In the meme, GigaChad Xi Jinping is smiling next to the phrase “Do Nothing. Win.” Then the meme was updated when Beta Donald Trump unleashed The Art Of The Deal and got bit on his own ass, badly. Now it's “The Art Of Do Nothing & Win by Fuk Yu.” This is funny but not true. China has done lots of things over many decades, as its ancient wisdom and modern results can tell you.

Confucius

Confucius's ancient governing advice can be summarized through the example of the even more ancient Emperor Shun. We consider Confucius (Master Kong) ancient (-500), but he himself was harking back to Emperor Shun from 1,700 years before him. As The Analects (15.5) records, “The Master said, “Is Shun not an example of someone who ruled by means of wu-wei? What did he do? He made himself reverent and took his proper [ritual] position facing south, that is all.”” This one of the more confusing axioms of Confucius because it actually expands your mind the most. As the footnotes to the Hackett edition note, “This idea of “ruling by not ruling”—concentrating on self-cultivation and inner Virtue and allowing external things to come naturally and noncoercively—has been a constant theme throughout the Analects.” This has also been a constant ideal throughout Chinese history though, like wu-wei, rarely grasped and only briefly held.

The broad Confucian idea is that order radiates outwards from a good ruler, like metta in Buddhism, only more meta. If the ruler orders themselves, everything is rightly measured; the household, the ministers, the bureaucrats, the common people. As Master Kong said, “Let the lord be a true lord, the ministers true ministers, the fathers true fathers, and the sons true sons.” And as the Duke he was talking to responded, talking about inequality IMHO, “Well put! Certainly if the lord is not a true lord, the ministers not true ministers, the fathers not true fathers, and the sons not true sons, even if there is sufficient grain, will I ever get to eat it?”

This Duke like basically everyone ever didn't actually listen. Master Kong gave mild advice which was wildly impractical. But he's certainly not wrong. The Master said, “In your governing, Sir, what need is there for executions? If you desire goodness, then the common people will be good. The Virtue of a gentleman is like the wind, and the Virtue of a petty person is like the grass—when the wind moves over the grass, the grass is sure to bend.”

Master Kong's idea (common across most ancient ideas of kingship) was that the ruler could ground themselves by a deep connection to the ancestors and the gods, enacted (programmed in modern parlance) by ritual. If the ruler truly respected his elders, the even elder gods, then he would command respect by a truly higher power. The kingdom would be rightly ordered. Thus he could ‘take his proper [ritual] position facing south, that is all.’ This might look like ‘do nothing, win’ to an untrained eye, but if you listen to Master Kong, finding such a path actually requires the most work of all! Not just the life work of a ruler, but the life force of all the generations before them.

Art Of War

The Art Of War is another ancient text from roughly the same time as Master Kong, from the possibly apocryphal Sun Tzu. It is also a confusing text because its highest ideal is winning wars by not fighting them. It's like a painter's guide to a blank canvas. Master Sun said, “winning a hundred victories in a hundred battles is not the best possible outcome. Best is to subdue the enemy’s troops without ever engaging them on the battlefield.” Like Confucius, a true warlord would look like they're doing nothing, because everything had already been done. As Master Sun said, “the one who has the most tallies in the “temple calculations” before battle will surely be victorious over the one with fewer, let alone the one who has no tallies at all! From this I conclude that victory and defeat can be foreseen.”

I remember reading the Art Of War when I had a few months to launch an UberEats competitor, and being disappointed because it was so useless for my purposes. I tried some light industrial espionage which just blew up in my face and we only survived because of the power of the programmers that came before me. But that's another story. The Art Of War is all about preparation (temple tallies), which I had no time for. That is the point, which I missed. You have to take time in the past to relax in the future. Master Sun said, “In general, whoever takes his position first on the battleground to await the enemy can take his time, whereas the commander who takes up his position belatedly must rush into battle hard-pressed. By definition, those who excel in battle compel the enemy and they do not let others compel them.”

This is not the conventional idea of war, which is all about glory on the battlefield. But Master Sun said, “A victory that does not surpass the understanding of the vulgar crowd is not the best sort of victory. Nor is the finest way to win a battle one that the whole realm applauds.” As they continued, “He who excels in battle doesn’t have a name for cleverness, nor does he garner accolades for his courage. He never errs in winning battles, because he places his men where they are bound to win, and he conquers those who are already lost.”

Bear this all in mind as we discuss trade wars, which are best not fought at all. As China's modern State Council Information Office said, “Trade wars produce no winners, and protectionism leads up a blind alley. The economic success of both China and the US presents shared opportunities rather than mutual threats.” At the same time, however, Master Sun didn't raise no bitch. So their Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman also said, “If war is what the U.S. wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight till the end.”

Trade War

I'm not saying that anyone in China is consulting these intro level books, these are common-sense insights, at least in China. Plan ahead, prepare, any parent worth their salt teaches this, you don't necessarily need great sages. I am saying that China is dealing small-minded people who have only now picked on someone their own size and are having a literal crash course in world history.

The great advantage of Chinese central planning is basically just having a fucking plan, which is somehow witchcraft to pantser Americans. ‘What is this sorcery?’ they say, ‘someone thinking more than a tweet ahead?’ This should not be news after getting bested by everyone from Vietnam to the Taliban, but a coward dies a thousand times before their death. But I digress.

For an understanding of Chinese leadership, understand what current leader Xi Jinping learned during his own re-education. Xi was sent to the countryside in Liangjiahe for seven years, “sleeping in flea-infested cave-houses, laboring for long hours and wrestling with hunger.” As a villager there said (via Xinhua) “Wang Xianping, recollected how Xi, who then served as a village leader, repaired the road connecting the village with the outside. “It used to be a narrow and winding path that couldn't even accommodate a wheelbarrow and was then transformed into a broad road,” Wang said. The road helped the village kickstart its development.” Call this propaganda if you want, I don't think it impractical that Xi built a road. It is this simply insight that leads directly to the Belt and Road Initiative today, which has gone global.

As Xi rose from village to town to province, Xi stuck to this lesson, citing the pithy saying ‘if you want to get rich, first build roads.’ When he rose to international leadership of China (which takes forever, it's not a reality TV show contest like in America), Xi transposed this logic to global transportation logistics, saying that “Infrastructure is the bedrock of connectivity – it is the lack of infrastructure that has held up the development of many countries.”

To that end, China embarked on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), building roads, railroads, and ports all over the world. In People's Daily in 2023, He Yin said, “Over the past 10 years, the BRI has taken "hard connectivity" of infrastructure as an important direction, "soft connectivity" of rules and standards as an important support, and "people-to-people connectivity" among partner countries as an important foundation.” This is now a working system, with major economic results.

This hard, painstaking work across multiple continents and millions of stakeholders was the ‘temple calculations’ made long before trade war broke out. China's ruler had already taken a ritual position facing (Global) South. This is why it appears that Xi is doing nothing now, because the hard work of preparation has already been done. And you can see what happened. China went from trading the most with the Global North (White Empire I call it) to trading the most with the Global South.

The BRI has been cynically spun by the West as a debt trap, but remember (always) that every accusation is a confession. I speak from Sri Lanka which fell into the debt trap, and our problem was western loans, China actually helped us out. Western debt is just debt to pay more debt (ie, themselves), with the IMF coming into strip us of assets, never building them. China is not like that, it's a completely different development model, and completely non-coercive. As a recent (Western) study out of Johns Hopkins reports,

Cases from Sri Lanka, Iraq, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Angola, and the Republic of Congo, among others, point to debt relief patterns with distinctly Chinese characteristics. In nearly all cases, China has only offered debt write-offs for zero-interest loans. Our study found that between 2000 and 2019, China has cancelled at least US$ 3.4 billion of debt in Africa. There is no “China, Inc.”: for interest-bearing loans, treatment for inter-governmental debt and Chinese company loans are negotiated separately, and often loan-by-loan rather than for the entire portfolio. While rescheduling by increasing the repayment period is common, changes in interest rates, reductions in principal (“haircuts”), or refinancing are not. We found that China has restructured or refinanced approximately US$ 15 billion of debt in Africa between 2000 and 2019. We found no “asset seizures” and despite contract clauses requiring arbitration, no evidence of the use of courts to enforce payments, or application of penalty interest rates.

China is actually helpful, the hateful propaganda against them is just sour grapes to make an intoxicating whine. I make this digression to spare myself a tirade war in the comments. You can generally take China at their word while you can assume that America is lying. This rarely leads you wrong.

For example, when America accuses China of 'stealing' jobs from them, this is a lie. America was deindustrializing long before China joined the WTO, and Americans don't want those jobs anymore. America chose to spend money bombing other country's infrastructure instead of building their own, but that's literally their business, not China's.

Also, American trade is not that important to China anymore. As someone reports, “China has been working to reduce its dependency on US trade since Trump's first term, successfully decreasing the share of US exports from 19% in 2018 to under 15% in 2024 based on figures provided by the People's Daily. However, the total value of exports to the US remains substantial at $525 billion, accounting for nearly 3% of China's GDP.” The number is high, but less than 3% is not actually substantial. The copy editors are coping hard.

Most of China's demand is actually domestic and they no longer require FDI and technology from the West, it's actually vice versa. The fact is that the world has changed while westerners are still dwelling in the past.

The yin-yang of global trade has completely flipped from 2000 to 2020. The world's largest trading partner is China, not America. America is more like the spurned ex, threatening to kill themselves if we don't go back to her. But America can no longer dictate terms, only throw tariffic tantrums.

Biden's Dumbassador Nicholas Burns said, “We don't want to live in a world where the Chinese are the dominant country,” but no other country is this murder-suicidal. There is in fact nothing nefarious in China's rise, just things returning to the global mean after a few aberrant centuries of colonial domination. Most of the world's population is in most of the world and that's where most the wealth was too, until Europeans looted it. The imperialists are lucky that the world doesn't want revenge or restitution, just to move on without things going nuclear. America (as heirs to the White Empire) could have had a privileged place in a multipolar world for another century, but they seem determined to piss it away this decade. And so it goes, in one last pissing contest.

Trump's tariff tirade goes nowhere because China has so integrated with the world while America has so disintegrated. Those that live by globalization die by globalization, and a lot of trade that Trump tried to ban in Trade War I just re-routed. Goods just re-routed via the Belt and Road while America auto-erotically asphyxiates itself alone in the closet. Americans ended up buying the same stuff through third parties like Mexico and ASEAN, at a markup. This is similar to what happened to Russian oil, which suddenly began being sold to dumbass Europeans as if Indians struck a geyser.

You could eyeball China's trade surplus with other countries going up as its surplus with America went down. Blackballing China doesn't work, America just ends up buying white-labeled good at higher cost. As researchers at CUHK said, “Our findings indicate a substantial increase in indirect exposure to China post-Trade War – the indirect exposure of U.S. importers to China through Vietnam increased by approximately 21%, while through Mexico by about 5.5% – suggesting that despite efforts to de-risk, U.S. supply chains remain intricately linked to China via third-party nations.”

‘De-risk’ is actually a made-up word, and absurdity repeated so much it sounds profound. It's like the joke about Australia protecting its trade routes (with China) from China. China has never threatened America and looks for win-win trade with everybody, even people that don't deserve it. If I spend millions ‘de-ghosting’ my house that doesn't make ghosts real, it just makes me a moron.

Whatever politicians say, the American economy doesn't want to decouple from China, as you may have noticed when markets recently shit the bed. A lot of the American economy (like Apple) is just white-labelling Chinese products at a massive markup. Apple's ‘Designed in California’ just means moving the camera bump around on Photoshop for decades, it's pure profit. And it's not just Apple, the military-industrial complex itself cannot decouple from China. Hence you get the warlords like Greg Hayes of Raytheon saying (via the FT),

Greg Hayes, chief executive of Raytheon, said the company had “several thousand suppliers in China and decoupling . . . is impossible”. “We can de-risk but not decouple,” Hayes told the Financial Times in an interview, adding that he believed this to be the case “for everybody”. “Think about the $500bn of trade that goes from China to the US every year. More than 95 per cent of rare earth materials or metals come from, or are processed in, China. There is no alternative,” said Hayes.

America literally cannot blockade China without blocking their own arteries. This is why China has been able to respond to America's diplomatic diarrhea so handily. As one failson told another in Succession, “You fucked it. He's got our dick in his hand. We should have his dick in our hand.”

Whereas America has talking dickheads on TV changing trade policy every 15 minutes, China responds calmly through staid official channels, and then jets off to actually close deals with Vietnam. China's Ministry of Finance said, “The tariff rate shall be increased from 84% to 125%,” and then dropped the mic. They said, “In view of the fact that under the current tariff level, there is no possibility for the US to export goods to China, if the United States continues to impose tariffs on Chinese exports to the United States, China will ignore it.” In another statement they said, “Even if the United States continues to impose higher tariffs, it will no longer have economic significance and will become a joke in the history of the world economy.”

And indeed, Trump has had to cave while waiting by the phone for a Xi that never calls. America had to delay its heaviest tariffs for 90 days and exempt most electronics trade with China, ie most of the value. Meanwhile China has not blinked on its reciprocal tariffs and has effectively blocked rare-earths exports to America entirely. America is now in a position where it can only import finished electronics from China, and anyone trying to manufacture them at home is fucked. If you try to import a computer from China that's fine, but if you try to import the parts and assemble your own, you get tariffed. This does not bring manufacturing home, instead it's like man, you fucked. There's a bit of lag in the system, but supply chains are shook, and there's no policy stability coming. Nobody can build factory cause they have no idea what price they'll be able to sell at, and no one knows what their imports will cost until they try to clear them. China has won a war they never wanted but prepared for, while America has started a war they're not ready for at all.

The Art Of The Deal

Master Sun said, “By definition, those who excel in battle compel the enemy and they do not let others compel them.” Alas for America, the power of their own numbskull compels them to further and further humiliation. Stephen Miran—one of the misfiring nodes in what passes for Trump's economic brain—says, “the U.S. exerts its financial might to achieve foreign policy ends.” Given that those ends are hundreds of thousands of innocent lives in Gaza, one really can blame them.

America deserves what they have coming and worse. The collapse of America is a cause for internation jubilation. As I've discussed, America is a colony vs. while China is a civilization, that is to say, America is a sick civilization on its deathbed. As Aimé Césaire said,

What am I driving at? At this idea: that no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization—and therefore force—is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased, which irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one denial to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment.

And so America punishes itself, by electing the mendacious moron Trump twice, and by launching Trade War II against all advice. The world should have sanctioned America long ago, but Trump does it for us, through tariffs. If you were trying to dismantle America you couldn't hand the mantle to anyone better than this man. As the now famous tweet goes, “[This] Chinese international student in my class was telling me about how his evangelical dad in Beijing believes that Trump was chosen by god to win the election, but that this victory is part of a larger divine plan to destroy the united states.” Ain't it the truth. As Drake said in his weird music video tour of dystopian America, God's Plan.

I would reference Trump's Art Of The Deal for some rhetorical counterweight, but Trump didn't write it, let alone read it. As his ghostwriter Tony Schwartz said, “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.” Trump's publisher said, “Trump didn’t write a postcard for us!” and Schwartz said, “I put lipstick on a pig.” Schwartz took his cheque but also said, in a private moment of honesty to his diary (in 1986), “All he is is ‘stomp, stomp, stomp’—recognition from outside, bigger, more, a whole series of things that go nowhere in particular.” And so here we are, with the guy who somehow fucked up the casino business closing down the USA for business entirely.

Thus bullshit artist meets the people who wrote The Art Of War, and is confused to death by Confucian wu-wei with Marxist characteristics. While it may look like China is doing nothing, they have taken an infrastructural position facing south, they have done the temple tallies, and they are conquering those who have already lost.

I've adopted the fundraiser for Muhammad and his family in Gaza. If you're able, give them support, a loan to God is surely doing yourself a favor.