“Imagine you are in a vehicle with inexhaustible gasoline that you don’t know how to drive and stop…speeding on an island full of precipitous mounds, overhanging cliffs and crags! This is the feeling of living in capitalism,” Bernard Shaw wrote before the Great Depression in 1928. A columnist at Deutsche Welle reckons that even nowadays, the words can still be a simile of the capitalism in which Chinese virus has made the economies of various countries come to a full stop. She particularly endorses Shaw’s conception that runaway capitalism is due to rulers at the helm “who know and think of nothing”. She even counts in Trump, who fixes his eyes on the stock market all the time.

Being put in the socialism with Chinese characteristics, we have never experienced the “non-stop nature of capitalism”. Yet, since the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, the situation has changed. President Xi, who is driving China, has been crowned and aspiring to drive “a great change that has not happened in a hundred years”, which has become the ultimate goal of Chinese dream. Gearing down and stepping on the gas, he has picked up speed, yet made it runaway. However, having wrestled with Trump in the trade war for two years, cracked down on the anti-extradition movement for a year, concealed Wuhan pneumonia epidemic, not least pushed through the National Security Law for Hong Kong in the Two Sessions, the National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, Xi Jinping should have sensed that the world he used to look askance at has changed. Since Trump’s Rose Garden manifesto in May 27, the free world led by the US has been beleaguering the Chinese Communist Party. With the joint investigation into the origin of Wuhan pneumonia, Xi Jinping is faced with having committed a war crime and a crime against humanity himself, the stress of which is way more intense than what the Soviet Union endured.

Crisis of plague、flood、national security law everywhere

After a local case of the second-wave epidemic certified in Beijing’s Xicheng district on June 11 confirmed that Xinfadi Agricultural Produce Wholesale Market is the source of infection, Beijing city activated second-level public health emergency. More than ten days later, even though several experts proclaimed that it could be and had been controlled, the high and medium risk areas have been increasing, spreading across ten regions in the city. On June 22, Caixin Media reported information about COVID-19 epidemic in Xinfadi and the virus DNA, in which three groups of sequences have D614G mutation. According to statistics by researchers, the proportion of D614G virus strain in COVID-19 has increased from 0% in the beginning of the year to 26% in March, 65% in April, and 70% in May. D614G mutation might multiply the infectiousness of the virus as well as the risk of death.

Beijing becoming the epicenter of the second-wave outbreak is precisely a ramification of Xi Jinping’s covering up the epidemic and impatience with holding back the Two Sessions and showcasing achievements. Since Beijing became the epicenter, Xi Jinping has been holing up and shirking all the responsibility to Cai Qi, who has been further concealing the epidemic. The latent troubles will not go away, but will become a deeply buried bomb.

The more imminent crisis is the freshet in the south. An “Unparalleled deluge”, most torrential since 1940, was found in the whole Chongqing section of the Qijiang basin at dusk on June 22. Bridges snapped in fragments; railways were destroyed; buildings were crushed; villages were washed away. Caving-ins and waterlogging have been all over the place in Hubei, Anhui and Zhejiang. Strangely enough, with such an unparalleled deluge this year, the People’s Liberation Army and the leaders of the nation have been absent from the scene of combating the flood. Not even a single word of command from them has been heard.

The Three Gorges Dam(TGD), which has been deforming and seriously leaking, is the crux. It has been laid bare by local and foreign experts that while both the welding and cement of the architecture are substandard, the jerry-built construction is standard. Now the water storage of the TGD is pivotal to whether Wuhan or Chongqing is going to be submerged. If one of the four hydroelectric plants above the TGD, Jinshajiang, Wudongde, Baihetan and Xiluodu, collapses, a domino effect will crumble the TGD. Once the TGD is devastated, the middle and lower Changjiang River will be swallowed up. This is a genuine grey rhino. When the time comes, the Xi dynasty is doomed.



The Xi’s runaway vehicle, different from the runaway one of capitalism that is full of fuel, has been depleted of gasoline, which is a black swan for the time being. 2,000 shop owners have been notified by Beijing State Taxation Bureau to pay overdue taxes dating back to 2017 in accordance with the E-Commerce Law. Simply put, it is the summation of three year taxes in total. The named driver, Li Keqiang, is going to create a bunch of bankrupts in the offing.

The revolt against the national security law in Hong Kong is another black swan. Black swans in China are all over the place while dangerous enemies overseas, including Russia that sides with India, are lying in ambush. Where does Xi Jinping, dubbed as “chief acceleration specialist”, drive the vehicle depleted of gasoline to?

(Lui Yue, veteran Chinese journalist)

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