Half of the ENTIRE city budget goes to policing while education, hospitals and mental health services are left with crumbs. We cannot continue this way.
Posted by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Monday, June 22, 2020
Elites in Beijing see America in decline, hastened by Trump Mr Trump and Mr Biden may share a capacity for talking (and talking) in pursuit of a deal. But Mr Xi’s grim, security-first worldview leaves little room for foreign friendships, let alone with garrulous Americans. .......... Mr Trump is called ignorant, erratic and tiresome, but not without his uses. He is praised for an apparent indifference to ideology. He is complimented for his reluctance to condemn Chinese repression in such places as Xinjiang. People familiar with the thinking of Chinese generals assert, approvingly, that Mr Trump dislikes military adventures abroad. ............... Chinese leaders initially mistook Mr Trump for a pragmatic tycoon, a type they have met before. Now he is called a narcissist who cares only about his own interests, starting with his re-election. .......... Satisfying Mr Trump has effectively parked America’s bipartisan demands for structural reforms. That does not make Chinese elites relaxed, though. They fret that Mr Trump has been “kidnapped” by the truly ideological China hawks who surround him. ............. As for Mr Biden, in Beijing he is called a member of the former ruling establishment that saw economic interdependence with China as a source of stability, not danger. Mr Biden was a player in Obama-era campaigns to seek China’s help in tackling climate change and other global challenges. Yet, in China, there is strikingly little nostalgia for those days. Some grumble that such engagement rested on a mistaken American belief that China would converge politically with the West as it grew richer. ............... The view in China is that its best scientists and tech firms are busy disproving such boasts, tipping America into a crisis of confidence and anti-China hysteria. .............. Just as bipartisan opinion in Washington has coalesced around alarm at China’s rise, an elite consensus has emerged in the Chinese capital. Especially in this summer of pandemic and street protests, America is called a nation in decline: a rich country too divided, selfish and racist to keep its citizens safe. Chinese elites see Mr Trump as a symptom and an agent of that decline. .............. Chinese netizens mockingly call him Chuan Jianguo, or “Build-up-the-country Trump”. Their joke, that he is a double-agent wrecking America to make China strong, prompts lines like “Comrade Chuan Jianguo, don’t blow your cover!” ................ elites focused on the economy fear the premature collapse of a global trading order that has profited China mightily. That prods some to hanker for Mr Biden
Why China bullies It sees a world distracted by covid-19, and too economically weak to hold it back ....... China is often called a country in thrall to nationalism. .......... Chinese nationalism is often compared to a tiger which Communist Party bosses have fed for years—and which they are now condemned to ride, for fear of being eaten if they dismount. ............. In reality, popular nationalism resembles a deep, man-made reservoir, created by the damming-up and channelling of long-existing forces. Most of the time, Chinese leaders can restrain or unleash public rage at will. Only in the biggest crises do they feel constrained to open the floodgates to ease dangerous pressure. ................ Often dismissed by Chinese as poor and chaotic, India is not in the rogue’s gallery of imperialist bullies that China’s young learn about at school. Vitally, two-way trade with India is rather modest: 11 countries are larger trade partners for China. All those factors leave Chinese rulers free to downplay a crisis with India. For even when China appears reckless, it is calculating rewards and risks. .............. China uses coercion “when the need to establish a reputation for resolve is high and the economic cost is low”. ............ China especially likes to inflict asymmetric economic pain, as when it banned imports of bananas from the Philippines during a territorial dispute in 2012, devastating Filipino farmers but barely hurting its own consumers. .............. Recent Chinese boycotts have targeted things like Australian beef or Houston Rockets games, but not more vital commodities. .......... Beyond its readiness to skirmish on the Indian border, it has decided to impose a draconian national-security law on Hong Kong, slapped trade boycotts on Australia and other Western nations, and sent coastguard ships to sink or harass foreign vessels in the contested waters of the South China Sea. It is also true that the world is geopolitically distracted. It is hard for governments to chide China over democracy in Hong Kong, say, while also negotiating to buy Chinese ventilators. .............. Chinese officials are betting on domestic demand to drive their country’s recovery from covid-19. ........ China is also being unusually assertive. ........ having limited economic ties with China may not make other countries safer. India is the latest country to be confronted with that dilemma. It will not be the last.
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