Fuck You, Balloon

 We shot the Chinese balloon down off the coast of Carolina. 

China is in an interesting place right now. (And not just because we are studying China in class.) A few things to consider.

- Xi Xinping has dismantled the party leadership structure put in place by Deng Xiaopeng 40 years ago to prevent the rise of another disastrous leader like Mao. Deng's basic idea is that you can have different factions rotate through power, that all paramount leaders should have ten year terms and party leadership should have a mandatory retirement age. All of this was designed to avoid exactly the sort of stovepipe decision making we've seen Putin execute in Ukraine. Mao made a terrible choice with the Great Leap Forward because there was no other voice to counter him, and when he was sidelined, he made as bad a choice with the Cultural Revolution. Deng wanted to avoid another Mao-type leader.

- Part of Xi's plan was to rely on China's rise to equal global power with the US and the EU. The three economies are more or less the three largest in the world, though America is a far richer country, once you divide per capita. Xi was hoping China's continued economic ascendency would allow it to form a tri-polar world between Beijing, Washington and Brussels.

- Another part of this plan was to ally with other autocratic regimes like, I dunno, Russia and Iran. This would give China an alliance of its own as a counterweight to the US/EU. Russia would hopefully be a help in fracturing the EU through support of efforts like Brexit or Catalonian independence. Now, Russia has managed to revitalize and reinvigorate both the EU and NATO, with the US firmly reorienting itself towards both Europe and East Asia and away from the Middle East. Putin's bloody blunder in Ukraine has to be making him reconsider his friendliness towards Moscow. And the brutal crackdowns in Iran can't bode well for the long term stability of THAT regime, either.

- Additionally, the ability of NATO to effectively arm Ukraine and hold Russia largely at bay will have to make him reconsider any plans he might have to forcefully conquer Taiwan. The US, Japan and other East Asian countries worried about China will now have reason to be proactive in arming Taiwan for its defense.

- China recently relaxed its draconian Covid restrictions in the face of widespread public opposition. The Chinese regime has been quite clever in how it approaches certain types of protest. It isn't like Iran where if you start protesting, the Revolutionary Guard just starts shooting. The Chinese state - ostensibly, but not actually communist - understands that repressing the "people" has a downside. (This offer not valid in Tibet or Xinjiang.) We spoke in class whether the Chinese state if "brittle" (like Russia) "adaptive" or "consultative". Is there appetite among the Chinese people for a potentially damaging conflict with the West?

So this is an inflection point for China, and the balloon is just part of it. It's embarrassing. Everybody spies, but you aren't supposed to get caught so publicly. They've yoked themselves, to a degree, to a Russia that seems dangerously off the rails. They're picking fights with India - a country that will soon surpass them as the largest in the world. 

Deng put in place a system to shield China from bad decision making. Xi tore it down. Is he already beginning to step on rakes?

UPDATE: The "discourse" over the balloon itself is pretty stupid.