{"id":25434,"date":"2026-05-13T09:29:56","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T09:29:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/egretnews.com\/?p=25434"},"modified":"2026-05-13T09:29:56","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T09:29:56","slug":"trump-can-stare-down-a-weak-xi-jinping-this-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/egretnews.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/13\/trump-can-stare-down-a-weak-xi-jinping-this-week\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump Can Stare Down a Weak Xi Jinping This Week"},"content":{"rendered":"

Xi Jinping’s inward-facing actions, however, betray a deep sense of insecurity. Trump can take advantage of it. <\/em>China’s people \u2014 to the regime “building material” \u2014 are now extremely unhappy in the Communist Party “engineering state.” Gloom, as a result, has descended over Chinese society.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Xi has responded to the unhappiness in society by initiating a censorship campaign against “excessively pessimistic sentiment.” Most significantly, he is not willing to implement structural changes to put more money in the pockets of the\u00a0laobaixing, the common folk.<\/em><\/p>\n

No wonder China’s intellectuals and social media users refer to this moment as their country’s “garbage time of history.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Unfortunately, Xi considers the United States an existential threat not because of anything Americans say or do but because of who they are. An insecure ruling organization in Beijing is afraid of the inspirational impact of American values and form of governance on the Chinese people. This means, try as Americans might, their democracy will never have amicable relations with China as long as it is ruled by the Communist Party.<\/em><\/p>\n

The\u00a0Washington Post\u00a0this week\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0that Xi Jinping, on the eve of his summit with President Donald Trump, is “confident in China’s power.” The country, from the outside, looks strong.<\/em><\/p>\n

Xi’s inward-facing actions, however, betray a deep sense of insecurity. Trump can take advantage of it.<\/em><\/p>\n

As Yanzhong Huang of the Council on Foreign Relations\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0in the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0on May 10, Xi has created and reinforced ridiculous narratives of American decline inside the “information cocoon” the Communist Party has created. For instance, the notion of an “American kill line” \u2014 millions of American families are “teetering on a precipice” where they are “one lost job, illness, or unexpected expense away from ruin” \u2014 has taken hold in China.<\/em><\/p>\n

“Insular, nationalist voices are amplified more than ever,” Huang writes. “Zhang Weiwei, a university professor who served as Deng Xiaoping’s interpreter and has millions of online followers, absurdly claimed in a viral video in January that China is the only country in the world whose people eat well.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Why the hostility?<\/em><\/p>\n

The Communist Party is in defensive mode. Its leaders have no other way to justify their failures than to denigrate others, primarily the United States.<\/em><\/p>\n

China’s people have largely lost hope, and it is not hard to see why. The regime’s leaders,\u00a0says Dan Wang<\/a>, author of\u00a0Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, “treat society as a big engineering project, where people are yet another building material that the leadership just want to tweak and destroy if necessary.”<\/em><\/p>\n

China’s people \u2014 to the regime “building material” \u2014 are now extremely unhappy in the Communist Party “engineering state.” Gloom, as a result, has descended over Chinese society.<\/em><\/p>\n

“As a leader of a totalitarian\u2014not simply authoritarian\u2014regime, the Communist Party controls narratives domestically,” Piero Tozzi, senior director for China Policy of the America First Policy Institute, told Gatestone on May 10. “It is increasingly difficult for it to dispel the nationwide awareness of malaise.”<\/em><\/p>\n

The pervasive pessimism has resulted in people “lying flat” \u2014 embracing a “low-desire life” \u2014 or “retiring” \u2014 leaving cities to work on farms. In one way or another, the Chinese are opting out of society.<\/em><\/p>\n

The University of Pennsylvania’s Victor Mair has collected\u00a0other words and phrases<\/a>\u00a0for leaving society, including “Buddha whatever,” “Kong Yijiism,” and “involution.” “China today has so many memes for opting out,” he wrote in July 2023. Young educated Chinese constantly find new ways to show discontent. People with resources, not surprisingly, are leaving China.<\/em><\/p>\n

The gloom is most fundamentally reflected in the country’s collapsing demography. Beijing reports the county’s population was 1.4 billion at the end of last year.\u00a0The UN’s median estimate<\/a>\u00a0for turn-of-the-century population is 633.4 million. Others, such as Yi Fuxian of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, have issued\u00a0far lower numbers<\/a>. “Left unaddressed,”\u00a0Yi wrote<\/a>, “China’s demographic trap could precipitate a civilizational collapse.”<\/em><\/p>\n

“China has embarked on a road of demographic no-return,”\u00a0wrote Wang Feng<\/a>\u00a0of the University of California, Irvine.<\/em><\/p>\n

Xi Jinping has responded to the unhappiness in society by initiating a\u00a0censorship campaign<\/a>\u00a0against “excessively pessimistic sentiment.” Most significantly, he is not willing to implement structural changes to put more money in the pockets of the\u00a0laobaixing, the common folk.<\/em><\/p>\n

Xi’s control and surveillance mechanisms, in their totality, are especially merciless. Those people with low social-credit scores have been completely cut off from society and must sleep in the streets.<\/em><\/p>\n

No wonder China’s intellectuals and social media users refer to this moment as their country’s “garbage time of history<\/a>.”<\/em><\/p>\n

“These days, there is a sense of bitter anger among the people at being the voiceless victims of the state’s obsession with world power and beating the United States,”\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0Helen Gao in the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0in November 2025.<\/em><\/p>\n

What does Huang of the Council on Foreign Relations suggest? Deterrence and “restoring the human connections that once helped hold the relationship together.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Xi, however, has been determinedly cutting links with foreign parties, a tactic Chinese leaders have used through millennia when they felt pressure from the outside threatened their rule. There is little the U.S. can do in this situation. It cannot force Xi to reestablish these links.<\/em><\/p>\n

Unfortunately, Xi considers the United States an existential threat not because of anything Americans say or do but because of who they are. An insecure ruling organization in Beijing is afraid of the inspirational impact of American values and form of governance on the Chinese people. This means, try as Americans might, their democracy will never have amicable relations with China as long as it is ruled by the Communist Party.<\/em><\/p>\n

When Xi is worried about contact with the outside, it is hard to engage his regime or society. Trump is confronting a brittle China in Beijing this week.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0egretnewseditor@gmail.com<\/span>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Xi Jinping’s inward-facing actions, however, betray a deep sense of insecurity. Trump can take advantage of it. China’s people \u2014 to the regime “building material” \u2014 are now extremely unhappy in the Communist Party “engineering state.” Gloom, as a result, has descended over Chinese society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47471,"featured_media":25435,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[198,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-slider","category-top-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/egretnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/egretnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/egretnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egretnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/47471"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egretnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25434"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/egretnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25434\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25436,"href":"https:\/\/egretnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25434\/revisions\/25436"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egretnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/egretnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egretnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egretnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}