China, Xi, stagnation and its future; will its apologists ever stop?

Foreign Affairs explicitly calls it "Xi's Age of Stagnation." Yes, it is Beltway-type wisdom, but nonetheless, it's backed up by others.

The starting point is COVID, of course. The mishandling of what happened at Wuhan was likely exacerbated by Xi's increasingly tight semi-authoritarianism. Again, it's not just the Nat-sec Nutsacks and Cold Warriors 2.0 who say this. Less credulous precincts of the left (ie, NOT Howie Hawkins and his China minders, Margaret Flowers and the late Kevin Zeese, with more here, along with cultists like Rainier Shea and hacks for money like Max Blumenthal, or alleged but WTF not really leftists in my book like Adam Tooze) know that China blew it from early on, on COVID, whether there was a lab leak or not. (And, per Pro Publica et al, I say there is a reasonable to fairly high probably there was.)

Follow that with lockdowns whenever strains of COVID raised their heads, in fair part because Sinovax et al suck even by mRNA effectiveness standards, and neither China nor Russia developed alternatives to mRNA type shots like Novavax, Johnson & Johnson etc., and the Chinese economy stagnated indeed. Western nations being impacted by COVID and their residents cutting purchasing, followed by supply chain snafus etc., exacerbated this.

Meanwhile, by a year ago, despite Beijing's official lies by silence, likely at least 2 million had been killed.

Then, as the Foreign Affairs piece notes, Xi went Great Barrington Declaration after the mass shutdowns in Shanghai, draconian ones indeed, in summer-fall of 2022 produced protest levels (and samidzat comments) that even he couldn't ignore. Let er rip! And he did, and per the piece killed another million or so. (Given just how bad rural health care is in much of China, it was probably well over 1 million. China probably has 3.5 million, maybe 4 million, COVID deaths.)

But, despite these mistakes, The Great Virusman (I see what I did) got his third term, and luckily for him, got it before Shanghai blew up, and is on his way to being China's third leader for life or nearly so, after Mao and Deng.

From there, we get into items newish to me. That's about how Xi's Great Firewall and other thought control affect what might be considered a "middle class" in China, not just the intellectuals. But, intellectuals, especially at universities, bear the brunt of the stifling.

But, the middle class really worries about the economic fallout. Like this:

Ordinary Chinese workers have a different set of concerns, mostly relating to the economy and the pandemic. During the first quarter of 2023, China’s slowing economy barely reached the government growth target of five percent, and it achieved that level only with heavy state spending. The youth unemployment rate is over 20 percent, and many people wonder how their children will be able to get married if they cannot afford to buy an apartment. Figures for the second quarter were slightly better, but only compared with the second quarter of last year, when the economy was nearly brought to a standstill by COVID lockdowns. A variety of indicators show growing vulnerabilities in a range of sectors, and many Chinese feel they are in a recession. A group of textile manufacturers from Wenzhou in coastal Zhejiang Province told me that sales across China are down 20 percent this year, forcing them to lay off staff. They believe the economy will recover, but they also think that the go-go years are gone. “We’re in a cloudier era,” one of them said.

Oof. The piece adds that the whiplashes of full lockdowns followed by semi-complete liftings, then back again, have other psychological fallout.

Meanwhile, the stagnation means that, contra Xi's Overton window attempts to define them away, poverty and even homelessness still exist in China.

As for Xi? The piece says that Deng did (some degree of) experimentation but implicitly expresses doubt he has the personal flexibility to do similar. 

Other things? Per this book on global carbon footprints, Xi's China is still "dirty" in a lot of its manufacturing. Ditto for its electric generation, despite all the talk of China greening up. Result? Chinese carbon emissions are a fair chunk higher than the US per ton of CO2 and a lot higher than Western Europe.

Another piece on its stagnation, from Heatmap, ties it with clean energy. It notes that Xi is doubling down on state capitalism, especially in heavy industry and manufacturing. That, in turn, means lots of cement, and if you know anything about climate change, you know that cement production is a bad carbon emitter.

On the flip side, it notes the state capitalism is likely to produce a glut of electric cars. With China already the world's largest carmaking country, many would be exported. This would hit the US industry hard, and probably be catastrophic for Europe, notes Robinson Mayer. (Note: He's formerly of the Atlantic, so like the first piece, this has an establishmentarian angle.)