“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. 

…

—Abraham Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address

Jennifer Suzuki contra Jade Liu

As a former—moderate and unenthused—supporter of Donald Trump, and who is very ashamed to admit to having voted for him, I find it difficult to justify and rationalize anything this president does right now. It is true that he is frivolously drunk-walking the country into a civil war. It is true that this president is destroying the credibility of the United States on the international stage for the next several decades or maybe even more. It is true that there are, and will always be, millions of Americans who will support him to the very end, the bitter end, even if it means that they destroy the entire country and burn the whole world down with them; to quote Russian State TV: “Why do we need a world to exist if Russia is not in it?”, so too, now Donald Trump and his enablers are threatening the entire world’s existence.

It is true that America, in its current policies both foreign and domestic, is turning its back on its very founding principles, maxims that Americans once held as self-evident truths. No one can predict what will happen in the next several months or weeks or maybe even days.

Everything you said regarding America is true.

However, what you said regarding China as being “doing nothing at all and winning” is a regurgitation of some shallow internet memes; though emotionally provoking, it contains no intellectual content.

Here is a very simple syllogism:

Trump is bad. Trump is a dictator. Trump is canceling elections and holding onto power for life. Okay. Premise is true.

But:–What Trump is doing to America right now is what Xi Jinping has been doing to China for the last 15 years.

∴ China is in far worse shape and in a far more perilous situation than America and the two countries are currently in a race to the bottom to see which government collapses first.

Q.E.D.

Let me elaborate further:

China, since the ascendancy of Xi Jinping, has been flip-flopping and mismanaging the entire country’s economy and social life quite significantly. Imagine all the bad things you have read or watched on what is happening in America, and now, amplify those things 100 times, and you will get a sense of what is happening and has been happening to China in the last 15 years. The reason you don’t hear much about it is because there is NO FREE PRESS in China.

The art of doing nothing and win.
The false Chinese meme spreading on the internet that China is doing nothing and winning.

In America, yes, things are getting worse and much worse everyday, but because we have a free press, and hopefully, we will have a midterm election this year, so, once again–hopefully, we will be able to peacefully correct course in the country. There is no such mechanism in China, and the only way China can correct course is if there is a popular revolt or another peasant rebellion which will turn the entire country upside down and ultimately cause the collapse of the entire country.

And no, China has not always been like this. China during the early 2000s practiced a much softer form of authoritarianism. Xi Jinping is by far the most authoritarian Chinese ruler since Mao Zedong. He is reversing course on multiple fronts both domestically and internationally. Xi Jinping is China’s version of Donald Trump, and Xi has been in power for 15 years now.

In 2018, Xi Jinping revised the Chinese Constitution and eliminated term limits, and enthroned himself to an unprecedented third term, which since Deng Xiaoping no Chinese leader has ever done. He is basically openly calling himself an emperor or a king and ruling China as a dictator for life.

This is what Donald Trump wants to do in America but we don’t know if Trump will be able to do it or not, and it’s very likely that he simply won’t be able to, because in America we have far more democratic guardrails than in China.

China is like a broken vase held together by patches of glossy tapes and though from afar, it may appear as if it’s elegant, pretty, and sturdy; at any instance, the entire country might just collapse without anyone noticing. Much like how Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s, quite unexpectedly.

A further perspective:

During the cold war era, there were widespread pessimism in America that America would eventually lose to the Soviet Union because there was so much unrest within America. There were massive riots, protests all across American cities almost on a daily basis, but because America had and still has a FREE PRESS, wherever there were issues to be addressed, the people, the citizens of the United States, mobilized to expose the underlying problems; grievances and gripes catalyzed to find solutions to the problems. That did not happen in the Soviet Union and that is certainly not what is happening in China. In those severe authoritarian countries, problems simply get buried and they fester and rot until they become giant, carbuncular gangrenes that cause the death of the entire regime.

American democracy is certainly being threatened like it’s never been before, not since the end of the last civil war 160 years ago, and it’s certainly the first time that it’s been threatened by its own very president. Whether or not American democracy will last will now depend on the will and the resolve of the American people themselves.