Following Bashar al-Assad’s rehabilitation with the Arab League, it was China’s turn to acknowledge his return to the world stage. Syria has a lot of oil that it can sell to China but it’s not as if China needs Syria to add to its energy procurement list. Currently, China has unfettered and discounted access to Russian and Iranian energy markets. Adding Syria to the list would only change China’s bill with a rounding error.
Xi Jinping makes no secret of his ambition to turn China into the sun of all-anti-US Dollar basement markets. That’s quite a downgrade from the “Belt and Road” dream of interconnecting all of Asia with a flourishing, legitimate, and international Chinese market. Now, it’s a market for illegals selling cheap commodities to each other with the Chinese Yuan.
I have the nagging feeling that I’ve seen this story over and over again and I know how it turns out. There’s clearly a very large arbitrage trade between the illegal oil market transacted with Chinese Yuan and the regular markets in US Dollars and the West needs to capture this gap.
The East is short of Dollars while the West is short of oil, and in such a scenario it’s usually the commodity seller that ends up selling for even lower prices to get the much needed Dollar. Russia and Saudi Arabia may be fighting a losing battle to keep prices up. It will be interesting to see how will the oil wars unfold.
As for Xi’s coalition of evil, he needs all the friends he can get on the international stage and not just for trade. After all, he may need many allies if he intends to invade Taiwan and fight off any resistance by Japan by nuking it first. Yet, Russia’s backers of its war in Ukraine and now, the backers of China’s warmongering over Taiwan, seem to have no false pretenses on projecting themselves as an international criminal network of warmongering dictators.
Under Mao Tse-Tung, China was an insular and brutal communist dictatorship, that shunned Western culture and ideas and was devastated by poverty as it looked inward and with great hostility to the outside world. Then Deng Xiaoping began the opening period which saw China opening up to the world as it became more integrated with the Western markets. Xi Jinping is pushing China’s clock back, halting the modernisation and opening process to go back to “communist” roots with a militant and inward-looking Chinese ultra-nationalist perspective. China may take the title of anti-Western Empire, but capital will go to India and Vietnam instead.
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