Is China bankrupt?

State servants including teachers are forced to pay back their incentives. Millionaires are being robbed of their income and billionaires are being squeezed for “charitable contributions”. Private entrepreneurs are harassed by ideology-indoctrinated Chinese Communist Party watchdogs.

Nymphomaniac celebrities and effeminate boy-stars are blamed for tax evasion or subversion of socialist frugality. They suddenly disappear and so do their bank accounts.

A nation-wide burn-out causes traffic lights to be out of order. Factories stop production and no bulb gives light in the apartments. No water or refrigerator runs. Smartphones cannot be charged. China is back to the Stone Age. Without the coal-fired plants, not enough electricity can be produced. Xi must have known that when he cancelled coal imports from Australia.

Then there is the mass-exodus of foreign enterprises led by Japan that leaves millions jobless and hopeless. In vain, veterans are waiting for their pensions. Old-age pension scheme is poor. Parents and grandparents will soon be in greater numbers than the young who have to care for them.

Food production is reduced due to drought and inundations, flooding by intentional opening of the flood gates of the dams and breaking of some of the 98,000 earthen barrages that were built under Mao and successors. Locusts have eaten up square kilometers of farm produce. Sand blown away from Gobi Desert covers countryside and cities. Farm lands and fish ponds are too toxic for food production. Former farmers are now factory workers. They buy their food at the ubiquitous wild-animal markets like the one in Wuhan.

Food import is hampered. Due to climate change rice-exporting countries keep the reduced harvests for their own populations. Poaching fish in other nations’ EEZ is increasingly difficult for Indonesia, Vietnam, Japan, Russia, Argentina, Peru, and some African nations sink intruders.

Huge real estate companies like EverGrande, Fantasia, China Properties Group, and Sinic Holdings are all defaulting on paying two- to three-billion dollars debt. The CCP-ruled state cannot bail them out even if they wanted.

Their income is dwindling: Stocks of Chinese state-owned entities and private firms are plummeting worldwide. CCP control always trumps investor interest. Investors no longer trust the unpredictable whimsical changes in Xi’s policy.

The incomes from debt-trapped countries along the Belt and Road Initiative are also falling and many countries are refusing to accept Chinese loans and projects at all. They are watching out for Biden’s and the European Union’s ‘Build Back Better for the World’ infrastructure plan.

The irrational armament build-up wrecks the economy. Those airplane carriers, submarines, bombers and rockets are all designed for attack. No nation has the intention to attack China. All want it as a fair trading partner. But Xi sees hostile invaders lurking all around ready to bully us: “Anyone who dares to try will have their heads bashed bloody against our Great Wall of Steel”.

Deng Hsiaoping’s reforms to capitalism opened China for foreign investments and made it great. Xi Jinping’s return to the ‘essence of socialism’ is a sure recipe for state bankruptcy. There are all the ingredients that ruined the Soviet Union 30 years ago. But that will not enter the power-blinded madman’s mind.

Erich Wannemacher

Lapu-Lapu City