but are not impactful in the short or medium term. And then avoids some of the real issues, like real estate and capital controls.
If people want to understand economics in China, I invite you to turn to the expert, Michael Pettis. The guy who advises Trump on China.