Find Peter Zeihan's appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast... Xi is a classic autocract, kills/silences anyone who doesn't tell him what he wants to hear.
Putin told him last year he would not invade Ukraine and Xi believed him, his advisers were terrified of telling him he was being fed porkie pies.
It's worst than that, he's literally worst than Hitler.
His belief is that the commercialization of China was a massive mistake.
He doesn't just hate capitalism, he doesn't just belief communism is a better system, he literally believes that intense suffering and famine is good for the soul.
Like it's rather explicit that he sees "The Long March", as the ideal act of moral purity. He sees the death of 87% of his soldiers as a moral ideal.
He's actively trying to force a New Long March, where half of the population dies in either famine or intense warfare. You have to understand that this is more directly a religious thing. Comparable with Jesus on the Cross, only it's half the population that dies for the moral sins of the people. And you have to appreciate that there's some truth to it. The long march is pretty much the only time in the last 150 years that you could argue the Chinese are the good guys. After the Long March, the Chinese kicked the Japanese out of China, kicked the fascist to Taiwan, and defeated the Americans in Korea.
Peter Ziehan is rather clueless on culture. A lot of the big problems facing modern China are from Communists who stopped believing in their culture/politics. The only time Chinese was truly successful from Xi's perspective was during/after "The Long March". You really really have to understand the whole thing as a kind of crucifixion. And this is no accident, it's exactly the kind of propaganda that Xi was drenched in as a Child, he literally got his father sent away to a Chinese gulag because of his impure beliefs. You have to appreciate historical context, foreigners have continually destroyed China through trade and invasion, both in the opium wars, the Japanese invasion, and the current era, where pseudo capitalism has completely annihilated the Chinese economy. He sees the current class of Communist party officials as fundamentally evil, because of their corruption. It isn't just ideology, he's factually correct that the state has been destroyed by greedy/corrupt party officials. Xi wasn't hired to fix the Chinese economy, he's hired to prepare for what happens after the economic collapse. He's gonna purge about 50 million chinese due to their corruption, spend 50 million men on war, and intentionally starve the older generation to death, as a means of preventing a collapse caused by demographics.
If the guy isn't gone soon, it'll be too late. Again you have to appreciate the situation they're in. They pretty much need to shed 500 million seniors as they can't afford to feed them. They can't do the capitalism thing as their market is completely fucked. And they need a war to consolidate power and as a means of killing off dissidents(by sending them to war as canon fodder. This is of course all things that happened under Mao, and it'll happen again if Xi is allowed to live.
The most famous of these marches was undertaken by the First Red Army under Mao Zedong: departing from their headquarters in the southern province of Jiangxi on 16 October 1934, the First Army marched over 9,000 kilometres (5,600 mi) in a large clockwise arc through the western frontiers of the country, ultimately meeting with Communist forces in Yan'an on 19 October 1935. The circuitous route required the First Army to pass through some of the most difficult terrain in the country while avoiding destruction by the Nationalists: at first the NRA under Chiang Kai-Shek, and later by local cliques of Nationalist-aligned warlords. Ultimately, fewer than 8,000 people traveling with the First Red Army would survive the march, out of a force of more than 65,000 that had set out the year prior.[1][2] Over the following year, the Second and Fourth Red Armies would continue to navigate and face resistance, with the meeting of the three armies in Yan'an only taking place on 22 October 1936.
Upon arrival, the leadership Mao had demonstrated during the retreat afforded him immense prestige and support among many within the otherwise-shattered Communist Party. The March would achieve mythical status in China and throughout the world as one of the most famous events of the war, for its immense hardship and implausible perseverance in the face of what appeared to be near-certain annihilation.[by how much?] It ultimately marked the beginning of Mao's long ascent to primacy within the CCP, and would be featured heavily in his public image, through the founding of the People's Republic.
