East is East and West is… Nowhere

The recent article in the People’s Daily, “How will China shape its development strategy for new stage?”, begins – “China’s development is entering a new stage.” – signifying that the upcoming year of 2021 marks the beginning of the next five year plan for the continued development of China’s socialist state.

At least China has a plan for the next 5 years, and will start discussing it’s next plan, out to 2030, in October of this year. On that occasion, and I’m not sure if this is a new thing or not, they will also be discussing objectives even further out to 2035.

Meanwhile, back in what is touted as being the ‘flagship’ of the West – where chaos reigns – the only forward planning to be seen or heard, is based on empty, meaningless and puerile statements around making an entity that may not even exist in its current state for much longer, ‘great again’. All based on nothing more than a debt-powered and morally bankrupt philosophy of military imperialism, still delusionally clinging to a debunked ‘exceptionalist’ belief system. What could go wrong?

And while the West may jeer and joke about the Chinese system, what I just described has been all the planning the West could dream up for, well, at least the past 70 years. Over which time they have completely lost their way by also losing their moral compass, degenerating faster as the years have passed, so that in the last 40 or more years they have resorted more to plundering and theft to keep their heads above water – losing all decency and shame in the last 20, resorting to overt internal in-fighting in the last 4 and completely abandoning all reason and relevance in the last 2 years.

They will also, more than less, lose any remaining capability to self-support on their own industrially depleted and climate ravaged lands at other than a rudimentary level, somewhere in the next 5 to 10 years – if they can even stretch the inevitable breakdown that far. 

All of which is described in the People’s Daily article as “…the increasingly complicated external environment…” with “…greater volatilities and uncertainties in foreign trade”. Merely factors to be aware of in China’s forward planning. 

East or West? I know where my money is, or would be if I had any.