The Chain of Redemption: No Snowflake Is Innocent

China's so-called "economic legitimacy" over the past few decades has been nothing but a joke. People often say that the common people tacitly accepted the Communist Party because they had food to eat and clothes to wear, but what truly maintained the regime was never the economy itself, but rather the money flowing in from external sources, which the Communist Party distributed layer by layer through corruption. The United States bought off the Communist Party, the Communist Party then bought off internal factions, and finally scattered some scraps to the common people. Every link in this entire chain is complicit.

After the 1970s, the Chinese Communist Party betrayed the Soviet Union and turned to align with the United States. For America, this seemed like a strategic victory: an enemy's vassal state defecting and joining their side. After the Cold War ended, the United States doubled down on this misjudgment, believing that since China could betray the Soviet Union, it could be "reformed" through the redemption of dollars and markets. Capital, technology, and orders poured in en masse—this was the first link in the chain. America thought it was buying a reformable criminal, but what it actually fattened was a monster.

When the Communist Party received this money, its first reaction was not to improve society, but to feed the military, state-owned enterprises, local governments, and technocratic bureaucrats to keep them quiet. All potentially demanding factions were given a piece of meat, so naturally they wouldn't rebel—this was the second link. Only after the factions were well-fed could the common people gnaw on the end scraps. Rising housing prices, busy exports, and wage increases seemed related to individual effort, but were actually just bubbles created by external blood transfusions passing through multiple hands.

The Communist Party packaged all of this as political achievements, boasting of "great leadership" domestically while using it as leverage externally: if America didn't continue investing, previous investments would go to waste, China couldn't integrate into the world, and global chaos would ensue. Deceiving America above, deceiving the people below, and relying on factional corruption in between—the entire system was maintained through deception. Moreover, the people themselves were not innocent either. Domestic public opinion was generally anti-American, with many people even hoping from the bottom of their hearts that the Communist Party could deceive America out of more money, so they could gain some advantage in their delusions. In this mindset, the people were also a link in the chain of deceiving America.

America's problem was naivety—it believed that economic development would inevitably bring political transformation. Decades later, it discovered that what it had spent money to nurture was not a partner, but an adversary. Only when it began cutting off the blood transfusion did all illusions shatter. The so-called "economic legitimacy of China" was nothing but a copy of dollar legitimacy. The Communist Party were the deceivers, America was the sucker, the factions were the corrupt beneficiaries, and the people were the accomplices. Once the chain of redemption breaks, you'll discover that no snowflake is innocent.