I don’t think China is in the business of trolling for sport — they’re methodical. What they do, with a patience that annoys western hotheads, is weaponize Western idiocy: let our fools burn themselves down and then profit from the ruins. Everyone outside the U.S. is, in Beijing’s ledger, a potential lever or a useful underling.
They don’t suffer the spectacle of idiots setting the established order on fire the way liberal democracies do. In a totalitarian machine those idiots either get folded into the apparatus or quietly removed from the communal stage. That isn’t moral — it’s efficient. And yes, the “efficiency” comes with a human cost most pundits politely omit.
Nor does that make China invincible. The model that fooled the West also breeds self-deception at home. Leaders must manufacture consent; the populace must be kept from seeing the rot. Admit the rot aloud and the whole scaffolding trembles — and admitting it privately is forbidden too, because confession is weakness and weakness is fatal in that system.So no tidy victory here — only strategems and self-delusions, both brittle. If you want a blessing to finish this riff: may everything burn.