Gaine
AgelessThrival™
Magazine

Article from Issue #56 (April 7, 2023)

Fascism Will Destroy Itself, Part 4: China

by Mark Hall

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When looking at the list of countries falling into fascism and authoritarianism, you can see that most of those countries also have failed economies, extreme poverty and conflict.

China is something of an outlier though. The Chinese economy is on the rise, and China, formerly considered a third-world country, is rapidly developing and modernizing and poised to become the dominant economic power of the world.

However, there is a dark side to China's rise to prominence in the world. The government has absolutely no pretense of democracy. The Chinese government's rejection of democracy can be seen plain as day when you look at the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. There is only one party: the Chinese Communist Party. And in the year 2018, president Xi Jinping abolished term limits, effectively declaring himself president for life.

One of the areas in which the Chinese government exerts its control is in the media, particularly the internet. There are so many restrictions on internet content that it has come to be referred to as the "Great Firewall of China". If you live in China, you cannot access Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Wikipedia, Whatsapp, Reddit and many other popular websites which make up a huge portion of online activity elsewhere in the world. It's almost as if China has a completely separate internet of its own. This allows them to control the whole narrative of the media.

China has cracked down on its own people violently many times in recent history. Any group of people which does not match the ideals of the government are subject to human rights abuses. Their intolerance of religious practices is shown by their campaigns of cultural genocide against the Uyghur muslim minority group and Falun Gong practitioners.

A Big, Stupid Mistake on the Horizon

When one person has too much power without checks and balances, it's inevitable that eventually they are going to make a big, stupid mistake. And nobody under them is going to be able to stop them even if they know how stupid it is. We saw that in Russia when Putin made the incredibly stupid decision to launch a full scale invasion on Ukraine.

The same kind of situation is forming in China with regards to Taiwan. The similarities are too glaring to ignore. China considers Taiwan to be a part of China, while Taiwan considers itself independent and has its own democratic government. Tensions around Taiwan have been increasing lately between the US and China, and the possibility of war is greater than ever.

It would not be a good idea for China. Taiwan is an island 160 km away from mainland China so any invasion would have to involve a huge naval force that could not be hidden and would be devastated by Taiwan's defenses on the way across the water. And once they got there, they would be fighting in dense cities and forested mountain terrain, a tactical nightmare which would be made even worse by the logistical issues of sending supplies from China across the water.

Compounding their difficulties would be that the US would likely get directly involved in the conflict, and other allied countries as well. There would simply be no way to win. It would be an even worse disaster than Russia's invasion of Ukraine, with a much higher cost of human lives on both sides, the end result being a total breakdown of the Chinese economy (or in the worst case scenario, a nuclear World War where everyone loses). It's quite likely that Xi Jinping knows this and is just bluffing, but when one person has so much power, you can never really predict how stupid that single individual can be.