| Absent something more serious, it'll take a long while for the PRC to get hurt in the way you outline, there's just too much it and it's large number of people do compared to much smaller Vietnam with I think on average less human capital, and India and its License Raj and other things that make doing business there very high friction. To the point it can't do a lot of things, even run a semiconductor fab line (except maybe in some government labs). But the PRC and Vietnam are taking hits I interpret due to the world economy slowing down. And Xi's Zero COVID policy is perhaps becoming unsustainable. It's kinda necessary since it's prevented the population from getting natural immunity and their own vaccines aren't good and aren't trusted, and there's a lot of history behind that. If the CCP just let COVID rip, even less nasty Omicron, it would get very ugly for a while. But it keeps shutting down huge cities and metro areas and has turned the PRC into an unreliable supplier. See the mess Apple is now in, I read something like 6 million and counting fewer iPhone Pros made at that Foxconn plant that's undergoing so much chaos and lost so many of their more experienced workers (or so I assume about the last point). The US is in a cold war with the PRC, and that's in the process of shutting down its semiconductor industry, or maybe just the most advanced nodes depending on how the new embargo gets administered. But Apple spent quite some time qualifying what's evidently good enough flash from one of their marque companies and that's now dead since it's advanced enough to be targeted. Overall, this embargo is a moderate sized dagger aimed at "the workshop of the world" so it's going to have effects, especially when the one year delay foreign companies have in getting licenses ends (then again they'll have plenty of time to get those licenses, or not). Xi is moving back to not quite doctrine Marxism and the economy, especially the private-ish part of it is taking hits, especially in web/apps stuff, see Jack Ma now living in Japan. That may have been justified on the merits, but it was done because he got a little too big for his britches as the CCP saw it. In particular I'd look at the residential property market, that's a HUGE bubble that appears to be bursting now. Too many details to go into, just there's reasons it is/was so much of the economy, and not good ones. And finally Xi is not very smart, had his education brutally ended in middle school by the Cultural Revolution, and is just not a very good helmsman. And is now the single most powerful figure in the PRC since Mao. This is not encouraging. |
One doesn't bubble up to the head of the CCP without being an incredibly savvy political operator. It's non-nonsensical to imply that is possible without intelligence. Even if he may be uneducated, education and intelligence are separate axis even if we normally conflate them.
Also evidence suggests he is a good strategist, even if a bit brutish in his execution.