Xi's "new type of great power relations" will be Trump's new "Apprentice"

A week out from Donald Trump's inauguration as the 45th US president, China and the US are set to begin a new chapter in their critical bilateral relationship, with many uncertainties dotting the trans-Pacific ties between the world's quintessential polar opposite governments and societies.

In this light, it's worth revisiting what China for its part actually hopes and expects from its evolving US partnership, and broaching the tantalizing possibility that Trump - for all his tough-on-China rhetoric - is exactly the answer to Beijing's prayers.

New model of big power relations - that wasn't

The present juncture of Sino-US relations can be traced back to the June 7, 2013 summit meeting between new Chinese president Xi Jinping and newly reelected US president Barack Obama. At the Sunnylands retreat resort in California, the two leaders were deliberately set up for an informal suit-and-tie-less strolling chat to gain an initial mutual trust and rapport.

The most significant tidbit to emerge from this confidence-building encounter was Xi's suggestion of a "new paradigm of big power relations" between the US and China, which seemed vague and highly generalized at the time, but was afterwards broadly understood to mean a high degree of cooperation despite irreconcilable differences of worldview and values that make long-term bilateral tension impossible to ever conclusively resolve.

Indeed, around that time (2012-13), it was widely speculated in foreign policy intelligentsia on both sides of the Pacific - though more markedly on the American - that the US and China were inevitably heading to some major great power or superpower competition for global supremacy. Never before in history, it was said, had an incumbent power and a rising one ever managed to get along without feeling so mutually threatened by the other that they weren't finally compelled to resort to strategic hedging in the form of buildups of both arms and rival geopolitical alliance networks; this so-called "Thucydides trap" was a whirlpool so hard to avoid being sucked into precisely because of the self-reinforcing nature of mutual suspicion and insecurity. As Athens was to Sparta and Wilhelmine Germany was to Great Britain, so China now appeared to be to the US.

Over and against this doomsday-like thinking, though it's widely forgotten, the up-and-coming new Chinese strongman Xi Jinping offered a far more benign and seemingly enlightened alternative view: no, the US and China simply weren't condemned to the age-old conflict, because the cost-benefit calculations on both sides were already so predisposed to peaceful and harmonious coexistence, and would in fact continue to be so.

Needless to say, as Xi burnished his credentials as a tough, no-nonsense authoritarian in the mold of a Mao-lite, his benign, even sanguinely confident appraisal of the US-China relationship were perceived as inconsistent with his broader worldview, and so deeply and fundamentally at odds with the apparently far darker vision of China itself that he exhibited in his zero-tolerance attitude towards dissent (both within and outside the party and state), that for a time it could be dismissed by even cerebral observers as little more than sweet talk - just a new terminology for the stale cliché of "win-win cooperation" (itself a phrase he had a particular penchant for).

Indeed, by 2015, when a stumbling Chinese economy was seized on by Xi to consolidate even more personal power at the expense of the rule-by-consensus model for top party leaders since the Deng Xiaoping era, it was no longer possible to even pretend that perhaps this "princeling" of the "red second generation" could actually have any warm feeling whatsoever towards either America or the West as a whole. The entire world could now see his handiwork of a combination of orthodox communist retrenchment and Putinesque revanchist nationalism: he had declared open ideological war on Western "universal values", cracked down hard on independent civil society and religious practice, and seemed to yield not an inch on Chinese territorial expansion and hegemonic economic and political influence in the region, especially with regards to its smaller Southeast Asia neighbors which watched helplessly as Beijing turned partially submerged reefs into floating fortresses in the South China Sea. Over and above all this, he had amassed a degree of cult-like adulation from party underlings and official media which would have been unimaginable for a top Chinese leader a few short years before, when some liberals and reformers were naïve enough to hope against the odds that he was something of a closet democrat.

His sole state visit - in September 2015 - to the Obama-era US was emblematic of this lack and even outright loss of "soft power" by the Chinese communist regime. The awful timing didn't seem to be a coincidence: China's Air Force One touched down at Washington's Andrews Air Force Base with Xi and his photogenic first lady only hours after the Vatican's "Pope Force One" had shuttled out the beloved pontiff, Francis, upon concluding the latter's long-awaited Apostolic pilgrimage to the US. The contrast between the lively, squishy spiritual and moral figurehead, with only faith and words for weapons, and the steely austerity of a tight-fisted dictator, with the world's premier apparatus of massive, systematic state repression, could not have been more pronounced. Then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump decried the imperious way in which Xi strolled into Washington, derisively offering to take him out for a Big Mac in lieu of the meticulously scripted state dinner with the Obamas at the White House; this helped to underscore - on both sides of the Pacific - that Xi was the polar opposite of the Pope: his influence flowed from intimidation and not decency or goodness, and the respect he commanded was not based on anything higher than primal fear, namely the fear of Chinese mercantilist ascendancy, which China's detractors in the West were becoming ever more contemptuous of in their feckless elected leaders. To top it all off, Xi's concluding tour speech to a half-empty UN General Assembly in New York gave the impression of a lonely emperor regurgitating - with more forcefulness, as if that weren't the whole problem to begin with - the same talking points about China's rise and its benefit for the world, merely days after a full crowd sitting in the same chamber was raptured by an inspiring homily of love and mercy in diplomacy by the blessed Vicar of Christ.

Xi's strongman vindication (a la Putin) as harbinger of Trump

But a funny thing has transpired since those awkward days of late 2015 into early 2016 - as recent as they were, yet so distant at the same time. Just when it seemed that Xi's brand of paternalistic authoritarianism was backfiring by wrecking both China's economic prospects and, along with them, its very viability as a one-party state, the new red emperor rolled up his sleeves and crushed his enemies even more ruthlessly and efficiently - and in such a way that it proved he wasn't a power-hungry madman, after all, but rather a patient and prudent ruler who struck out only as a matter of sheer necessity and a cold, detached practicality.

Just a week into 2016, Xi found himself privately rallying internal party loyalists to his personal banner: now was the moment, with hell having finally broken loose as Chinese markets teetered on total meltdown, to take the kid gloves off those vested and factional interests which the previous regime had left behind, wreaking such havoc that it now threatened to bring down the entire party-state hierarchy with their own largely self-inflicted, even self-imposed, crumbling fortunes. Asserting personal control of the national situation, Xi brandished the sword of self-enforcement and self-purification of a wayward bureaucratic apparatus: the special interests and rent seekers of the party and state, especially in the provincial and local administrations and their favored state firms, would still be co-opted to get the economy back on track, but from now on they would suffer severe consequences for shifting the blame for their own intransigence or incompetence in carrying out top-down mandated reforms onto the party center.

By force of fiat, Xi quickly unleashed the levers of a badly delayed fiscal stimulus - a feat that had eluded his premier and head of government, Li Keqiang, who seemed to never have teeth to his edicts. Compromises were inevitably struck - notably, an injunction on graft-prone local government financing was eventually lifted - but Xi's mandate alone got the ball rolling not a moment too soon. China's trillion-dollar stimulus of the first quarter of 2016, which a year later can be credited for saving it from a 2008-style financial collapse, is unmistakably the princeling general secretary's handiwork.

At the time, needless to say, it was much reviled: the last desperate gasp, or indeed "dead panda bounce" as it were, of a terminally ill peculiar system, namely "socialism with Chinese characteristics." But the long-awaited collapse has been incontrovertibly thwarted, and for this the communist regime has plenty of company in its gratitude: not merely the rest of China, but the global economy as well, has been granted a big sigh of relief.

Even worse for Xi's critics both domestically and internationally, the new Mao next conclusively demonstrated his circumspection that he had no laurels to rest on. In the wake of the stimulus that effectively bore his name and catapulted him to seemingly absolute power, his internal enemies - sensing that he was probably serious about "draining the swamp" after all, when the opportunity would truly present itself - struck back in an ill-conceived attempt to blame him for a still highly tense and precarious national condition. In doing so, they betrayed their utter lack of understanding of the big picture and a shocking basic ignorance of financial and economic realities. So accustomed to adoring their own bellies were they that they didn't realize what Xi and his loyalists always knew: that the party center didn't even have to tighten the screws on its apparatchiks in the first place had the latter actually followed orders and loosened their own grips on their subjects. For Xi, control has always been merely the means to eventual liberalization - it has never been an end in itself, as has been exposed to be the case with most of his insubordinate underlings accustomed to looser oversight from above and tighter manipulation down below.

And so, an entirely one-sided power struggle played out in China from March to May last year, wherein Xi all but wiped out any credible internal party resistance to and even dissent from his official policies on the so-called "supply-side restructuring" that had first been touted without the technical catchphrase near the beginning of the Xi-Li administration back in 2013. By mid-May and June 2016, a calm finally began to settle on the Chinese economy from the gradual, belated, but undeniable emergence of a new equilibrium: coordinated by a vigorous central party leadership with Xi himself its "core", the system as a whole exhibited the right combination of growth and reform, of qualitative improvement and quantitative reduction. The key impetus for this was political: at long last, provincial and local party officials who resisted Beijing's mandates for slashing excess industrial capacity were facing serious if still uneven consequences. They could still skirt around their targets and delay unsavory implementations of policy, but the mere fact that overt disobedience or blatant failure now risked harsher discipline from the top meant that they were now looking to cut their eventual losses, rather than continue a futile fight to finally forestall the inevitable.

Strangely, then, just as Vladimir Putin's Russia over the course of 2016 emerged as ahead of the curve in grasping the monumental shift of US domestic politics which propelled Trump to the presidency, so has Xi's China, since roughly the start of the US general election last spring, offered the incoming American leader pointers on how to bring to heel powerful internal vested interests and lobbies. While Trump's public bromance with Putin has generated all the headlines and attention, even more significant is his as yet undisclosed attitude towards and appraisal of Xi's governance of the world's second-biggest economy and quite possibly its true emerging alternate pole to the US-dominated "unipolar" post-Cold War order of the quarter-century after 1989-91.

In both public statements and private talks that have been subsequently disclosed, Trump has made clear that he views China, not Russia, as the main foreign policy challenge for America of the 21st century. On this fundamental point, he does not differ from either Obama or his predecessor, George W. Bush; however, his critical departure from both is a grudgingly realist recognition that the two-decade-long Washington China fantasy - that Beijing could basically be co-opted into a system whose underlying principles are still set by the US - is already sorrily detached from reality. He does not see China as a friend to the US-led post-1945 order - at least not anymore - even if his branding of it as an adversary comes off as mostly rhetoric.

Yet if his warming towards Putinist Russia is any indication, this would be a convergence rather than divergence with Xi's communist regime. Understanding why this is so leads to the initially bizarre assessment that, far from worsening under his watch, Sino-US relations are set for a new boon with Trump at the helm.

In the first place, the Chinese themselves can no longer pretend that they're satisfied with the status quo of American and Western stewardship of global institutions and the global "commons", anyway. They've outgrown the old paradigm, plain and simple; they demand a new one not so much to undermine American leadership but to augment its shortfalls - and its shortfalls are ever more apparently ideological and philosophical in their final origins, borne of an orthodoxy that made far more practical sense when the world was still far more lopsided in being essentially led and run by Western societies and cultures (read: before China's spectacular rise). To Beijing's (and Moscow's) no-nonsense style of diplomacy, it's far worse to try to minimize or downplay these fundamental clashes of core interests and values in the unspoken assumption that they're somehow not such a big deal, than it is to confront them head-on if in a broader context of holistic bilateral and multilateral intercourse; the bottom line being that they're far too big already to still treat as an anomaly or temporary nuisance: the second term of the Obama administration has conclusively proven that the neoliberal West no longer offers the "only game in town" in terms of either markets or policies.

In this telling, the twin shocks of Brexit and Trump's election should be recognized as the final nails in the coffin of the early-1990s "Washington Consensus" of unfettered "free markets" - particularly in the form of cross-border capital flows and capital investments. Well before the West itself pronounced that this unquestioned unitary system was broken, "the Rest" were already suffering its concrete consequences: since the end of US quantitative easing (QE) in 2013-14, they were already mired in a growth slump which steadily snowballed into outright economic contractions for a host of commodity-exporting countries, before finally nearly bringing down the mighty engine of China itself in the aforementioned travails of 2015-16.

Thus if anything, Xi's vindication as Chinese communist strongman has been a harbinger in its own right - a la Putin - for the rise of Donald Trump. Even as vastly contrasted systems built on diametrically opposing values - the West's individual liberty versus the East's collective welfare - China and the US both confront the same underlying problem: how to better distribute - indeed redistribute - the benefits and merits of globalization from those "haves" that are entrenched and ensconced in their privileged access to its modes and levers, to the "have-nots" who, whether real or perceived, have been systematically excluded from the decision-making processes that have produced this universal bifurcation and stratification.

Common goal "trumps" incompatible means - are they really so incompatible, after all?

To conclude, the obvious inference from the above is that Chinese and American objectives are ultimately so deeply and harmoniously identical - a society with such balance and prosperity that it's at peace both at home and with the world - that it's becoming less and less of a stumbling block that their respective means to achieve these are so irreconcilable.

The combination of China's rise and the decline of neoliberalism even on its home turf have revealed that even a system as intrinsically fair and just as America's representative republicanism isn't an end in itself: it's a means to higher and more final objectives. A more perfect union; lasting domestic tranquility - which isn't merely the absence of overt unrest or violence; a general welfare that encompasses all classes and segments of society by leveraging their disparities, not obliterating them; a sense of common purpose and belonging shared by the individual members of the great family that is one's nation-state.

Pluralistic and democratic governance are the said preferred ways that America has always put its faith in to achieve these; whereas effective and authoritative bureaucratic administration has been the millennial Chinese path to said sociopolitical Nirvana. The two parallel tracks can never presume to ever truly intersect - they are by their very nature different beasts. As an American - even as a Chinese - it's difficult to not recognize the inherent intrinsic superiority of the liberty-based US model over the order-based Chinese; even so, the great paradox remains that the imperfections and deficiencies of either paradigm point to the equities and strengths of the other. Just as individual liberty is a function of a collectively observed morality that governs all private conscience, so is collective order a function of the essential latitude that individuals have to optimize their place and position within the public whole, even irrespective of their absolute level of social mobility.

For this reason - that far from detracting from one another, the two parallel tracks actually augment and reinforce one another - the path forward for Sino-US relations couldn't be clearer. Not only does a common goal "trump" the incompatible means taken by the two sides - that's a given - but curiously the disparate means themselves might not even be incompatible at the end of the day, after all.

The platitude of "win-win cooperation" may soon have the most unlikely of new champions: Donald Trump himself. To "win" big - "bigly" or "yugely" that is - for America, as he has promised, he wouldn't mind that Xi Jinping's China "wins", as well. In the final analysis, this competition is one of messaging and marketing rather than of underlying substance - which is precisely why "The Apprentice" Master sees himself as uniquely made for the present moment. Realizing Xi's "new type of great power relations" - not just with China, but with Russia coming along for the ride that turns a "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" triangle into a geopolitical equivalent of ménage à trois - is the only global reality TV show whose starring role befits his ego; with this in the bag, he could just as well Tweet his boredom with running the planet.

Why Trump trade war with China could be just what globalization needs

As global markets count down to the Trump presidency, the trillion-dollar question seems to be how the flamboyant realtor and reality TV personality plans to "get tough" with China, as he has so emphatically promised to do so ever since his improbable bid for the presidency began nearly nineteen months ago.

Trump's appointment of anti-China stalwarts Peter Navarro and Robert Lighthizer to key trade posts in his administration signals a break from the past, when such offices were as good as a China lobby on Beijing's behalf in the US - without China having to spend a dime buying influence itself. State media in the communist superpower has predictably responded nastily: China isn't afraid of a trade war, it pouts, because such a conflict will be anything but one-sided and will leave America bruised and battered, too. That begs the question: Is Trump really preparing to exchange salvos with the world's second-biggest economy in such a way that global markets and supply chains are jolted into painful adjustments?

On closer examination, highly improbable. Trump knows that his mandate to govern will be judged by practical positive results. And he also knows that such results could be hard to come by in a scenario of tit-for-tat hostile escalation with the middle kingdom - especially in light of how much more achievable they'll be with Beijing's cooperation.

For starters, China is already such a major market for American companies - with such potential for further growth - that even Trump can't purport to start from scratch in kickstarting US exports to what promises to be the largest single foreign market in the not-so-distant future. As the Asian powerhouse grows wealthier, with an ever expanding middle class, its appetite for US agricultural produce and high-end manufactured products, as well as premium services such as those in finance and law, is primed to explode. Mind-boggling sums of money over many years into the 2030s and beyond are now at play. To take just one example, Boeing expects China to account for nearly a third of global jetliner demand in the coming decade and purchase a whopping nearly 7,000 planes over two, which would make it the first trillion-dollar aviation market. While this smacks of the time-honored Western China lust whose fabled lineage can be traced all the way back to Marco Polo, it gives a sense of the sheer magnitude of the perceived opportunity for US capitalists and investors - and by extension, workers.

To "win" the trade war with China, in other words, doesn't mean making China - no more than America - worse off: quite the contrary. "Victory" will mean the rising Chinese upper and middle classes purchasing massive volumes of American goods and services even as Chinese firms continue to sell prodigious quantities the other way. Both sides stand to become better-off - possibly much better-off.

On this flip side, Trump's biggest wish - that America attracts more productive plant investment from international companies - also happens to correspond with what a growing number of Chinese companies are already pursuing. The combination of rising labor costs at home and cheap energy supplies on the other side of the Pacific is slowly but steadily becoming a structural vacuum sucking Chinese manufacturers onto Yankee shores to be closer to their most lucrative foreign market. Massive retailers like Walmart and Amazon, whose branded and generic products alike are heavily sourced from Chinese-owned factories on the mainland, could in time find themselves purchasing inventories instead from new Chinese assembly lines employing American workers and robots domestically in the US.

Chinese investment in America will get an even bigger boost if the pragmatic Trump administration, eager to capitalize on excess Chinese capacity in real estate, construction and infrastructure-related industries like steel, cement, and glass, reduces the political barriers hindering investment from majority state-owned Chinese players in these sectors. Such a drastic move may be wishful thinking for the foreseeable future, but if anyone would even consider it for the medium to longer term, Trump would be the one. While China trade hawks like Navarro decry Beijing's seemingly untouchable lifeline of subsidies to its favored industrial firms, one wonders what attitude a mercantilist Washington will adopt if this largess is turned to support American reindustrialization and American jobs instead. Having never been a slavish ideologue when it comes to "free markets" and strictly "private" investment, Trump of all American leaders would likely welcome a helping hand from the Chinese state: it's not like subsidies are anything new to strategic sectors of the US economy, to begin with; if introducing Chinese cash into the mix stirs competition in these spaces which otherwise tend to be pockets of inefficiency and waste (as tends to be the case where free public money is doled out), all the better.

The psychological aversion of Americans, especially conservative Americans, to communist Chinese investment is a barrier of the kind that only a character as unconventional and maverick as Trump can overcome: he likes to see the big picture, and as a consequence isn't apt to dwell on details which in and of themselves could feel awkward. What better way to contain China, he'd broach, than to sucker Beijing into pouring so much of its prime industrial capacity into America that America effectively gains a veto over Chinese behavior around the world?

For China's part, far from lamenting the loss of factory installations and jobs that this strategic economic shift comes with, both the communist government and general population would welcome their own arrival as major investors and owners of productive assets in the heart of the developed world.

The "win-win" aspect of US-China relations has in recent years become so cliché as to become a fitting euphemism for everything that America feels has gone off the rails with the globalization project. But even now, a good two weeks before he even takes office, one can see the outlines of how a reinvigorated America under Donald Trump could score so big and so spectacularly - eventually, at least - in reframing the world's central commercial relationship that before we know it, we'll actually get tired of winning.

It's a crazy world when the Apocalypse becomes the Salvation, but that's what 2017 seems to be heralding barely a week in.

A year after near collapse, Xi's China on belated path to stability

A year ago, the global financial world held its breath as the Chinese stock market and currency nosedived to open the 2016 trading year's first two weeks, triggering the second round of China-induced multi-trillion dollar liquidations worldwide in less than six months. As George Soros quipped, "I'm not predicting a Chinese hard landing, I'm observing it," a general consensus emerged in the ensuing weeks that Beijing was basically on its last legs fighting off a general financial crisis, which could only end in a massive devaluation of the yuan to bail out a debt deflation-trapped banking sector. Longtime China-bashing "permabears" like Jim Chanos and Gordon Chang gleefully trumpeted their prescience all along that the communist regime had built nothing more than a Potemkin village, confidently predicting that this time - at long last - Beijing simply couldn't stop a complete meltdown no matter what it tried.

It turns out, of course, that they were badly wrong for what could well be the last time: China not only didn't collapse, it managed to bounce back and stabilize in such a way that, by the closing months of 2016, it no longer appeared so particularly vulnerable in a global neoliberal economic system whose very heart - the Anglo-American-dominated West - was undergoing significant convulsions of uncertainty and volatility which were calling to question the integrity of its very foundations.

Against this backdrop, even as Beijing bleeds capital at the rate of $50 to $100 billion a month while watching the yuan slide towards the psychological threshold of 7 per dollar, it appears to be indisputably in charge of China's destiny. This is in no small part because it has comprehensively and holistically confronted the fundamental structural problem it faces: how to carve out a greater global space for its brand of centrally planned economic development, with greater international use of its newly designated reserve currency as the linchpin of such a strategy.

Even before the surprise election of protectionist Donald Trump, it was painfully clear to China that its future prosperity and strength as an independent sovereign power would necessarily wean it off the quarter-century model of export-driven surpluses with the West which it recycled into Western reserve currencies to keep the cycle flowing. Much as this whole scheme had begun to foster greater disenchantment with trade and globalization in Western countries in recent years, it had also begun to badly sputter as a source of income and profits for China itself.

The investment-heavy Chinese economy increasingly needs to shift gears: its producers must climb the value chain from cheap assembly to advanced component fabrication, even as the consumer society must expand healthily along with the service sector. Such a profound transformation amidst declining demographics and sluggish growth both domestically and globally has forced Beijing's hand in the realm of fiat credit long utterly dominated by the West and particularly the US: now more than ever, China must develop and boost confidence in its indigenous financial system, starting with the RMB itself.

Looking back on 2016, it was a watershed year for the communist superpower's domestic credit development. Trillions of yuan of new locally denominated debt were issued to corporations, local governments, and increasingly even consumers to keep the domestic economy - especially the real estate and industrial sectors - afloat with cheap cash at a time of highly pronounced global dollar scarcity and illiquidity. Skeptics will of course lambast Chinese officials and bankers for creating so much new credit out of thin air which in the long term might only further saddle Chinese economic agents with unpayable debts; but thus far, since the massive first-quarter stimulus of last year, Beijing's monetary and fiscal easing has succeeded in reversing the deflationary tide that had Mr. Soros and like-minded speculators so certain the middle kingdom would flatly crash.

This offered a propitious background against which the yuan was finally officially added to the IMF's Special Drawing Right (SDR) basket of elite reserve currencies (alongside the dollar, euro, pound sterling, and yen). Whereas 2016 saw a decline in the offshore RMB's total usage beyond the mainland - mainly as a result of capital controls imposed to stop a run on the currency - this should be understood as a stopgap pullback and not a permanent resealing of the capital account. The yuan simply wasn't ready for anything close to prime time in 2015 and 2016 - not when domestic Chinese firms' and individuals' faith in it hadn't yet been tested vis-à-vis their ironclad trust in King Dollar. Going forward, as local usage of the local tender for bond and debt issuance increases - it has already ballooned dramatically only since 2014 - this gap of credibility and confidence should steadily narrow. (And needless to say, this is a prerequisite for medium to long-term Chinese aspirations for a Sinocentric Eurasian economic architecture, where the yuan is a legitimate trading and reserve currency for developing countries along Beijing's "One Belt One Road" scheme.)

Which of course leads to the underlying and underpinning question at hand: just how stable is the communist regime and system under Xi Jinping? It is on this matter that perhaps the most resounding proofs have emerged in the past year - however open-ended or inconclusive they yet remain.

There's little doubt that the financial and economic travails of 2015 and early 2016 badly bruised the Xi-Li (Keqiang) administration which had taken power with such an ambitious reform agenda in 2012-13; the attendant fallout of this prolonged episode, however, has also exposed the fundamental stability of the one-party state with a single powerful center that none of the subordinate parts can effectively directly challenge, however much they may continue to disobey or defy its edicts - mainly through sheer inertia.

Like their counterparts in the West, China's own elite "ruling class" - in this case the communist party bosses at the heads of local governments and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) - have been demonstrated to be highly reluctant to compromise their long-enjoyed prerogatives at the apex of the socioeconomic food chain within the global neoliberal architecture. Having contributed so much to China's development and prosperity for the preceding quarter-century, they understandably felt a sense of entitlement - again closely mirroring their Western peers - to a disproportionate share of the common goods even as the overall pie stopped growing or even shrank. Though they'd already been admonished by the central government that downsizing their debt-ridden and overcapacity-bloated industries would be nothing short of "slashing one's wrists", they used various shenanigans to put off the day of reckoning, with near-disastrous consequences for the entire country.

This is what became strikingly apparent in the second half of 2015, when the double whammy of the Chinese stock market crash and yuan devaluation coincided with the Fed's first interest rate hike in nearly a decade to create a perfect storm that culminated in the virtual panic at the outset of 2016.

Initially, the economic slowdown in early 2015 - in spite of repeated central bank easing through a series of interest rate and reserve requirement ratio (RRR) cuts - was greatly exacerbated by deliberate intransigence of local officials to adapt to a stricter financing environment, specifically the new prohibition on local government financing vehicles (LGFVs) for the purposes of curbing corruption in line with Xi Jinping's much vaunted and increasingly feared and hated (among officialdom) campaign.

Where they should have responded with circumspection in the form of production and capacity cutbacks - this was just the environment that would have demanded their delayed compliance with central mandates to do so - the ensconced managers of local state firms instead fired up their lines in the hope of decimating lesser (including private) competitors. A mutually destructive race to the bottom ensued, pitting factories and plants both regionally and nationally against each other in pursuit of shrinking profits. The systemic distortions were multiplied by the various forms and channels of illegal "shadow" lending and credit which moved into the funding gaps of less privileged market players to sustain their tooth-and-nail efforts to stay alive.

By the time the central authorities stepped in to loosen the politically tautened local fiscal levers, it was too late to stop or even moderate this free-for-all: the final two quarters of 2015 saw ham-fisted efforts by Beijing to wring out what legitimate stimulus they could from provincial and local administrators without returning to the good old days of LGFV extravagance, coupled with far less restrained industrial expansion by provincial and local firms to meet the only incrementally improving aggregate demand. The result: by December, the producer price index (PPI) had been mired at close to negative 6 percent for the second straight month - which when coupled with the benchmark interest rate of over 4 percent meant a deflationary hell for industry of real borrowing costs in the double digits. Unless drastic action was taken quickly, Beijing would be utterly humiliated by its ill-wishers in the Western China-bashing and China-shorting community.

And so the LGFVs had to be reinstated, at first by degrees and eventually virtually wholesale: there was as yet realistically no other way to pull off the scale of fiscal stimulus that the overall economy now demanded to keep from abruptly depressurizing. As soon as this decision was made, unleashing an over $1 trillion spending package, the Chinese recovery was both swift and broad, almost overnight spiking global commodity prices.

The double-edged word, of course, was that this short-term provisional lifesaver greatly emboldened the party bosses of the local government and SOE worlds: they now felt vindicated in resisting Beijing's downsizing program from the get-go. To them, it was a moral as well as political victory over Xi's party-mandated austerity, which by now they saw as really a naked power grab by the most insatiable personality-cult strongman since Mao himself. When push came to shove, they had managed to extract a massive concession from Li's government to all but veto Xi, which, for a brief moment, seemed to do the impossible: create an actual rift at the very top of the party-state structure in the paramount Politburo Standing Committee.

It was at this juncture - on the occasion of the annual "Two Sessions" of the rubber-stamp Chinese parliament early last March - that the anti-austerity, status-quo faction of the party struck: an anonymous "open letter" purportedly from disenchanted party officials appeared on the internet, first overseas and then republished by the Xinjiang provincial government - headed by one of Xi's known enemies (a crony of anti-corruption-disgraced security czar Zhou Yongkang) - calling for nothing short of the general secretary's resignation.

The Xi administration's response was predictably immediate and furious, but by now more was being exposed: even the Politburo Standing Committee wasn't fully in line with Xi's increasingly personal brand of authoritarian rule by one-man diktat - or at least, not as much as it should have been. In an embarrassing flub, the propaganda ministry headed by standing committee member Liu Yunshan summarily executed the online presence of outspoken liberal party stalwart Ren Zhiqiang, unleashing such a firestorm of negativity towards Master Xi himself that it had to be investigated by the anti-corruption watchdog. Thus were even Xi's purported loyalists unwittingly destabilizing the delicate internal balance of the party - serving their leader with a zealous loyalty that could barely conceal ulterior ambition, they wound up damaging his reputation at just the moment when it was already bruised.

The culmination of the intrigue came in late April and early May, when the palpably widening split between Xi and Li finally came to a visible head. The critical occasion for this was the fizzling out of the initial energizing effects of the trillion-dollar stimulus: redundant steel and coal capacity which had without authorization been brought back online to meet stimulus demand (after being slated for rationalization) now had to be shut down again absent yet another injection of bailout cash. While the public posturing gave Xi's detractors and critics hope - they were thrilled to see state media broadcast Li meeting and greeting his power base at the communist youth league (CYL) - the behind-the-scenes power play was characteristically one-sided: Xi loyalists quietly began executing plans to permanently sideline the CYL as a patronage base for future top leaders, and the recalcitrant party secretary of steel-producing Hebei province right outside Beijing was purged from his post for failing to curb "zombie" plants which had once more come back from the dead.

Then in May, an official "expert" essay on the economy appeared with fanfare which blasted the old means of economic development through massive debt expansion as inherently flawed and potentially very dangerous; virtually simultaneously a previously private statement by Xi to provincial party chiefs was publicized that conveyed how the general secretary was basically losing patience with his underlings for their chronic foot-dragging on painful restructuring. By the time these reiterations of paramount leadership's officially sanctioned stances were disclosed, the internal power struggle they indicated had been decisively concluded: Xi had utterly crushed the ill-conceived and completely uncoordinated revolt against him stillborn.

Through all these developments, the standout fact which emerged was the party central leadership's creeping consolidation of control over the provincial party hierarchies and its steadily encroaching overriding influence over the actual organs of state. Since spring 2016, as the Chinese economy has further stabilized, a sense of normalcy has returned politically as well: Xi has further consolidated his unchallenged position as the "core" of the party's fifth-generation leadership. He has warded off whatever trouble may have arisen from subordinates in the party-state latching onto an alternate lead figure, i.e. Li Keqiang, as a channel for passive dissent or resistance; Li for his part has also demonstrated the political prudence to shy away from rivalry with Xi, even at the price of exposure to risk of a forced early retirement at the coming 19th party congress, for the discretion of doing the best visible job he can executing Xi's economic initiatives.

In this light, the most critical single development in China in the past tumultuous year - and the single greatest comfort that its optimists can take - is the admonition published last April on the official website of the Central Committee for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), the party's self-policing agency in charge of the graft-busting crusade, titled: "A single truth teller is better than a thousand yes-men."

Since it appeared so hot on the heels of the hostile open letter demanding Xi's resignation - the key grievance of which was the party chief's seemingly unabashed self-promotion of a personality cult - this party-approved exposition, which can only have been published with express permission from CCDI head Wang Qishan, was at the time widely seen as indicative that even this stalwart anti-corruption firebrand had finally turned against old friend and ally Xi, the disgraced young red princeling he had first bonded with in the Cultural Revolution some 50 years earlier.

Alas for those wishing communist China ill, the CCDI article was not scrubbed off like any online content clearly not in line with Xi's leadership, and thus turned out to be an unequivocal if oblique expression of support for the current administration. It sent a powerful message that Xi - through trusted confidante Wang - was fully conscious of the risks coming from both ends of the spectrum: he was appropriately wary of the temptation of absolute power even as he rightly wouldn't tolerate malicious dissent within the ranks. In other words, the man charged with leading the party - and thereby an empire of 1.4 billion and a $10 trillion economy, the world's second-largest and still a pivotal engine of globalization - was highly competent because he was at heart a humble servant of the nation and its citizenry.

Obviously, the ultimate success of China's monumental transition is anything but assured at this admittedly incipient stage: it could yet derail in unforeseen ways, and if anything, it's the sense of calm and the lack of trouble or drama which ironically could breed the very complacency that most reliably allows imbalances and distortions to build up until they reach a breaking point. If there's anything Beijing's policymakers and Xi himself should have learned since 2014, it's that they're actually better off in a constant state of concern or even worry - this is precisely what keeps them on their toes, alert to subtle threats to systemic stability which in fatter times could easily slip past unnoticed.

To conclude, a year after apparent near collapse, Xi's China finds itself on a belated road to eventual stability. It doesn't seem anymore like it was ever much more than a fool's know-nothing fantasy that the rising superpower's implosion was already a foregone conclusion.