Joe Biden's China policy is getting a rather hefty boost from … China.
Specifically, President Xi, whose youthful studies in chemical engineering, mixed with Beijing's mandatory lessons in Marxist economics, seem to have instilled the notion that industrial societies and the economies they're based on can be manhandled by a supreme leader, with prosperity to follow.
He might want to ask another Joe — the one formerly of the Soviet Union — how that worked out for his motherland.
"Under Mr. Xi, China is reshaping how business works and limiting executives’ power. Long in coming, but rapid in execution, the policies are driven by a desire for state control and self-reliance as well as concerns about debt, inequality and influence by foreign countries, including the United States," reports the NY Times.
"Chinese tech companies are reeling from regulation. Nervous creditors are hoping for a bailout for China’s largest developer. Growing numbers of executives are going to jail…. [Analysts] worry that [Xi's] new policies could hurt competitiveness and favor the inefficient, monopoly-dominated state sector."
I'm all for reducing inequality and ending corporate corruption. Who isn't? Much of Xi's policies, however, appears to be geared more pointedly toward the greater acquisition of his power than bettering Chinese society.
Stalin's heavy-handed economic policies, case in point. Uncle Joe devastated Russia's economic potential ruthlessly and early on, following Lenin's realization that less state control would be the only workable path to a prosperous Russia. Lenin was right, Stalin was wrong.
The Times' article is titled "The End of [China's] 'Gilded Age.'" Obviously comparisons of China today and, as well, the U.S. of the late 19th century are strained at best. But this much can be reasoned out, I think:
Had the U.S. government reined in the immense financial, industrial and, indeed, brutal power of the nation's Rockefellers, Carnegies and Morgans in, say, 1880, America would not have become the global economic dynamo that it was by the 20th-century's early decades.
True socialism is for advanced capitalist societies. Those well matured beyond their pre-industrial and industrial days. Even Marx understood that. China's president, it seems, does not. And President Biden can be thankful.