HMM: China Is Becoming The Soviet Union.

Xi is borrowing from a well-used Chinese playbook. His isolationism and xenophobia evoke policies from the earliest years of the People’s Republic and during the two millennia of imperial rule. As Georgia Tech’s Fei-Ling Wang details in The China Order: Centralia, World Empire, and the Nature of Chinese Power, isolationism is inherent in Chinese totalitarianism.

Chinese rulers, as Arthur Waldron of the University of Pennsylvania told the Hoover Institution, have periodically avoided contact with other societies “lest that lead to disorder, as globalization is doing in China today.” These rulers throughout history relentlessly enforced their geliguojia — “separated country”—system, he points out. Today, Xi Jinping is going back to that approach.

Of course, as Chinese leaders closed off China from time to time, economic stagnation and failure inevitably followed. At the moment, the Chinese economy is probably contracting, mostly the consequence of Xi’s misguided views.

We’ll see. Gordan Chang has been predicting the end of the CCP any time now for more than 20 years, but Xi does seem more dogmatic than his predecessors.