In North Korea, they pay actors to wander around the one mall in Pyongyang in order to make the country look not like an impoverished communist hellhole

SF cleaning up their house before guests come over to stay... I would love to see chinese media(or documentary or something) going to SF and on one street seeing a bunch of luxery cars, fancy dressed people, expensive ass restaurants and literally next street over bunch of homeless struggling to survive and do some story... maybe even pull some "fake and dystopian city"(like America loves to do with China and DPRK) stuff before and after the "clean up"

You know, I did not foresee America turning San Fransisco into a Potemkin village for the general secretary of the communist party of China. But I do find it kind of funny

I’m on the record as being a San Francisco stan. Ignore all the liberalism and techbro crap - it’s still the most beautiful city in the US by a good margin. Walking around the city during the day is a genuinely nice experience.

But yeah, after dark it’s like the whole city shuts down. I mean, yeah obviously it doesn’t literally close up but I’ve walked through Chinatown, down Market, through Russian Hill etc at night and it’s almost disturbingly empty of bustling night life you’d expect from a city like that.

The best Chinese restaurants in SF are out in Richmond/Sunset, not Chinatown.

Change my mind.

“In China we do not have an issue with homelessness. We ensure that every person has a home to live in since we guarantee that for everyone. As I walk around San Francisco, I’m delighted to see that clearly the US must have similar policies”.

China is negotiating from a position of strength and knows it. Question is whether the American side also knows this or if they will continue to delude themselves.

I don't think I've ever seen tensions cool off after US China meeting in the last 3 years

It usually ends up with US putting out an aggressive statement

idk if i would read into a couple of purges and changes of personel with such negative and "china observer" like analysis.

We know the long standing issues of the PLA and how it improved and modernized a lot under Xi's tenure (often with purges like this) and we know there are different wings and interests inside the CPC. Whose to say that this isnt a case of Xi consolidating a more loyal and competent comand. Or that its indeed a corruption case which extremely realistic given PLA in the last 20 years and so despite a very widespread and successfull anti corruption campaign you can still find big names lacking. Or that they were found out to have a mistress like a couple of big officials in the last few months.

"Political shake up that has not occured since the cultural revolution" seems like a quite overblown take at the very least given the things you listed. China had self contained political crises in the 80s ,90s ,00s and 10s that saw "shake ups" much more dramatic and in scale. Hell the anti-corruption campaign that i mentioned saw like 500k mid, low and high level party officials and army officers purged. The "shake up" during zero covid and before the party's congress also seemed much more important than whatever this is.

In the end of the day under Xi the biggest shake up has occured. That in a way "Politics are in command" in much more real sense than they have been in 40+ years. That new reality foundementaly makes staff changes, purges and shake ups in positions much more common than they were in lets say 90s-early 10s .And that shouldnt immediately be thought of as a negative or as a measure of instability, or that Xi positions is more precarious than ever. I simply dont see it.

Also repeating the completely and utterly unsubstantiated submarine incident rumor as something that even remotely can lend more merit to your analysis makes it more flimsy.

The source (Lude media) has no credibility and then the guy who originaly (and only) put the story out in western twitter claiming he also veryfied it ,H I Sutton, isnt a particularly trustworthy figure in the PLA watching sphere. He run with the "there is a coup against Xi" and "China is hiding 20 million covid deaths" stories last year and the manner in which the story broke was at best shaky. For example Lude media has written a rather defensive follow up tweet stating that the supposed incident occurred in the Yellow Sea and nothing occurred in the Taiwan strait, and that people saying it happened in the Taiwan strait are 50 cent shills, essentially claiming it is disinformation. Of course, it is rather confusing, as it was Lude media himself who first stated so confidently that he had top secret information, and that among other details he had access to, that this happened in the Taiwan strait ("在执行台海任务时出事"). And both had follow up tweets walking back on the claims saying that it is unconfirmed and to treat with great caution (and if im not mistaken they later delete dtheir original posts). And then nothing . There here's been no other news sites reporting this, even anti-china ones , and had the Chinese somehow lost a sub in the Taiwan Strait or SCS, the ereaand the skies above it would be full of Chinese ships and aircraft on search and rescue missions, and all of the traffic and survailance on the erea would see it and report it. There's no way such an effort could go unnoticed in such a busy water ways. Nothing came out of it an dnothing was reported.

But lets ignore that the submarine thing as a misstep. I see little reason to think Xi is going to meet biden from a position of weakness even if there is relative weakness in some apsects of the economic sphere as you claim.

The collapse of Ukraine’s offensive against Russian forces , its commander’s admission that the war is a “stalemate” and the slow but certain shift in narrative is a setback for America’s strategic geopolitical position and a gain for China and the end of the war seems to be shifting towards a net loss for the US and a net gain for China. And Russia itself isnt a market or economic hub that can be handwaived as easily as you think. China has doubled its exports to Russia since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, has increased their coordination with Moscow in almost all foreign actions and have secured or are in the process of securing energy and food security configurations they could not expect some years prior

The US tech war on China has mostly flopped, with even western think tanks and pushers of the sanctions admitting deffeat or panicking to double down. America’s restrictions on high-end chip exports to China failed to prevent Huawei Technologies from offering a new smartphone as well as Artificial Intelligence processors with performance comparable to or close to what’s achieved by the products of Nvidia and other US designers. Huawai is expanding both domesticaly and worldwide and so do other chip and tech companies America tried to strangle. Chinese and SEA market is increasingly being caprtured by China and so is the developing world and the lead in 5g tech and applications only grows larger . The mate60 came out of no where and Chinese AI firms buy fast Huawei processers in place of chips from Nvidia and other US producers. US,japanese and Korean tech firms lost and are losing markets of ~2 billion peope and they are in a positionf of weakness right now, many begging the US regime to change approach and course

The Isreili war on Gaza and the US response gives China a free option to act as the de facto leader of the Global South in opposition to Israel, an American ally even by simply not doing much and simply watch the US losing their hold in PR and public opinion in lot of the developing world. US prob spend tens of billions in worldwide media and NGO campaigns to undermine China's image and postive attitudes towards it but all that effort has been at the very least counteracted it by the last month;s impact on West's and US's image for billions. Also China now exports more to the Muslim world than it does to the United States and more to the developing world than they do to US+EU+Japan+Korea+Canada

Also the US military ,despite what the political hawks are pushing for, really wants to avoid confrontation with China in the Northwest Pacific region as well as its home waters in the South China Sea, where the PLA’s thousands of surface-to-ship missiles and nearly 1,000 fourth- and fifth-generation warplanes give China an overwhelming home-theater advantage in firepower. By most credible voices ,both official and unoffical, China holds a distinct advantage in the erea and can achieve right now a ,costly for itself but even more costly for the US in more way than material, win in a military campaign against Taiwan.ANd that will become increasingly more true over the next decade

LA Rocket Force “is the largest ground-based missile force in the world, with over 2,200 conventionally armed ballistic and cruise missiles and with enough anti-ship missiles to attack every US surface combatant vessel in the South China Sea with enough firepower to overcome each ship’s missile defense,” Major Christopher J. Mihal wrote in 2021 in a US Army journal.

If you think this is just a "please give us money" and not the realistic analysis a lot in the US military are having you are mistaken.

We got a taste of the Biden-Xi discussions from Newsom's visit (who is also the likeliest 2024 Democratic presidential candidate should Biden withdraw for health reasons) . Newsom has been quoted as saying that he had “expressed my support for the One-China policy … as well as our desire not to see independence” of Taiwan. Clear rejection of Taiwanese independence contrasts with the approach and statements of the last few years of almost all US officials including Biden who will likely echo such retorical pull back in the next few months. It doesnt mean too much materialy but its an important point of where the wind is shifting and with teh upcoming Taiwanese elections in mind and the weakening of the DPP positions.

Thats all to say that yeah (de)dolarization matters, yeah US financial capital hegemony and capabilities matter but they dont come or exist from without. Their strength and usability is at some point a function of the material,political and social base and on the ground contradictions both domesticaly and abroad matter more long term. Each global or geopolitical crisis or event of the last few years has "trickled down" much more instability and rot in the US political and social fabric than it did for China and provided much more fertile ground for counterhegemonic developments in the developing world , even if one can say that China and Russia didnt take advantage of them as much as they could. US financial hegemony doesnt exist outside of politics or (geo)politics in "people" centered sense even if we might still be far from the US domestic contradictions and global crises having significant impact on the ability and effectiveness of it to act and react in the way it needs to to "win" (but we also might be closer than we think). US might have gotten a lot of economy related "wins" already in Ukraine for example but in a long term PoV im not sure "putting EU back in its place" and having them on a geopolitical and economic leash is enough considering the changes it kickstarted and accelerated domsetcialy and abroad and especially their consolidation given the likely outcome

There's no such thing as normalization talks with the US, the Americans are serious about pushing this confrontation to its logical conclusion

What DC wants is breathing room to deal with Ukraine and the middle east and if China just hands that room to them then it'll be China at a disadvantage tomorrow

idk about normalization, decoupling in my little corner of the world continues apace. kylin is set to replace windows on all government related terminals by 2025 (fucking finally, i might add) and there has been a massive uptick in pentest jobs across the board. military adjacent project prereqs getting progressively stricter and big cuts in bureaucrat/civil servant tenures. feels more like theyre battening down the hatches for a big one