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China's XI is Repeating an Old Mistake - and Trump is Helping Him [1]
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Date: 2025-02-18
In the eighteenth century, the British developed a craving for tea, specifically Chinese tea, that country being about the only source for it. The British spent huge amounts of money buying tea, and also silk and porcelain and other Chinese products, but the Chinese weren’t much interested in buying anything from Britain. The resulting trade imbalance threatened to drain Britain of silver, so the British East India Company (BEAC) decided to correct the situation, first by stealing tea plants and the know-how to make tea, so they could set up a rival tea source in India, and second, by finding a product the Chinese would really really have to buy: opium, which the BEAC could get from its holdings in south Asia. (You can read more about this here, for example: The Opium Wars: The Connection Between Tea and Opium Trade.) The results were disastrous for China, which ended up essentially an economic colony of the West for the next several decades, and fostered a resentment that still influences Chinese foreign policy.
Now, Xi Jinping is repeating that mistake. Xi Is Making the World Pay for China’s Mistakes. The mistake the article is specifically talking about is Xi’s poor economic decisions — particularly the one to force “the country’s huge household savings into an immense investment boom.” This led to a real estate “bubble” which eventually “triggered a deep property slump that has persisted.”
Xi’s response has been to make other countries pay for his miscalculation:
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