Bad news for Team Hondo

https://foxnews.com/opinion/christian-whiton-chinas-xi-looks-increasingly-dazed-and-confused-could-hong-kong-win-this-showdown


It wasn’t supposed to be like this. When Xi Jinping effectively crowned himself emperor at the 19th Chinese Communist Party Congress in 2017, consolidating his power by ending a practice of term limits, China was supposed to be ready for its next stage of his meteoric rise.

In a triumphal speech, Xi heralded a “new era” of Chinese power and predicted the nation would become a “mighty force” under his control. But as the summer of 2019 drags on, Xi and the government he leads look increasingly weak and lost.

China’s economy is in the doldrums, put there in part by President Trump’s decision to change U.S. tactics dramatically in long-running trade disputes. Last month, the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics reported the slowest economic growth since 1992. China’s manufacturing index has indicated contraction for all but two months so far this year.



In July, imports fell 5.6% compared to a year before, partly due to less demand for inputs to manufacturing that increasingly is moving out of China. (In the first quarter of this year, foreign investors pumped $10.8 billion into neighboring Vietnam, an increase of 86.2 percent.) China has also nationalized three banks since May with more bailouts expected as its overextended financial system faces extreme risk.

A fair assessment of the U.S.-China trade war shows Washington winning the dispute, although not everyone agrees. In his weekly New York Times column titled “China Tries to Teach Trump Economics,” progressive economist Paul Krugman argued that the president, “…vastly overrates his ability to inflict damage on China while underrating the damage China can do in return.”

In fact, Trump has proven that the opposite is true in imposing tariffs—for a simple reason. Last year, America imported $540 billion in goods from China and exported only $120 billion worth. As the far bigger customer in this relationship, the United States has the power. Even if Beijing stopped all $120 billion in U.S. imports, that amounts to only about half of one percent of U.S. GDP. The impact of tariffs on U.S. consumers has also been negligible. As the former CEO of Toys R Us recently explained, tariffs are “a fraction of a percent…on the average annual consumer basket.”

And then there is Hong Kong. Beijing has gradually been eroding the relative autonomy it promised in repossessing the territory from Britain in 1997, as well as its agreement to allow free elections with universal suffrage. Given its congenital unwillingness to leave well enough alone, Beijing attempted to have its puppets in the territory allow extradition to the Mainland—effectively importing its political repression into a city that has long been effectively part of the West.

The result has been stunning. Massive demonstrations have continued throughout summer, most recently closing the airport. This in a city that supposedly cared singularly about money and where it was long said that only a tiny minority would do more than lament the erosion of freedom. Evidently not.


Worst of all for Beijing, while students and the young are the most active protesters, they are joined by Hong Kong residents from all walks of life—civil servants, bankers, flight attendants, teachers, and the like. The real crisis that events in Hong Kong pose is the question of whether Mainlanders are also poised to challenge the government.

Xi likely believes he can blow past demonstrations in Hong Kong as Beijing did amid smaller protests in 2014. But that doesn’t seem to be the case: average Hong Kong residents have decided that they must defend freedom now.