What happened.
“Chinese leader Xi Jinping has called on his top national security officials to think about ‘worst case’ scenarios and prepare for ‘stormy seas’ . . . . as Beijing faces a host of challenges, from a struggling economy to what it sees as an increasingly hostile international environment” CNN's Nectar Gan reported earlier this week.
Gan, CNN:
“The complexity and difficulty of the national security issues we now face have increased significantly,” Xi said Tuesday at a meeting of the party’s National Security Commission, state news agency Xinhua reported.
“We must adhere to bottom-line thinking and worst-case-scenario thinking, and get ready to undergo the major tests of high winds and rough waves, and even perilous, stormy seas,” he added.
China’s own political analysts say Xi’s National Security Commission remarks “show Beijing harbors no ‘illusions’ about fallout of US rivalry and has little hope of a lasting improvement in ties,” per the South China Morning Post.
SCMP:
According to Xie Maosong, senior fellow at Beijing’s Taihe Institute and a senior researcher at Tsinghua University’s National Strategy Institute, Xi’s latest remarks showed China had “no rosy illusions” about the potentially devastating outcome of the US rivalry and was making serious efforts to prepare for it.
“The ‘worst-case scenarios’ might include a nuclear war, a devastating war that ruins China’s coastal economic belts [or] Western sanctions on China’s energy, finance and food supply,” Xie said.
Why it matters.
Testing Western resolve in Ukraine
Xi’s speech at the National Security Commission meeting came in the wake of diplomat Li Hui’s unsuccessful bid to dislodge Europe from Washington in the Ukraine war.
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