I'm going to start out this week's piece with something that I have not had a chance to absolutely confirm. However, the person who passed it on to me is someone who I trust in matters of unclassified Intelligence, and he linked to a mention of it in a site that has been reliable in the past.
OK, this whole Covid affair started in the huge Chinese megalopolis of Wuhan, which is on the Yangtze River. Specifically at the Wuhan Institute of Virology owned and run by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and apparently funded in no small part by the U.S. government and a certain American Dr. named Fauci. It is more than passing suspected that contaminated personnel went shopping in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. Which happens to be one of the largest open-air food markets in the world (and, being outdoors its food is largely unrefrigerated and is in the open). The market just happens to be about a block away from the address listed for the Institute, and was/is listed as the center of the first spread of infection.
When this all started, I went on Google and looked up both the Institute and the market and noted the proximity (and satellite pictures and street maps of both). Some months later, I heard the Chinese government claiming that the Institute had NEVER been near that Market and it was an American lie. I checked again, and lo' and behold, the Institute was listed on Google (which is almost a subsidiary of the Chinese government) as being miles away from both the old location I saw and the Market. China has multiple major Covid labs in urban areas. This has some importance in reference to the continuing outbreaks of Covid in China (like in this country, it spreads in crowded, urban areas which is where most of the Chinese population lives) and the reports I referenced above.
Those reports say that at the East China University of Science and Technology in Shanghai, specifically the State Key Laboratory of Bioreactor Engineering, Newworld (sic) Institute of Biotechnology has had a major Covid-19 leak with large numbers of University personnel infected. The University (26,000+ students) has been closed because of the infections. This was on Chinese social media and was swept clear of the Chinese Internet by government order yesterday (11-15-21).
Both on a human and an economic scale, this is not a good thing. Shanghai is the largest city in China (25 million people) and the University is about 20 miles from the sea, which places it near the middle of the city proper. However there are contiguous suburbs that extend for 75 miles up the Yangtze till they hit the contiguous suburbs of Nanjing (also known in English as Nanking) which has 10 million people. This, and the Yangtze drainage as a whole, is the heart of Chinese manufacturing and overseas shipping. And it is now a giant petri dish. Leaving aside the human cost, trade with us could easily be shut down even longer.
And they do not need the additional shut down. Last week, we were talking about the effects of the One Child Policy. Specifically 30 million males of breeding age, and the most productive working age, who will never marry and never have families because there are no women to marry. Deng Xiaoping did prevent a runaway population explosion. But he, like all totalitarian leaders no matter where based, did not take anything into account as far as unwanted consequences.
Just in passing, the females of that age group are benefiting from the scarcity. Many have moved into professional fields and for other reasons are not interested in forming traditional families, making things demographically worse. China's population is not exploding, but it is also not growing as fast as it needs to. Some of those consequences.
One reason for large, extended families in Chinese history has been the need to deal with a high death rate. Like all Third World countries that move into range of being First World, there are cultural and economic changes. China has not been a developed country for all that long. When my dad came over here just before the Great Depression, China in large part was still functionally in the 1600s. Now I am an old man, but still I am of the first generation of my family born here. When I was born, China had just been conquered by the Communists, but the country itself was flat on its back. Except for military matters, China was then functionally in maybe the early 1900s. While I was going to kindergarten, 45,000,000 people in China starved to death because of a government induced collapse of their agricultural system (happens whenever the Left takes over). At that time, the number of people who starved in China was equivalent to one quarter of the population of the United States. My lifetime is one generation of living (not breeding, my kids have kids). One generation. China has grown economically in that one generation to where they are one of the great manufacturing and exporting countries in the world. Think about the changes in China, not only economically but also demographically in that time.
I mentioned one reason for large Chinese families. There is another, too. Chinese culture emphasizes filial piety; respect for and honoring previous generations, both in life and in death. Which implies a concurrent emphasis on the continuation of the family and its name. Which means the traditional emphasis on sons. I will note that my father was the youngest son in the family. He was sent alone, to America, because my grandfather counted sons and counted land he could pass on (he was middle class, not a non-land owning peasant) and there was not enough for each son to be able to support a family on the land he could inherit. As the youngest, my dad was surplus. He was sent to America, for which I am grateful to the grandfather I never met.
But when the grandfather in a Chinese family is too old to work, he was supported by his sons and their families. Thus, when the One Child Policy came about, yeah of course they favored the birth of boys who carried the family name. It may not have been politically correct here, but in terms of Chinese culture in China, it made perfect sense. And it led to death and abandonment for female children and the demographic disaster today.
Even not allowing for the internal political purges and massacres in any Communist system, doing all of this in one freaking generation means a lot of dead people, and a lot of people who are “surplus.” And there are a lot of people who survived once China was unified and the internal wars were done. They are now old. And they do not have enough descendents to support them or maintain a family. There are tens of millions of Chinese males who will never have families. And while there has been tremendous economic growth in that single generation, which kept things together kinda-sorta, that is coming to a screeching halt between Covid and the freeze of international trade. China's economy depends on exports, mainly to us, and on imports, mainly of food. Because China, on a good day with a downhill run, and a blazing tailwind cannot feed itself and cannot internally furnish enough electrical power and heat for its population. It has to import food and fuel.
Now look at the problems they have, seriously. They are still overpopulated in the areas where people can live and make a living. Remember, huge parts of China are mountains and desert and the population clusters in habitable areas. They have a huge population of males in the most productive ages who will never have families, and given the lack of females may never even have a “relationship” with one. Which is functionally the extinction of family lineage. The end of which also involves there being a large number of older people whose whole cultural (not political) life has involved the image of being surrounded by hordes of adoring grandchildren. Toss in the change in the standing of women, both because of the destruction of the old system AND the sheer scarcity of women and you do not have a stable society.
Instability and change can be managed, even in a relatively short period of time, as long as there is not life and death pressure on the members of the society. In the last generation however, that life or death pressure, while not constant has been a definite factor. From the conquest of China by the Communists until the death of Mao, there was political purge after political purge with millions killed, accompanied by massive famine and economic collapse that killed SCORES of millions more. For those who do not know about those days (I am an old man, as I said) I recommend “ESCAPE FROM RED CHINA” by Robert Loh. It will shock and enlighten you about what we face(d). I read it when it was new and I was in fifth grade.
It was only after Mao and his generation of Communist leaders died out (their deaths ended the last of the great purges, the Cultural Revolution, which ran from 1966-1976 and killed up to 20 million people) that the pressure abated. As I said, Deng Xiaoping did do one good thing for China. Buying and selling outside government-run commerce went from being a death penalty offense to official state policy. They bought from us, and the rest of the world, and they sold to us. At first it was simple things, junk mostly. But cheap Chinese labor and capital costs, combined with Chinese government subsidies, and what is one of the primary economic talents of my ethnicity, corruption and payoffs (both foreign and domestic) led to a growing and now near majority of American manufactures being really done in China. And what is not done in whole is dependent on parts, components and computer chips made in and imported from China. That explains why manufactured goods are harder to come by today and shelves are emptying.
The only thing that keeps us from being an economic vassal of China, is the fact that they are not producing enough food to feed everybody at home. We feed our economic masters. We grow and sell them huge quantities of wheat, soybeans, and yes (sigh!) rice. They have the money from their manufacturing to afford to buy both crops and producers. Smithfield Foods, makers of a lot of brands including a lot of pork, was bought by Shanghui Group for $4.7 Billion cash on the barrel and renamed “WH Group.” Literally one out of four pigs raised in this country belongs to the Chinese. The Chinese are the largest annual foreign purchaser of American farmland, and own 192,000 acres. It is only a fraction of the 900 million total acres of American farmland, but it is growing every year. And it is a well-financed growth given that the crops grown on that land are shipped to China, and yet the Chinese receive the same U.S. government agricultural subsidies that American farmers receive.
While the last paragraph is not exactly good news, it might be our saving grace. Which I will explain later in this series. Of the 70 years or so since the Communist conquest, the first 27 were mass murder, famine and political terror. Neither productive nor stable. It took maybe another 10-20 years for American industry to move too much critical production overseas to China (say about the early to mid-1990s, which coincides with some interesting financial transactions with leaders of our government). If we say that things started falling apart on both sides of the Pacific (and worldwide) with the widespread onset of Covid moving from Wuhan to everywhere in 2020; that means that there were maybe 25 years when the transfer of American wealth to China funded the social and economic shortfalls in China.
A whole lot of Chinese people today were raised in what political scientists call a “Revolution of Rising Expectations.” Life has been good, and it is expected by the people to continue. Let me offer something I learned a long time ago as a student of history and political science. Everywhere; here, China, everywhere around the world it is not long periods of poverty and oppression that trigger revolutions. In times like that, people are too busy trying to survive and keep their heads down to overthrow those in power. Revolutions and unrest come when people see that there is a better life possible, and that chance might be taken away from them and their descendents. And it is the middle class, who have the means to resist and who are in communications with others, who make revolutions.
Look at our Founding Fathers. No, they were not small farmers. They were middle class or better, educated especially in the English form of government and rights, and in communication with each other who led free men to liberty. In France, the technically it was the Estates General that overthrew the King; the First Estate being the Church, the Second Estate being Nobles and the Third Estate being commoners. But with the exception a couple of defectors from the First and Second, it was the Third Estate that started the irreversible process with (Non ego te cacas) “the Oath of the Tennis Court.” And that Third Estate was ALL middle and upper class with no peasants or poor urban types represented. In Russia, it was a combination of middle class, lower Nobles, and educated émigrés that plotted the removal or rescue of the Czar on both the Red and the White sides. Even in China, it was both Chinese and Manchu court officials, Nobles, generals, and émigrés who overthrew the Manchu (Qing) Emperor in 1911 and triggered 38 years of war to unify China. The bulk of the people were peasants and just tried to survive the war.
Most of the Chinese alive today expect things to get better, are educated (for the first time in Chinese history almost all Chinese are literate and speak the same dialect), and have means of communication even when the government objects. And they are the ones who are seeing that maybe things are not going to get better, contrary to how they were raised, and they may want to do something about it.
As wie als Fußball-Schläger abgefuckt as we are, and indeed we are, mostly caused by ideological actions by Leftist governments; it has to be realized that CHINA IS WORSE OFF. And that fact will without doubt affect us, whether we like it or not. Wishful thinking will change nothing.
China had the first and widest outbreaks of Covid. Being the earliest, it was the most virulent and deadly forms. The plural of form is deliberate because they seem to breaking out still. Early on, they had to call in the Chinese Army to run mass cremations of the dead. Cities, counties and even whole provinces have been and are forcefully locked down. When the Chinese government enforces a lockdown, violators die.
Our ports are backed up. Chinese ports are even more backed up than ours and many of their major ports have the entire city locked down. NOTHING is moving.
That “nothing” includes food and fuel. We have empty shelves in places; they have cold and empty stomachs.
Their electrical system is collapsing because of lack of fuel for power plants. A couple of weeks ago, I included a map of provinces where there were widespread, prolonged blackouts. That includes most of the population of China. That lack of fuel can only be covered by imports of coal (low-grade and polluting brown coal, which is what they use), since their mines cannot operate during lockdowns and power outages. Oops, ports are shut down.
Another thing that cannot come into closed ports is food. Remember all that they import from us? We are not shipping because our ports and ground transportation are blocked up. Add in another thing. Today is 11-18-21. On the 14th SW Canada was hit by 20+ inches of rain (still raining). There is only one highway and rail route through the mountains connecting the shipping port of Vancouver, BC with the rest of British Columbia, and that route is closed by land and mudslides and flooding. The port of Vancouver is closed. Besides the 2.6 million people in Metro Vancouver who are short of food and power, and getting shorter by the hour; this is the time of year when the Canadian wheat crop that China buys is supposed to ship to China. Oops, ports closed on both ends.
Now toss in one final detail. The newly “re-elected” leader of China is Xi Jingping. He is not like Deng Xiaoping at all. He is closer to Stalin or Nicolae Ceaucescu. He is actively working to dismantle the capitalist aspect of their economy for ideological reasons. Like the part that is making money. Major Chinese businesses are by their nature corrupt. But they are the only game in town. Chinese citizens have been investing, mostly in real estate, for a couple of decades. One of the biggest real estate companies is/was “China Evergrande.” It is defaulting on stocks and bonds in greater amounts than we lost here on the first day of the Great Depression crash. And there are many more doing the same. Xi's reaction is to shut down as many companies as he can. Which will impoverish much of China. Add in the detail that apparently he is the kind of leader that usually ends dynasties. By that I mean that he is known to punish those who present facts he does not want to hear, even if they are true and he needs to know them. So to avoid standing in front of a wall, they say nothing. That is a formula for economic collapse. And with economic collapse in Chinese history usually comes political collapse. And the dance could be on.
. . . something, something, “Rising Expectations.”
Believe it or not, we are close to ending this series. The excess length of this one helps. One or two more should do it, laying out what to watch for and what we can do to survive it.