China's plan to rapidly dominate chip manufacturing, end US technological supremacy, and absorb Taiwan

Hardly a week goes by now without a new development in the great US-China tech war. However, the outcome of this war hinges on a single critical industry: semiconductors. More specifically, it hinges practically exclusively on who makes them.

This is the true subtext behind recent escalating tensions over Taiwan: China's real goal is not to invade and occupy the island, but to control its world class chipmaking industry. Over a comparatively short period of time, Beijing intends to transfer the lion's share of industrially critical medium-end - and even some high-end - chipmaking from the self-ruled island to the mainland. This will give it absolute strategic advantage over the US as well as strategic dominance over Taiwan itself: rendering the ROC a geopolitical extension of the PRC that will cease to be of any use or value - but rather a growing liability - to Washington.

Ultimately, China's plan to absorb Taiwan - and force the US to accept the "One China Principle" as Beijing defines it - boils down to a simple scheme to force the island's semiconductor factories to obey the Communist Party's industrial directives as the price of avoiding wholesale hollowing out, i.e. mass migration to the mainland.

Taiwan currently dominates high-end semiconductor manufacturing: led by TSMC, the island's foundries (or "fabs") account for nearly two-thirds of the world's output of advanced chips - defined as being fabricated at or below the resolution of 7 nanometers (7nm). This has made the island the prize in a tug-of-war between Beijing and Washington for the crown jewel of the lifeblood of current and next-generation technology.

However, whereas the US is relying on antiquated legislation and trade negotiation - the CHIPS Act and Chips-4 Alliance (with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan) - to assert control of the chip supply chain, China already enjoys actual physical control of it on the ground.

For all its heavy intellectual capital requirements that are still practically monopolized by US and US-allied companies - such as ASML, Lam Research, Synopsys, etc. - the chipmaking industry is just as beholden to upstream Chinese dominance of the primary elements extraction and processing industry as any other.

China supplies two-thirds of the world's silicon and three-fifths of its "rare earth" metals; between these dozen or so elements alone, Beijing essentially determines who gets to make how many chips - for whom - and at what price point.

The global semiconductor shortage since late 2020 has been a reflection of Chinese leverage over the ostensibly US-dominated global chip sector. It largely reflects a growing opacity in Beijing's dealings with the industry's top players - who even as they follow the letter of Washington's growing litany of export restrictions against Chinese chipmakers are becoming steadily more in thrall to the Communist regime's semiconductor localization policy.

Early in 2021, the fledgling Biden administration was forced by the growing chip supply crunch to temporarily grant Chinese firms like SMIC a license to import lithography machines - the centerpiece of the entire semiconductor fabrication process - capable of producing chips up to the 10nm sophistication level. In hindsight, this was enough of an opening for the Communist Party to secure the tools for its preferred domestic champions to rapidly climb the value-added ladder for the most complex commercially manufactured components of the 21st century.

In late July 2022, it was revealed that SMIC had been making bitcoin mining chips at the 7nm process node for a whole year - though not necessarily at full commercial scale, i.e. "yield." This was a total gamechanger: it indicated that the leading Chinese chipmaker had leapfrogged even Intel and Global Foundries of the US in establishing an initial proven 7nm capacity. But the backstory behind this great leap forward - and that's exactly what it is, even if China continues to allow speculation otherwise, i.e. that it's only a modest and incremental industrial upgrade - is far more significant.

In late 2020 and early 2021, as the Trump era's sanctions and restrictions on Chinese tech firms carried over into his successor's term, the semiconductor world was fixated on whether China could quickly develop its own alternatives to the lithography hardware and electronic design automation (EDA) software necessary to manufacture chips below the 40-45nm resolution. If the answer was no, so the thinking went, Beijing's tech ambitions would be set back years, possibly even a decade, by simple US export bans.

By mid-2021, however, there was little indication in public news releases that China had either made any commercially significant domestic supply chain breakthroughs or imported lithography machines capable of fabricating at even the 28nm node - let alone the 14nm or 7nm ones. Rather, the tech press was awash with reports of Chinese imports of older model tools - including second-hand ones - and noted that some of them were obtained at a hefty premium despite their age and maturity.

Looking back, however, the picture was already far more nuanced: China had begun, no later than the second quarter of 2021, to systematically assert full-spectrum upstream control of the chipmaking supply chain.

When in the summer of 2021 the chief executive of ASML, the Dutch company that dominates the market for the highest end lithography machines - the deep ultraviolet (DUV) immersion and extreme ultraviolet (EUV) varieties - publicly voiced concerns that China could upend the entire chipmaking equipment market within just a few years, the game was already up insofar as it concerned the industry.

What really happened over the course of 2021 was that China - which produced 359 billion integrated circuits that year, or virtually a billion a day - acquired a dominant position in the bottom half of the global annual $450 billion market. In typical Chinese fashion - as had happened in so many other industries over the preceding couple of decades - the mainland ruthlessly exploited its comparative advantages of labor, capital, and generous state subsidy to rapidly undercut its foreign competitors, specifically by muscling in on the vast home market.

Whereas TSMC and Samsung - the longstanding duopoly of high end chips - had largely stopped fabricating ICs above 28nm, this was not the case for their laggards such as UMC, Intel, and Global Foundries. They now found ferocious new competition at the 40nm, 45nm, 65nm, and 90nm nodes: yet the effect on the market as a whole would hardly be limited to just these lower segments.

In addition to silicon, rare earths, and other primary elements, advanced chipmaking requires - unsurprisingly - a lot of less advanced chips. Not only that, but even ASML still earns over 40 percent of its revenue from previous generation lithography machines - dry argon fluoride (ArF) DUV and krypton fluoride (KrF) devices. With China quietly collaborating with ASML's Japanese rivals Nikon and Canon - exclusively in the older lithography space - Beijing suddenly acquired the means to deny second-tier global chipmakers the very heart of their businesses while simultaneously threatening to wipe the floor from even the ASML monopoly.

This gave ASML little choice but to secretly begin selling its best DUV immersion machines to SMIC and (for all we might speculate at this point) possibly other Chinese fabs: this would've happened no later than June 2021 - as in July 2021 SMIC was already shipping basic 7nm chips for bitcoin mining application.

In fact, realistically ASML had already begun shipping DUV immersion lithography to SMIC in April or even March: it would've sent an initial small batch of just 5 or 6 units as a preliminary trial of sorts - under the mutual understanding that all beneficiaries would be confidential mainland clients whose purchases of SMIC 7nm product were to be tightly guarded by state authorities.

As of August 2022, therefore, it's reasonable to estimate - based on additional technical information released after the shocking July disclosure of SMIC's 7nm crypto processors - that the leading Chinese champion alone has been churning out no less than 10,000 to 20,000 such wafers monthly, albeit nearly all of them labeled under the 14nm or even 28nm process nodes (at least until now).

Additionally, it should now be apparent that no later than the end of 2021, when China's primary domestic supplier of lithography equipment, Shanghai Microelectronics (SMEE), was poised to unveil a homegrown 28nm DUV device - even a rudimentary dry ArF one - ASML came under enormous new pressure to stabilize its supply of DUV immersion machines to the mainland market. It has since been revealed that 23 ASML lithography devices were sold to the mainland in the first quarter of 2022 alone - presumably all or most being DUV ArF immersion, per SMIC's requirements as of second half 2021. The true number could well be much higher - and under-the-radar sales must be assumed to be ongoing to this day, especially after the early July ban announced by the Biden administration on DUV as well as EUV devices to mainland chipmakers (firmly opposed in public pushback by ASML).

For all we know, by early 2023 SMIC and a select group of other Chinese fabs may well have monthly 7nm capacity of 50,000 to 100,000 wafers - even if they continue labeling most of it 28nm or 14nm - which would seriously jeopardize TSMC and UMC, the two leading Taiwanese foundries, in their residual business above 7nm.

That would mean Taiwan - which has already been hit with sanctions on imports of mainland sand (a vital raw material in the chipmaking process, along with water) in the wake of the Pelosi visit - would face new shortages of chipmaking inputs just as competition with the mainland heats up. It already seems as though Beijing intends to penalize Taiwan's strengthening economic ties with the US - specifically the push for a free trade agreement - by engineering a semiconductor recession on the island.

In fact, if China really played hardball, it could promptly cut Taiwan's chip industry in half by mid decade - and shrink it by three-quarters by late decade. Presumably, the mainland would make up the entire difference in such a scenario. All that Taiwan - and the US, by extension - would be left with in this full-scale chip war would be a small slice of premium manufacturing of 5nm, 3nm, and future 2nm process nodes.

Not only would reducing Taiwan's share of chipmaking boost China's own: it would also render what capacity remains on the island even more dependent on both mainland suppliers and clients. This would allow Beijing to quietly hoard even more output of TSMC's 5nm and (soon to be mass rollout) 3nm chips than it realistically already has been.

With such a grim outlook for the very heart and pride of its tech-dependent economy, Taiwan will be under enormous strain to make major concessions to China to avoid rapid hollowing out. TSMC, for one, will face financial pressure to transfer its advanced 5nm and 3nm manufacturing to the mainland to retain any significant capacity at or above 7nm - which as of today still accounts for 70 to 80 percent of its revenues.

Coercively onshoring Taiwan's semiconductor industry is by far China's best strategy to simultaneously end the century-long US superiority in global technological leadership as well as absorb the island itself. So potentially effective is it, in fact, that Beijing is aggressively pursuing no less than three other avenues to achieve this strategic master stroke over the remainder of this decade: advanced chip packaging, silicon photonics, and new semiconducting materials.

With AI-enhanced 3D chip packaging, China will be able to multiply the performance of lower-end chips - often no narrower than the commoditized 40nm node - by stacking them up and combining their processing in efficient and power-saving configurations. While this increases the use of silicon itself, it reduces the cost of advanced chipset production by up to an order of magnitude. All chipmakers whose primary lines of business remain above 10nm may be existentially threatened if this new trend of 3D packaging takes off in as little as two to three years: especially if the massive server and cloud markets which rely on mature central processing (CPU) and general processing (GPU) units typically between 14nm and 10nm are replaced by multi-packaged 28nm alternatives that may ultimately breach 10nm or even 7nm performance equivalents.

Silicon photonics, meanwhile, holds out the opposite promise: much more high-throughput calculation per unit of chip. With revolutionary quantum mechanics applications, parallel processing for cryptographic and high-volume data crunching becomes feasible at much lower levels of power consumption. With Chinese firms and research institutions already practically neck-and-neck with global leaders in this field, mass production and deployment are a matter of less than five years.

Finally, China is investing heavily in R&D on new semiconducting materials: particularly graphene, gallium nitride, and silicon carbide. All hold potential to significantly boost performance per chip transistor - meaning even a 28nm carbon-based chip could match a 7nm silicon one in speed while conserving 5 to 10 times the power. If eventually combined with 3D packaging, the new semiconducting materials will offer an extraordinary boost to low-cost, high-performance, and low-energy computing.

With all the aforementioned initiatives, China's de facto control of Taiwan's semiconductor sector is already little more than a matter of time. And yet, it behooves us to understand just how and why both the US and Taiwan arrived at such a dire juncture - where Chinese dominance is already approaching so rapidly on the horizon.

The bottom line is that the Trump era US trade war with China has been nothing short of an all-round strategic catastrophe for both America and the global democratic order it underpins.

Had Trump struck a comprehensive deal with Beijing when he had the upper hand in the intensive negotiations of early-to-mid 2019, instead of going for an unrealistic total kill of China's state-led economic model - thereby expanding the trade war into a tech war, as well - China would've remained entirely beholden to US-controlled chipmaking supply chains to the present day, as it only gradually ascended the value-added semiconductor manufacturing ladder.

Instead, by attempting to wipe out 5G telecoms giant Huawei with blanket chip export sanctions, Washington tipped off to the Communist regime that American semiconductor supplies would thereafter all be at risk of cutoff - and had to be replaced with domestic or at least non-American alternatives as quickly as practicable.

From there, further US restrictions against SMIC ensured that China would accelerate its quest to establish a fully indigenous chipmaking industry chain, to boot: though this would've happened regardless, American efforts to deny China modern fabrication equipment pulled forward by at least several years an all-out scramble by the mainland to reduce and eliminate the bottleneck of foreign lithography equipment and EDA software; thereby forcing the lucrative chipmaking supplier industry to cater to the Chinese market much earlier than would've otherwise been the case - that is, for all but the uppermost tier of EUV lithography.

The net result, in less than three short years, is that the entire chipmaking supply chain is primed for a wave of commoditization driven by Chinese industrial policy on a scale and timeframe rivaling that of primary bulk manufacturing in the early 2000s - that is, in the wake of China's entry into the WTO and an injection of fresh international capital into its cumbersome state-owned enterprises (SOEs).

In other words: by the second half of the present decade, Taiwanese, South Korean, Japanese, and yes, even American, technological prowess and primacy will have been relegated to a thing of the past: the entire future of semiconductors and chipmaking will belong to mainland China.

But if anything, this terrifying trajectory alone will create panic - sooner rather than later - in Washington and Taipei. The specter of the end of US primacy and its replacement by a Chinese ascendancy in East Asia and the Western Pacific is so traumatizing to both that they're liable to overcompensate with new gestures of diplomatic and defense cooperation in the very near term that unequivocally cross Beijing's red lines on the One China Principle.

In that case, Taiwan's de facto independence can already be measured not in years or months, but mere weeks or even days.

While stepping up military blockade exercises again - perhaps to an even greater intensity than in early August - China will now threaten to commandeer the island's maritime commerce and freeze its supplies of semiconductors to the US: and to make the latter stick, Beijing will also brandish its "nuclear option" - a rare earth ban on American customers in both the military and civilian sectors.

This will force Washington to nix additional arms sales to the island and possibly even scale back the symbolic diplomatic visits by Congress members and state governors - which will finally be understood to have been a spectacular strategic blunder. The ensuing domestic political crisis in Taiwan, meanwhile, could well destroy Tsai Ingwen's pro-independence government - faced as it will be with a steep and probably irreversible recession.

Taiwan will be absorbed - and America will have been replaced as the leading superpower - not so much in fact, but in sheer psychological intimidation; years ahead of schedule, one should add.

China's already won the trade war - here's why

As the US-China trade war teeters on the brink of all-out hostilities, it's high time to declare that its outcome is already a foregone conclusion. China's already won - its victory simply has to play itself out now, whether over a few months or a full decade. What follows is a brief explanation of how and why.

The entire premise of the Trump administration's hardline stance - that China is so badly dependent on US markets and high technology that cutting these off would be a death blow to its economic and geopolitical ambitions - rings increasingly hollow. The fact is, China never really needed the US and its allies nearly as much as they imagined. On top of this, it has offered them enormous benefits in return, as well - the loss of which will be considerably greater for the free world than will be the closure to Beijing of Western institutions and know-how, both of which are now enormously exaggerated in their intrinsic and practical value.

China already faces a very different challenge in its ongoing national development than it did even a decade and a half ago, as it first surged into global economic powerhouse status aback entry into the WTO and the free trade this offered its vast export engine of cheap labor and intensive capital investment. This phase of growth is over, and China's rulers already plan to slow down, even to potentially a crawl, future growth for the sake of internal socioeconomic rebalancing and redistribution.

It is no longer correct to assume, as Western media and punditry so blithely do, that Beijing's obsession remains to "overtake the US" in the conventional sense of creating more cutting-edge technology and eventually catching up to the same high average living standards; the former remains a long-term aspiration, the latter is already being reassessed as a legitimate goal at all. Some 40 years of reform and opening have already entrenched within the People's Republic the same structural social and cultural problems that plague far wealthier Western states - destabilization of the traditional family, plunging birthrates, exploding frequencies of sexual and other moral vices and addictions, epidemic rates of psychological disorders such as depression, and an especially fragile and vulnerable youth population in which these complications of postmodernity are amplified. These issues of the public welfare reaching down to the very private individual level - not some rat race for superpower supremacy with America - are what keep the country's Communist rulers up at night.

The question confronting China is no longer one of generating prosperity, but one of how to harness it for a well-rounded and holistic well-being for its venerable Oriental society and culture in the collective. To this end, all Western-inspired ideas and Western-sourced technical innovations are merely ancillary to the perceived needs of the Chinese state in its self-declared service of the Chinese people. What Beijing wants far more than parity with the West is a better-functioning and more harmonious domestic house - whereby even autocratic one-party rule itself is but a means to an end, not the end in itself.

This requires, in turn, trade-offs that point not necessarily to acceleration of capital and technological accumulation, but more selective distribution and application of it. The human factor is central: China has never lionized technology as some silver bullet to supplant human decision-making and agency, even in limited well-defined realms; it instead views it only through the lens of optimizing, streamlining, and securing and certifying the functions of governance and oversight that are so central to any nation or society's ongoing existence across all ages and eras. Likewise, and even more critically, China has never prized material wealth as anything intrinsically so valuable that it can purport to replace - rather than facilitate with more leisure and luxury time - the more transcendental pursuit of human knowledge and wisdom at a broad and general level if at all possible. Wealth and technology alike, as China has recently been rediscovering in its struggle to wean itself off the broken rapid-growth model of recent decades, are of little value if they don't somehow engender deeper integration, based on enhanced overall self-awareness and other-awareness, of the individual members and groupings of society which form it as a whole.

Beijing thus has, by this point, little confusion as to where its principal chores lie in the foreseeable future - and how a partial retrenchment from engagement abroad, especially with the democratic West and the US in particular, would actually help rather than hurt this endeavor. Practically no expert opinion on the other end - the instigating end - of the trade war has even thought about this possibility, judging from the commentary to date.

The role that technology will play for China is not to increase the average citizen's enjoyment and consumption of goods and services - of that there is already an excess, in the ruling bureaucracy's view - but to gradually educate and inculcate said citizenry in the traditionally specialized domains of knowledge and application of it hitherto reserved for the mandarin caste. This cannot happen overnight in any individual Chinese person's case: it must be fully and deeply integrated into all aspects of everyday life over a period of many years. Consumption of sheer quantity - even superlative quality, in many cases - of goods and services will be de-emphasized; production of them with greater efficiency and more widely disseminated specialist knowledge, such as computer coding, with greater mass involvement to boot, will be promoted.

As such, the vision of a future high-tech China will not be one in which disjointed individual consumers are instantly downloading and processing with lightning speeds ever-greater volumes of raw data in every conceivable media format; it will be one in which connected clusters of citizens will be very deliberately collaborating in controlled and measured formulations of moderate scale and speed - with the only end-goal being the absorption into the strictly human realm of knowledge and understanding of digitally-mediated data points, which by definition can only happen not by being force-fed, but by an osmotic-diffusive digestion.

Contrast this with what the vaunted tech titans of Silicon Valley have created for Western society: an anarchic mass jumble of cacophonous competing hashtags and memes - expressing itself most effectively in collective format by the naked tribalistic insults, recriminations, and backbiting which are already becoming the legacy and hallmark of unregulated social media. Is that something that Western elites and opinion leaders - no less its rabid tribal elders like Donald Trump himself - can even presume to be a model or inspiration for the proud Middle Kingdom, which now has every reason to decouple from Western technological systems and networks altogether?

You can see where this must conclude: China's already won the trade war because it alone - in stark contrast to the clueless West and especially self-absorbed ethnocentric United States - even understands what this conflict is really all about. It's hard to win a war when you don't even know what your objectives are - versus what mirages you think they are. In the end, you can't prevail in a new century's competition if you stick to the script of the last century - and this is what the last-ditch American attempt to stop China's rise with this trade war essentially and very transparently has now been disclosed to be.

Trump is doomed: China has a "Plan B" but US doesn't

After weeks of wrangling over tariffs, the prospect of a US-China trade war has become frighteningly real.

Some would dismiss this as alarmism - despite bouts of volatility caused by trade war talk in the markets, the international financial and business communities remain fairly sanguine and overall seem to be rather naive as to the magnitude of what is now transpiring between Washington and Beijing.

But the underlying shift has already occurred: this spat between the world's two leading economies is no longer about prosperity, but about power; it is no longer a clash between profit-seeking corporations, but between identity-seeking civilizations. Money is already rapidly being relegated to only a means to an end - this is why Wall Street and the global financial community are about to be completely blindsided by the developing course of events.

But Donald Trump's gambit to compel China to change its behavior by dangling the threat of a trade war is already doomed - in fact, practically even before it began. Because for all its stated reluctance to engage in such a conflict, Xi Jinping's communist regime is already resigning and resolving itself to disengage from the United States - and Washington is not aware of how far along this process has come. China has a "Plan B" if negotiations with America fail; the US does not.

China no longer needs the US exclusively for high technology to build up its already formidable economy and military - it can get most or all of that from its European and Asian partners who are caught in the middle of the gathering clash of the titans, who themselves harbor no illusions about being able to challenge China's rise and will thus demand an ever higher price from the US to join in an attempt to stop it, one that Trump has unequivocally stated he is unwilling to pay. Increasingly, China is also developing indigenous capabilities across an entire range of industries and sectors that, while not yet in the same league as those of the West, make it practically impossible to blackmail with sanctions.

Hawkish US commentators tend to be under the impression that the US still holds the ultimate advantage in an economic conflict with China because while it will absorb tremendous pain from a cutoff of cheap Chinese goods, it is China that will risk complete collapse as the social contract between the communist regime and its subjects is shattered by the loss of the export cash cow that is America. This is a dangerous misconception: it is China that will absorb tremendous pain in such an apocalyptic scenario, but the US which could stand to come apart at the seams if the cost of everyday living suddenly skyrockets.

Even when China first entered the WTO in 2001-02, its cheaply assembled consumer goods exports to the US underpinned hundreds of billions of dollars in annual markups to distributors and final retail sellers; today, that figure stands in the trillions. Literally millions of low-end, typically part-time and sparsely benefit-offering retail and service jobs in America - the lifeblood of much of the bottom 80 percent of the workforce - are now intertwined with Chinese products that must be imported in the volume that only the middle kingdom can reliably offer to keep basic expenses at American companies low yet still profitable for their merchants. The disruption to the bottom line of firms across the entire US economic landscape will be great enough to pressure wages and even jobs themselves on a broad and systematic scale; the dislocation need not reach the level of social instability to generate a political backlash that would reverberate powerfully both in state capitals and in Washington.

In the decade since the financial crisis, the other major factor in China's economic clout with the US has likewise exponentially mushroomed: mainland investments in US assets of all classes, of which the $1.2 trillion of US Treasury holdings by Beijing's central bank are only the foundational linchpin.

Chinese firms and financial institutions of all sizes, both private and state-owned, are now marquee players in the global US dollar ecosystem. The $10 to $15 trillion offshore dollar or "Eurodollar" money market has a single undisputed top player: China, whose over $3 trillion in foreign currency reserves doesn't even include the massive and still rapidly growing foreign-denominated liquid assets of Chinese state banks and enterprises and private Chinese individuals and firms - which together amount to perhaps another several trillion US dollars.

As such, the media debate over whether China will "dump" its vast Treasury holdings in economic warfare with America completely misses the point: while China would appear to have no interest in debasing its own assets, it is such a disproportionately large - even "market-making" - factor in global bond and debt markets that even small shifts in its allocation preferences will have powerful repercussions for debt pricing and borrowing costs worldwide. This is already evident in the heart of the Eurodollar money market based in England: largely presaging the looming Chinese switch from dollars to yuan for oil and other commodity payments, the overnight benchmark London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) has shot up in the first months of 2018.

From these aforementioned financial and commercial realities, there is little doubt that Beijing - not Washington - already truly calls the shots in the global economy. Indeed, if anything the Trump trade spat is only highlighting how skillfully China has managed to continue keeping its profile low, per Deng Xiaoping's famous maxim, "Hide your strength, bide your time": when China was already a rising superpower in the 1990s and 2000s, it gave the appearance of merely a normal great power; now that China has already become the new superpower on the block, even its increased bouts of assertiveness on the world stage - especially in its own neighborhood - are still fooling its opponents and critics into the impression that Beijing is arrogantly overreaching and overextending itself.

But with Donald Trump in the picture, everything that is hidden is being dramatically brought to the light. The maverick US president was elected largely on the premise that something is deeply, deeply amiss about a postwar global order that purportedly was still under Washington's control for the benefit of the American people, yet was ever more obviously serving other nations, even competitors like China, better than America itself.

The Trump administration is now barreling towards the point of no return: it is Washington, starting from a weak and losing position that it is ever more fully conscious of, which is pushing this imminent clash with Beijing that one way or another stands to fundamentally reset the entire architecture of international relations and indeed alter the trajectory of world history itself.

In already backing away from actually imposing tariffs that amount to a paltry fraction of a percent of annual GDP, Trump has unwittingly signaled just how badly unprepared his administration is for a trade war that he has blithely declared to be "good, and easy to win."

It is good and easy to win alright: for China, because the middle kingdom has already won (something Trump, yet again unwittingly, admitted).

The talks between Washington and Beijing are essentially futile in substance no matter how substantive in appearance: they are basically negotiations over the terms of US surrender to China. (In fact, their opaque nature of late is itself an indication of just how little there is to really discuss, i.e. how practically nonexistent is any positive spin that the White House PR department can put on it.)

Because China is the party that can walk away and call a total victory. Its "Plan B" isn't even a plan: it's simply to stay still and virtually mum in its dealings with America even as the latter howls in protest for more "talks" and the like.

While it's true that Beijing is also accelerating already well-developed and partially implemented contingencies for joining with Russia to counter US military provocations across the periphery of Eurasia - the clearest evidence of all that Trumpian Washington is getting totally taken to the cleaners by its old Cold War rivals - even this is merely secondary.

The American system will itself fall apart should Trump finally and actually push the envelope on the Celestial Empire: its own internal dichotomy between a bipartisan globalist elite and an increasingly nativist Republican party base will not survive the headwinds of a clash that pits individual profit and interest against collective responsibility and cohesion. China will be the death knell for American liberal democracy and free-market capitalism - the coming realignment will be utterly epoch-changing, because it will spell the end of the supremacy of modern Western civilization itself.

What's behind the China-Taiwan air dispute?

Relations between China and Taiwan have hit an arguably decade-plus low in recent weeks, as an intensifying row over acceptable civilian air routes over the Taiwan Strait has apparently jeopardized all current and future transport integration of the island with the mainland. What could be behind such a drastic deterioration of the atmosphere?

Beijing's displeasure with the self-ruling island's independence-leaning president, Tsai Ingwen, stems from the latter's refusal to reaffirm the so-called "1992 consensus" that posits that Taiwan is an inseparable part of "one China" even if it practically interprets this differently from the communist-ruled mainland. Since taking office in spring 2016, Ms. Tsai has held the line on this core campaign pledge to her liberal Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) base, to gradually formalize the island's de facto independence by removing recognition of Beijing's wish for eventual reunification as a precondition for cross-strait relations.

In recent months, Tsai's defiance has acquired a more urgent undertone for the communist authorities, who since October's 18th Party Congress which cemented the authority of Xi Jinping have made nationalism even more prominent as China's primary ideological organizing principle and foundation. This is in no small part because Taipei has increasingly turned to its main ally - the United States - for backup.

By approving a $1.5 billion arms package for Taiwan in mid-2017, the Trump administration has signaled its willingness to continue America's role as the island's security guarantor per the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act; meanwhile various military and civilian contacts between Taipei and Washington have accelerated since the second half of last year, adding to the growing impression that a new push is underway to support the island as a principal buffer against red Chinese expansionism in the Western Pacific.

This kind of US-Taiwan engagement would not be particularly troublesome for Beijing except that it's happening in the context of a Taipei administration which has made no secret of its desire for formal independence - or at the very least, refused to rule that out as a viable option.

Especially because Beijing considers the Taiwanese people as belonging to its own, it has always been loathe to assert itself too intrusively on their internal affairs - and this is especially so in the present moment, when pro-reunification sentiment on the island has dipped to an all-time low as younger Taiwanese in particular bask in their separate identity apart from China. But as Beijing sees it, it is nonetheless still Taipei which is upsetting a carefully balanced and mutually agreed upon status quo of non-independence in exchange for non-interference; it thus behooves it to put the Tsai administration in its place by showing it that its aspirations for internationally recognized statehood are no closer today than they were during the first DPP-led independence bid of the early 2000s.

For the Taiwanese people's distinctly forged identity is not the only major change that has occurred since then: China itself has also risen dramatically. In economic, political, and military terms, the balance of power has tilted to the mainland's advantage so much that even as Taiwan seeks its own way, that way is increasingly defined by how it recalibrates its relationship with China.

To put it another way: the 1992 consensus may be long defunct, but if Taipei pushes the envelope on shoving this fact in Beijing's face, it will find that the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act with the US is also practically untenable in its status quo format.

America can no longer save Taiwan from China. Previously, it pledged to do so only within the context of acknowledging Beijing's own "one China principle" - never permitting let alone encouraging independent Taiwanese statehood, even as a separate "Republic of China" which in fact it had recognized as the legitimate government of all China until the 1970s rapprochement with the communists.

And so, as Tsai's Taiwan has nurtured and acted upon hopes of American support for its assertion of a separate destiny, the Xi regime has moved to constrict the actual free space that the island still affords to do so. In unilaterally declaring new routes for its civilian airliners over the Taiwan Strait, the mainland intends to show that it doesn't need any permission from Taipei - and Washington for that matter - to change facts on the ground (i.e. in the air) to match its claims of sovereignty over all Taiwan.

The Taiwanese retaliation - canceling earlier approved mainland carrier flights to its territory - will not succeed in altering the communist regime's calculations. With two-fifths of the island's exports going to the mainland, there is little doubt who holds the upper hand in the economic relationship - especially as Taiwan's long vaunted technological edge over its increasingly sophisticated and capable rival further diminishes. And any attempts by the Taiwanese military to (re)establish control of the truncated airspace will immediately trigger a more powerful PLA response.

Ms. Tsai for the first time last week grudgingly acknowledged the possibility, even likelihood, of a mainland attack should Taiwan move towards formal independence; that it took her so long - and required such a concrete crisis imposed by China - to wake up to the harsh reality, indicates how patiently and confidently Beijing has been playing its hand against her.

Meanwhile, the US under the bombastically "America First" banner of Donald Trump could hardly notice the China-Taiwan spat less; its Asia focus appears to continue to be consumed by the singular problem of North Korea, and even that in a highly insular and even ad-hoc manner.

China - even under the stridently nationalistic Xi regime - has always seen itself as playing a long game that the sheer force of history assures it of winning; its intent for Taiwan's independence proclivities - which it has soberly come to recognize as a permanent fact of cross-strait relations - is to merely disabuse them of what they don't in fact render possible for the self-ruling island. That is to say, it ultimately matters not a whit how much the less than 25 million people of Taiwan may feel they are a separate people and nation deserving of recognition as such by the international community - so long as the communists rule the mainland, the nearly 1.4 billion people there will have a final veto.

The US empire's last stand in the Asia-Pacific

Even as the Koreas begin historic new peace talks, here in the US the neocon hawks are making sure their case for war is still heard loud and clear. Perhaps this is nothing beyond the obvious substitution of a war of words for a war of bombs and missiles; but in fact there is something more profound behind it.

If the North-South detente succeeds, it will mark a new chapter in US-Korean relations: one that diminishes the seven-decade role of Washington as Seoul's security guarantor, perhaps to the point of a complete pullout of US forces from their remaining outpost on the Asian mainland. In the immediate term at least, this will be viewed as a major blow to American power and prestige.

Even without such a pullout - which will likely be the concession given to the North in exchange for the latter's nuclear disarmament - from now on the US will no longer be in the driver's seat with respect to Korean security policy. Already, its freedom of action is sharply constrained by South Korean politics; if and when a North-South thaw really takes hold, unless some corresponding policy shift also occurs in Washington, the US will find itself left out in the cold and wondering why it has to continue defending an ally who so much no longer sees eye-to-eye with it on very fundamental matters.

Inertia is the most powerful force in politics - but especially in international relations. As a whole, the US policy class inside the Beltway has completely failed - in reality, refused - to adjust to the new glaring realities of a China-centric East Asia (with Russia an effective satellite of Beijing in the region which also happens to be the latter's ultimate security enforcer). This new environment is one in which US free-market democracy is not the dominant socioeconomic system, but increasingly an also-ran clawing for any bit of traction in whichever small would-be dependency it can; and an environment in which the high-priced US military so deeply worshiped by the Washington policy class is simply not an effective tool anymore to deter authoritarian expansionism.

That second part was already pretty much clear to common-sense observers around the beginning of this decade; that they still haven't sunk in in the minds of the career bureaucrats making decisions about US policy in the Far East shows the depths to which American leadership and initiative in the region has decayed and atrophied.

To his great - but politically posthumous - credit, Barack Obama understood that any continued and indeed expanded US military presence in the Asia-Pacific would only be effective in countering China's imperial ambitions if it were integrated into a more overarching geoeconomic strategy to compel Beijing to open its markets on US terms or risk being isolated into its own command-economy bloc. While he ended up being unrealistic about the actual achievability of this objective, he at least understood its practical necessity: in the Asia-Pacific policy void that his administration has left behind it, there is now little left but a series of haphazard and uncoordinated American reactive measures to retain influence in a critical part of the world that Trump effectively handed to China on his third day in office by leaving the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

The unfolding of the North Korean crisis has been but the logical outcome of an America gone AWOL in the region in every sense except brandishing its sheriff's guns - as if there weren't already a new sheriff in town there. The neocons are dead right in one respect, even if they won't admit it: this is for all practical purposes the US postwar empire's last stand in the Asia-Pacific...and yes, it carries profound implications for the US empire elsewhere, especially the Middle East, where Iran's Ayatollahs are inevitably drawing the lesson from Kim Jong-Un that Washington is powerless to stop a determined foe from acquiring the means to render itself invulnerable to imperialist bullying.

The neocons may be paranoid, but behind every paranoia is a quite rational fear of loss - the object feared to be lost may well be blown completely out of proportion to its actual value, but the very process of undergoing loss itself is the true issue at hand for any mind or mindset that has for so long been accustomed to thinking of world domination as its birthright.

Why the Xi Jinping era could go beyond 2030

As the last quarter of 2017 approaches, things are looking up for Xi Jinping. The 19th party congress, set to start October 18, now looks all but certain to cement his paramount power over the CPC state, which ever since his early days in 2013 has been likened to Mao's.

Indeed, it is now no longer unrealistic to consider that the Xi Jinping era will outlast whatever tenure as party secretary that Xi actually does serve: if, as appears increasingly the case, the coming years in China will be defined as much by raw politics as by technocratic administration, Xi's style and method of governance are likely to retain an influence on the top levels of the party-state to a far greater extent than any one official title or post could suggest. As such, the longevity of his reign at the apex of the world's rising superpower could eventually boil down to informal and behind-the-scenes authority and clout of the sort that Singapore senior minister Lee Kuan-Yew enjoyed for a full quarter-century after retirement from the premiership in 1990.

This critical two-year period from late 2015 to late 2017 will likely go down as China's true departure from what might be dubbed the "extended Deng Xiaoping era", namely the period of "reform and opening up" that was launched in late 1978 and continued throughout the length of the administrations of Deng's two immediate successors, Jiang Zemin (1993-2003) and Hu Jintao (2003-2013).

With the stock market crash and consequent currency instability of the second half of 2015, the post-Tiananmen contract that had prevailed since 1989 - that of continual economic liberalization even with persistent political control - finally came under a kind of existential strain that meant the end of "business as usual" with respect to the CPC's essentially techno-bureaucratic approach to governance as personified by the two "red engineers" personally handpicked by Deng, Jiang and Hu.

Though few have recognized it, what has transpired since late 2015 and early 2016 has been nothing less than a purge by Xi of the powerfully vested interests of the Jiang and Hu administrations - which collectively formed the "rent-seeking" upper caste of post-Tiananmen, market-Leninist China. Even in very short hindsight, it should be clear that this internal housecleaning is no less significant than what took place in 1989-91; and despite the fact that Xi's practical authority still lags that of Deng in that post-crackdown interlude, as of the imminent 19th congress, it is becoming apparent that even those elite apparatchiks that may never be considered "his own men" in any meaningful sense will necessarily be cowed to toe his line, if they haven't already.

While the outside world and especially the West continues by habit to look to the government side of the party-state - exemplified by its head, premier Li Keqiang - for cues as to China's direction, since 2016 it behooves China watchers to pay ever closer attention to the partisan aspect of the giant country's sociopolitical equation.

That's fundamentally because, during the extended Deng Xiaoping era (1978-2015), it was truly the case that economics and commerce took precedence over ideology and identity. For once the initial contradiction of economic reform under a communist regime was dealt with violently in 1989, the sheer underdevelopment of the nation as a whole meant that any deeper and more ultimate questions - of socialism versus capitalism, of autocracy versus democracy - could simply be deferred for a while as China feverishly (even frantically) closed the yawning material gap with the rich and Western world.

As of the early 2010s, however, China had essentially reached middle-income status (at least in purchasing power terms); by now questions of distribution and equity of wealth and prosperity had overtaken those of the aggregates accumulated. Being such a large continental economy with massive interior regions as well as a long ocean coastline, it was simply impossible for China to put off dealing with these problems that likely would have been far less pressing, even benign, were it the size of Korea or even Japan.

Xi Jinping came to power in 2012-13 with an acute understanding of the ideological-identitarian - not merely the administrative-practical - nature of China's governance crisis and more particularly the party-state's own internal crisis of confidence. Events since late 2015 have now revealed that his grasp of both the breadth and the scale of this conundrum greatly exceeded that of his critics - and indeed that which said critics were ever capable of noting in him (let alone crediting him with).

Indeed, it was the stock and currency travails of 2015 which - exactly contrary to the regime's opponents' and detractors' claims of being proof of the Xi administration's woeful incompetence in tackling complex market systems - instead vindicated the draconian approach of intensified centralized control that Xi had taken with both the anti-corruption campaign and the broader crackdown on sociopolitical dissent that began in his first year (2013).

As it turned out, what China truly needed was more control and authoritarianism, not less: it was precisely because Beijing refused to kowtow to the Western laissez-faire principle that markets shouldn't be tampered with by authorities - in effect, that greedy speculators and interest groups should have free rein because the only alternative is the greater evil of state repression - that the Chinese economy avoided panic and ultimately staved off the hard landing that Western and pro-Western neoliberal fundamentalists craved to see.

As such, Xi and his allies have every reason to view their perseverance and belated victory (to date) of the past two years as ultimately one of superior values and not merely one of better technicals: they see that the blanket rejection of Western regulatory minimalism has paid off - so well, in fact, that the rest of the non-Western world has taken increasing notice.

And Xi personally would like to take the lion's share of credit for this - at least eventually. The state's role as market and by extension social referee is now increasingly enshrined in China as the antidote to the perverted Western notion that seems to unduly exalt individual liberty as an end in itself; man is a social animal and as such it is the collective that must set boundaries for the individual and expand or contract them with the whole prioritized over the parts - not the other way around.

Of course, this throwback to the traditional Confucian value system of ancient China has been a feature of the post-Mao communist party-state from the get-go; even in the headiest days of the Jiang and Hu eras, characterized as they were by the unbridled pursuit of personal riches and status, the CPC has invoked it as a foundational societal organizing tenet. What differs now in the Xi Jinping era, though, is the sheer emphasis and confidence: because the individual simply can't be trusted to have the collective's best interests at heart, far be it from any self-respecting nation and culture (let alone one as old and venerable as China) to ever again entertain the subversive Western notion that one single human person can claim such a degree of legally sanctioned and morally enshrined autonomy and sovereignty.

This promises, then, to be the ideological sine qua non of Xi's China in his coming second term and beyond: a decisive counterpoint to Western hegemony in the realm of the mind and heart. While China's economic and technological development will continue apace throughout the 2020s - to create what's likely to be the world's largest economy even at market exchange rates by 2030 or thereabouts - this is also to be achieved in tandem with a clean break from the Western concept of "human rights", namely a clarification of the latter as more narrowly equated with "individual rights."

Indeed, as the West fractures and polarizes in the coming years - led by none other than its premier member, the now increasingly un-United States of America - a statesman as powerful and as ambitious as Xi Jinping will seek to make his impression on what will suddenly and drastically become a far more open battle arena of ideas and values which merely mirrors a far less Western-centered global economic order.

After all, the "Chinese dream" will not purport to limit itself to China's own restoration to the top of the family of human civilizations; it will and must eventually expand to encompass the actual Sinicization of that broader family itself - within the admittedly Chinese bounds of historic and cultural possibility, of course.

Xi envisions this dream to be realized by the year 2050; he has always envisioned its effective seal of guarantee to be secured far earlier than that, perhaps in the 2030s or even later 2020s. And as the 19th party congress comes round the corner, he most certainly intends to see to it that his own name is personally inextricably and indelibly associated with the ascent of the hope and the promise - by laying the foundations for a Xi Jinping era well past his transition off from official party leadership that will almost certainly happen in the next decade, whether early or late.

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.