Despite the best hopes of the liberal-minded West, the globalisation and modernisation of China have made its communist rulers less democratic at home and, on the international stage, more belligerent. Xi Jinping is a nasty piece of work. His “anti corruption” efforts have actually been him removing his rivals. His aggression and arrogance in illegally commandeering the South China Sea says it all. The gutless bastards ruining the West have let him get away with it. The UN has let him get away with it.

Xi’s China is a Communist dictatorship. No voting. No freedom of speech. Disappearances. Executions: China executes more people than the rest of the world combined. Any decent person would be appalled that China has not been ostracized.

China exercises a subtle but powerful degree of control over the right of its citizens to closely examine its recent past. The absence of a free media and strict limits on academic freedom give most Chinese citizens a distorted view of world affairs. Many of those Chinese who know anything about the Tiananmen Square massacres believe that the student protests were instigated by agents of foreign powers in the same way that many Muslims believe that the 9/11 World Trade Centre atrocity was instigated by Israel.

The only hope for the West to deal with this dictator for life and his awful country and communist party lies with a Trump America, if the half-wits in that country and the rest of the West will allow it.

YAY VERILY, AMEN, AMEN, AMEN!
Alan B.

The Chinese are limited in what they can do. The threat to dump US treasury bonds will increase their bond yields and drop their value. For example, a 10% drop will devalue China's holdings by $200bn.

Similarly, China's tariffs on US goods has always been higher than US tariffs on Chinese goods and US imports of Chinese goods has been about 3x that of the reverse, so a trade war will hurt China more than the US.

Bring on the blues - we know this already, we always knew what China is all about - the question is what can we do about it? How can we help the oppressed people of China, of the countries it conquered and of the countries it threatens?

"The lesson learned from the collapse of the Soviet Union was the need to have the party retain absolute control."
They've learned the wrong lesson, and it's likely to come back to bite them when the Chinese people learn how irredeemably corrupt their Communist Party is.

The real lessons from the collapse of the Soviet Union were:
1) Don't send yourself bankrupt by keeping your currency's official value far above market rate.
(China learned and heeded that lesson at the time).

2) Ensure the nation is something that the population (in all provinces) want to be part of.
(China learned the lesson, but probably not its full implications)