Top Communist Party Official: China, US Headed For "Complete Economic Decoupling"

It's fair to say that tensions between the US and China have escalated to levels unseen since the days of the Nixon Administration, when the bilateral relationship between the two countries finally began as the Communists abandoned their commitment to isolation and insulation from the capitalist west.

Though it has never garnered much attention in the headines, the US Navy has increasingly flexed its military muscle in the contested South China Sea, which Beijing claims as sovereign Chinese territory, despite an ICC ruling repudiating China's claims to some of these reefs and islands in the south and east china seas.

Over the past week, the Navy sent two aircraft carriers to begin some of the largest military exercises that US forces have ever hosted in the South China Sea, a show of strength with a clear message: That the US stands ready to counter China's military ambitions in the Pacific.

A reporter for the Nikkei Asian Review noted Thursday that a former high-ranking CCP official this week published an editorial in a key academic journal that appears to cut against the Party line, and suggest an even more radical solution: complete economic decoupling from the US.

The author is careful to address the fact that isolationism has a bad history in the 20th Century in China: Instead of China going it alone, Zhou Li, a 65-year-old former deputy head of the Chinese Communist Party's International Liaison Department, argues that a competing "yuan-based" economic bloc must emerge to rival the dollar-based financial system.

In a commentary piece, a writer for Nikkei breaks down Zhou's argument:

It has been a tense first week of July in the seas of Asia.

While two U.S. aircraft carriers, the USS Ronald Reagan and the USS Nimitz, launched hundreds of aircraft daily into the skies above the South China Sea, China was conducting naval exercises in the same sea. In a rare and symbolic move, the People's Liberation Army Navy also carried out live-fire drills in the East China Sea and the Yellow Sea.

Amid the tensions, one published article has been the talk of the town in many Chinese circles. Written on the assumption that the novel coronavirus will disrupt China and the world for an extended period, the content is highly controversial.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/top-communist-party-official-china-us-headed-complete-economic-decoupling