Category: China Page 8 of 11

Cold War 2.0 Incoming

On August 11, 2020

Right, with the ban on Huawei using chips made with American manufacturing equipment (one of the US’s last few places of absolute advantage), the bans on TikTok, Tencent, and WeChat, the attempt to convince other countries to not use Huawei 5G, and the arrest of the Huawei founder’s daughter for doing business with Iran, along with the US seizing a freighter full of medical supplies for Iran, I think we can state that the world is moving towards a second cold war.

The US pivoted to China containment under Obama, not Trump — though Trump has been far more aggressive. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was created as a way of marshaling Asia-Pacific countries into an anti-Chinese trade area. While Trump didn’t go ahead with it, he’s pushed hard against China in other ways.

When the US asked Canada to seize the daughter of Huawei’s founder, for example, it destroyed Canada-China relations: Canada was forced to take sides, and the Chinese were furious. The USMC (the NAFTA replacement) included a clause that says signees cannot make new trade deals with non-free states if the others object: This was aimed squarely at China.

Britain had originally intended to use Huawei 5G, but after leaving the EU, reversed course.

It’s important to understand that the anti-China pivot is bipartisan, as are the sanctions against Huawei and others.

The United States has a number of advantages and it’s using all of them aggressively. First, the fact that it is the center of the financial universe, to the point that movement of funds often goes through the US even when the transaction doesn’t involve them, is a major one. The US has made its financial laws extra-territorial, in effect. If a transaction goes through the US at all, even if no one involved in the transaction is American-related, the US claims jurisdiction. (Famously, this was used by the US to launch an investigation in the World Cup, in which the US is a trivial player, because a bribe went through the US on its way somewhere else.)

This often happens unintentionally, and firms that do business with the US at all are thus often unwilling to do business with anyone whom the US has sanctioned.

US naval power and military presence is also important, with their ability to interdict the Strait of Malacca. China imports about 70 percent of their oil, and 80 percent goes thru the Malacca strait and the US can shut it down any time they want. This is true of much else that China imports or exports.

The Belt and Road Initiative is, in part, meant to cut out the US ability to use its navy to hurt China; it creates alternate land routes, including one right across the continent to Europe, and it includes pipelines. The alliance with Russia, fraught as it is, is also about reducing dependence on Malacca.

Indeed, even the ability to protect and control trade to nearby neighbours is in doubt, which is why China built artificial islands in the South China Sea.

Fundamentally, the post-WWII trade, financial, and military order is an American creation, with a European assist.

When the US let China into the WTO, they let the power most likely to overtake them inside, as it were, the house. They did so for the simplest of all reasons: greed. Oh, sure, there was talk of capitalism meaning democracy and all that, but basically, offshoring and outsourcing to China made a lot of money for a lot of corporations and rich people, and that’s why they allowed China in.

The US deliberately sped up the transfer of industry to China as a way of making more money and undercutting wages at home. China knew the deal it was offering; they understood Americans, and they were patient.

So now, China is a larger manufacturing country than the US and, by some measures, has a larger economy.

China is a threat.

China is seen as a threat and this perception is, again, bipartisan.

There is no reason to expect this to change. China is not going to buckle under to the US, like some third-world nation or a vassal like Canada. They now have a de-facto alliance with Russia. China has nuclear weapons, and Russia is not going to allow China to be taken out with a nuclear first strike (without China, they’d have to give the US anything it wants, and they know it.)

The US will keep using its financial and technological power to weaken and isolate China.

So what will happen is an acceleration of the creation of a banking system that routes entirely around the United States and which does not use the US dollar, but instead the Yuan. Countries will be folded into this, as part of the Belt and Road Initiative. Even core US allies may have little choice: South Korea does twice as much business with China as with the US, for example, and Australia is extremely dependent on China.

For many countries, China clearly offers the better deal: they provide far more cheap loans than the US, they provide development, and their goods and services are suitable for both developed and developing nations. Nor do they natter on about “human rights” while they bomb Yemen.

For others, China will be unacceptable.

This leads to a world with two trade areas, not a free trade world. It leads to an end of the dollar as the world reserve currency. It leads to a continued arms race. It may well lead to a breaking of world IP into two sets: one American lead, one China lead. (There’s no particular reason for China to respect US IP if the US refuses to let them use it.)

This is a recipe for Cold War 2.0.

This time, however, understand that the US is facing an “enemy” with more population and more industry than it, not a nation devastated by World War with less population. Likewise, China and Russia combined have more land and more resources, while Europe is not a sure American ally, though Britain, absent EU support, will fall completely into US vassal status.

This is especially true as the US is experiencing late-imperial rot. It is nearly completely unable to handle its internal affairs, and its social cohesion is breaking down to the point where it may soon become a failed state.

Many American supporters of Cold War 2.0 are trying to use China as the external enemy to rally Americans around and, by closing China off from the US, to drive manufacturing back to the US, or at least to its firm allies (like Taiwan).

Bringing manufacturing back is smart, it should never have been sent overseas, but American elites are confused: Their primary enemy isn’t China, their primary enemy is themselves. They are responsible for the US decline and China could not have risen so fast if they were not so corrupt, greedy, and short-sighted.

It’s a very stupid world we’re moving into, but some of what is going to happen has to happen. It’s not good that the US has the ability to sanction anyone it wants to. Those medical supplies seized off that freighter? Covid-19 medicines.

Power which is routinely abused, as the US has abused its financial and military power, is eventually removed. The US is accelerating this progress as fast as it can.

The ban on Huawei using chips manufactured with US tech will hurt, for example. But it’s time limited: China isn’t some backwards third-world country. They will advance their own chip manufacturing and erase the deficit.

By fighting the dragon, the US is making a rival an enemy.

Cold War 2.0 is coming and essentially inevitable, because it is something the leadership of both countries either wants or is willing to accept. The only monkey wrench in this are the effects of climate change and ecological collapse. More on them later.

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Japan and South Korea Agree China Will Rule SE Asia

By Ian Welsh

On August 26, 2019

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Well, the headline says “South Korea needles Tokyo with military drills around Japanese-claimed islets,” but when one reads the story one sees:

Days after Seoul scrapped intelligence-sharing with Japan, all branches of its military descended on a handful of disputed islets for two-day drills, raising ire in Tokyo and fueling a brewing trade conflict between the neighbors.

The basic truth is that the days of the Pacific being an American lake are coming to a close. China is the 800 pound gorilla. As Yang Jiechi said, “China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact.”

So if the small countries don’t want to be ruled by China the way that Canada, Mexico, and most South and Central American countries are, they need to work out their differences and band together.

That is especially true for the two most powerful countries after China: Japan and South Korea.

If they can’t, well, welcome to vassalage as the Middle Kingdom rises.

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What the Chinese Communist Party Learned from the Fall of the USSR

By Ian Welsh

On June 14, 2019

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Recently, I read a speech from 2013 by Xi Jingping, the General Secretary of China’s Communist Party, and China’s leader.

In one respect, it’s turgid and boring; it’s for insiders, other party members.

But in another, it’s fascinating.

In one part, Xi goes on and on about how there have been different periods in the Communist rule of China, and none of them must be repudiated. He doesn’t say that everything that was done was right, but that the earlier struggles and attainments were necessary for the later attainments.

There is no repudiation here of Mao. Perhaps Mao’s actions didn’t always work as expected, but the rule of the Chinese Communist party made China better, even before the reform period.

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(Yes, there was a big famine and the cultural revolution, but there were plenty of famines and purges before Communist party rule. What is important about Communist party rule (though Xingping doesn’t say this) is that this was the last famine.)

This very careful reaching back to Mao and, also, to Deng Xiaoping, the seminal leader of the reform movement, is in large part a response to the fall of the Russian Communist party.

Xi and the Chinese Communist party believe the USSR fell mostly because they stopped believing in their own ideology and their own history. The Communist party theoretically had the power to hold the USSR and Warsaw Pact together, but simply refused to use the Red Army and the KGB to do so.

Gorbachev was a communist believer, sure, but he repudiated most of what had been done in the past. A smart reformer, instead, Jingping seems to believe, but makes the necessary reforms without repudiating the past.

Equally, they do not repudiate Marxism. It brings a bit of a smile to the face of a Westerner, but the Chinese Communist Party is absolutely firm on the claim that what they are doing is still Marxism. It is Socialism with Chinese characteristics, and it is aiming towards a goal of full socialism. That will probably take many generations, but that’s the goal, and they are making progress.

So to Xi, he is the heir of Deng. Mao, Marx, and all the Communist leaders of China’s past. The party is doing things differently, yes, but strategy and tactics evolve, even as the goal (communist utopia) does not.

This is a near religious goal, as the translator notes:

One of the most striking aspects of this speech is the language Xi Jinping invokes: Party members must have “faith” (xìnyǎng) in the eventual victory of socialism; proper communists must be “devout” (qiánchéng) in their work; and Party members must be prepared to “sacrifice” (xīshēng) everything, up to their own blood, for revolutionary “ideals that reach higher than heaven” (gémìng lǐxiǎng gāo yú tiān).

Religions are special cases of ideology: a subset. All successful ideologies, especially hegemonic ones, must create true believers. When they stop believing, they stop being willing to enforce the ideology (and all ideologies, including ours, democracy and capitalism require enforcement). When they stop being willing to enforce their ideology, it will die.

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So here, again, Xi is seeking to shore up the Chinese Communist Party. For it to continue to rule, it must not repudiate the past, nor its own ideology. Party members must truly believe and be willing to do whatever it takes to move the Party towards its goals, even if that means blood or death.

So I suggest readers take a moment and pop over and read the speech in full. It’s long, yes, but this is the leader of the world’s second most powerful state, the country that is threatening America’s hegemonic rule. What and how he thinks, and what the Chinese Communist Party believes, matters.

And one thing they think is that they’re not going to make the same mistakes their Russian communist brethren made.

China Already Has Almost 430 Million People With First World Incomes

By Ian Welsh

On June 7, 2019

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If you wonder why America has become so hostile to China, it comes down to this.

Back in the 80s, Japan looked like a threat. If fizzled, in large part due to some mismanagement, but the truth is it was never really a threat, because it didn’t have the population to be one, and while highly technologically advanced, it wasn’t a generation ahead of the US, or likely to make that leap.

China already has a first world population that is larger than America’s. Oh, they earn a little less, but they still qualify as “rich” by global standards.

Technologically it is not as advanced, but it’s catching up. The furor over Huawei 5G is because Huawei has the lead in that technology, and so many countries are going with their technology. China produces far more engineers and scientists than America, and they are growing in competence.

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The most important region in the world for electronics manufacturing is Shenzhen. Oh Silicon Valley still matters for design and software, but for actually building things, Shenzen is where it’s at. And they’re catching up in design and software.

Back in the late 19th century, when America became the largest economy, Brits consoled themselves that they were still creating most of the new inventions (and the Germans were inventing a lot of the rest).

It didn’t last. The inventiveness moved to where the factories were.

So China is a real, credible, threat. For most of the last 2,000 years it’s been the world’s most advanced region, with the largest economy. (Before that it tended to be India, and before that it was usually the Tigris-Euphrates region.)

The last two-hundred years, in which China wasn’t the world’s greatest, most advanced economy, are an aberration. Europeans industrialized, and industrialization was an order of magnitude more powerful than agricultural civilizations.

That period is over. China is industrialized, has information tech, and so on.

There are two great threats to the rise of Chinese hegemony. The first is a population time bomb, even worse than the Japanese. All of that “one child policy” is about to come back and bite hard. The Chinese, however, know that, and it is why they are trying to make gains now, in the South China Sea and with the Belt and Road Initiative. They recognize they have a window, and that they must use it.

The second is climate change and ecological collapse. China will be hit hard. The south is subject to both heat and rainfall problems; the Chinese have vastly overused their aquifers, and climate change in general is going to hit their food production hard.

The first threat is serious, the second one may be existential. But the other great powers are facing these threats, in various forms as well.

For now, America is freaking out over China because China is actually a threat to American hegemony. It’s that simple.

What is also true is that, historically, this leads to war more often than not.

Oncoming Recession and the Chinese/US Trade War

By Ian Welsh

On May 29, 2019

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Chinese and American flags flying together.

So, it’s been a long time since the last recession and indicators are turning negative. While this is never a science, odds are good for a recession in 2020 or early 2021 in the United States.

This is not due to the China/US trade war, but that conflict will make things worse. There is an argument for what Trump is doing. However, even if this has overall good effects for the US, in the long run there are significant dislocation costs when moving production back to the US and there are always going to be losers, because the US does sell a lot to China even if it has a trade deficit, and those people will lose markets. (Hello, soybean farmers!)

Meanwhile the Chinese are ratcheting up their rhetoric. Multiple newspapers have suggested embargoing rare-earths to the United States and this seems like a near certainty if there isn’t a deal soon.

Rare earths exist other places than China, but China has been able to mine them more cheaply than anywhere else, so no one has bothered to create significant production, as it isn’t profitable. China produces 80 percent of rare earths. So, if there is an embargo, other sources can be developed, but that will take time: again, dislocation costs.

The last time a rare-earth embargo happened, I noted that it was insane to have only one country producing all rare-earths and that sensible policy would subsidize production somewhere else just to avoid this scenario. But modern trade rules make subsidizing production of most items (except agriculture and defense) essentially illegal, so we have to wait for a crisis to do the sensible thing.

Chinese rhetoric around the trade war has become very serious, with the People’s Daily newspaper (official Communist newspaper) writing:

“We advise the U.S. side not to underestimate the Chinese side’s ability to safeguard its development rights and interests. Don’t say we didn’t warn you!”

…The expression “Don’t say we didn’t warn you!” is generally only used by official Chinese media to warn rivals over major areas of disagreement, for example during a border dispute with India in 2017 and in 1978 before China invaded Vietnam.

I’m going to discuss the oncoming new trade-era more in the future. For now, note that this isn’t just about Trump. Moves in this direction had already started under Obama (the Trans-Pacific Partnership was meant to isolate China).

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What is different about Trump is that he prefers unilateral negotiations to multilateral (WTO) or plurilateral (a few countries).

This is not stupid. Out of anyone in a singular deal, the US will always be the stronger partner. It prevents other nations from ganging up on the giant, and trying to use numbers to make up for their weakness.

The US can almost always inflict more damage on any one other nation than that nation can on the US.

Again, not stupid; entirely rational and good negotiating tactics.The larger issue is that the US is, itself, dismantling a trade order created, largely, by the US. That trade order had significant disadvantages for the US working and middle classes, but it also was to their advantage geopolitically. The US chose who could industrialize or re-industrialize (its allies – Taiwan, Japan, Germany, South Korea), and so on.

This worked well for the US (not so much most other people) until the Americans got stupid and greedy under neoliberalism. Then, the US corporate class, looking at China, lost their heads: Especially as China went out of its way to make sure that various Americans made a lot of money helping China industrialize.

The difference, of course, is that China is the world’s natural leading power. Has been for most of the last two thousand years. China would be an actual competitor with the US, if it was allowed to get back onto its feet.

And it was.

As a Canadian, I have a dog in this fight. Canada is an American subject state, and we’ll be on the US’s side, because we won’t have a choice. Nor am I particularly a fan of how China is run.

But this is the cycle of great powers. There is always a new challenger, and the old Hegemon always resists (and is virtually always in a late Imperial stage of incompetence and corruption).

When giants clash, ants (you and me) are advised to beware.

Make money now, before the recession, if you can. If your income or wealth is tied to trade, try and mitigate your exposure.

Meanwhile, we may as well enjoy the show.

Everyone’s Noticed the Oncoming US/China Cold War

By Ian Welsh

On May 22, 2019

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Chinese and American flags flying together

Horowitz calls it a tech cold war, but it is unlikely to stay that way.

Cutting Huawei off from all non-open source Google services, including the Play Store, and not allowing it to buy US components is a huge blow to Huawei.

Huawei is ahead in 5G, and American allies have been reluctant to ban it, but the US can do great damage to China’s tech industry, because in many other ways it is still far behind America’s. (Horwitz is good on this.)

China has ways of retaliating. The most potent is to embargo rare earths. China did this once before and the WTO declared it illegal, but that won’t necessarily stop the Chinese from doing it again. The WTO, which is also under attack by the Trump administration, may not have the teeth necessary to stop the Chinese, especially as the US is scarcely innocent in the tariff escalation.

I’ve been on the Huawei situation for months, because I believed it was the first step in a dangerous escalation between the current hegemonic power and the challenging power.

The best book on the subject is Thucydides Trap, by Graham Allison. Allison also wrote a foreign affairs article on Thucydides Trap. The summary is that in the past 500 years there have been 16 similar challenges. Twelve of them led to war.

America was a particularly aggressive rising power: seizing huge amounts of Mexico, grabbing the Alaskan panhandle under threat of war with Great Britain (who couldn’t afford to move their forces away from the Germans, and so let Teddy Roosevelt, an aggressive asshole in foreign affairs, take it.)

And of course, America terrorized South and Central America, as it still does, while claiming foreign naval forces had no right to be in the Americas (an echo to China’s expansion in the South China Sea most Americans refuse to acknowledge.)

Now that America is the hegemonic power they want to stay the hegemonic power.

The current international order was mostly created when China was weak, recovering from arguably the worst position it had been in for 2,500 years.

The Chinese do not accept the current international order; created by America, with European help, after WWII as legitimate, because it was created almost entirely without their input when they were weak. Indeed, a clear-eyed realpolitik view is that America enforced the order because they were massively strong, then further enforced it after the collapse of the USSR.

Put aside all the bullshit, the Pax Americana, like all Pax’s comes out American force: the barrel of a lot of guns, and the boom of a lot of nukes.

So China is moving to retake what it regards as its rightful place in the world: The greatest nation in the world. America is doing what all hegemonic powers do when an upstart rises: Resisting.

This is not a temporary thing and it is not just a result of Trump. There are real differences, and the pivot to China as the big enemy began under Obama, not Trump. Ironically, the Trans Pacific Partnership (which Trump refused to ratify) was an effort to contain China.

Trump’s addition is a preference for unilateralism. Under mulitalternalism the Americans had found it harder and harder to get their way, as the failure of the Doha round of WTO negotiations showed.

One-on-one America is always greater than anyone else. It always has the advantage. Trump is not wrong about that. So he is using that might to “re-negotiate” with other nations, including China.

Meanwhile the Chinese have been forming their Belt and Road system, which is an alliance and trade organization substitute, meant to form deals 1:1 with other countries, and to create trade links, especially a land-route across Asian to Europe, which will allow China to bypass America’s stranglehold on naval power, and especially on the Straits of Malacca.

And so on.

Let’s cut to the chase. There will be many tactical and strategic moves, but China is about as economically powerful now as the US. They are currently, overall, a middle income country, but many cities are high income.

Because China has three times the population of the US, if they can move their population to high income, they will have an economy about three times the size of the US.

They will win.

The US should think about that carefully, because if they oppose the Chinese at every point, when China becomes the hegemonic power, the US may find themselves treated badly. The Chinese won’t feel badly about it, at all, given how they feel about how China was treated when it was weak by Europeans and Americans.

The Chinese, meanwhile, should remember that their rise to hegemonic power isn’t certain, and that if it requires great power war in a world with nuclear weapons, that may go very badly for everyone involved.

Neither side, as an aside, are good guys. The Chinese are, domestically, creating a rather nasty authoritarian surveillance state. America domestically is a shit show for many, and it has been far more likely to go to war with other countries than the Chinese have.

In fact, while Chinese actions in the South China Sea are nasty, they are mild by rising hegemonic power standards, and certainly, so far, less nasty than how the US acted when it was the rising power.

A new cold war, with the world dividing into two blocs, would be shitty. A hot war would be worse.

But I’m not at all sure “cooler heads” will prevail. The simple fact is that Americans think they are the indispensable nation, and good people, and therefore have the right to rule the world. Meanwhile the Chinese nurse their own powerful sense of superiority, added to a massive feeling of grievance and ill-use. Nor can the Chinese Communist Party allow economic growth to falter without danger to their own power and legitimacy. If it does, be sure they will focus the anger at foreign enemies.

I’m not sure there’s much point being worked up by all this, mind you. Rising and falling hegemonic powers act like this, that’s just how it is. Most of us don’t have enough power to affect these events. Just be aware of them, and if you have some power, perhaps put your finger on the scale that at least avoids hot war.

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What the Huawei Row Portends for the Future of America, China, and Canada

By Ian Welsh

On January 14, 2019

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Huawei is a giant Chinese telecom company. It produces fifth-generation telecom equipment (5G), cell phones, and much more. Its 5G equipment is probably the most advanced in the world.

The US has accused it of espionage: Stealing commercial secrets. In the US, it is illegal for Huawei telecom equipment to be used for infrastructure, and the US is trying to convince other countries, especially European ones, to not use their equipment either. The rationale is that such equipment makes Chinese spying easier.

A while back, the US government asked the Canadian government to extradite a Chinese Huawei executive to the US. Her name is Meng Wanzhou, and she is the daughter of Huawei’s CEO.

Importantly, she was charged with fraud related to violating US-Iran sanctions, not espionage against American companies.

In response, China has mostly swung at Canada, arresting a number of Canadians and retrying a Canadian drug smuggler, increasing his penalty to death.

One of the US’s goals has been to separate the US and China: For example, the NAFTA rewrite, the USMCA, forbids any member from forming a trade deal with a “non-market economy” if either other member disagrees. (The US defines China as a “non-market economy.”)

It may or may not have been deliberate, but this request has made Canadian/Chinese relations much worse.

Note that the person being charged is pretty close to Chinese royalty. This is like if Steve Job’s daughter was a senior Apple executive and arrested. Imagine the furor.

But I want to highlight something else: This is about breaking Iran sanctions. (Which China did, though I have no insight into Meng’s involvement.)

The Iran sanctions were certainly legal under US law. They were not, however, in any way, shape or form, just. As with all economic sanctions they disproportionately hurt people not in the ruling class. They hit various medicines and caused a lot of suffering and death. The evidence that Iran had a nuclear weapon program was always dicey, and in any case, that America has the right to deny nuclear weapons to other countries is unclear.

So Meng is being prosecuted for a political crime. She is being prosecuted because her country decided not to obey US laws with respect to another country. US laws which are unjust on their face.

To me, at least, this is illegitimate. China’s counter-strikes are also illegitimate: Canadians should not be used as cats-paws in this, and China’s actual issue is with the United States, not Canada. That said, from a realpolitik point-of-view, I entirely understand China making the point that acting on behalf of the US in its near-cold war with China will have negative consequences.

This row has continued to accelerate. There is a fair bit of danger, in the medium-run, that the world is going to split into two economic blocs, and enter something close to a cold war again.

The US wants China to do what the US wants, which is for them to remain a regional power, not a great power, to not take control of its near abroad (as the US did in the 19th and early 20th century, in much more violent fashion than China has so far), and China, a rising Great Power (and potential superpower) will not be stifled in this way. No rising great power, certainly not the US, ever was or will be.

This road, though we are early on it, leads to war. There are things China does that are illegitimate, but its power will have to be accommodated, just as the US’s was. (Take a look at the map of the Canadian province of British Columbia, notice the Alaska panhandle: It is complete bullshit, and it was obtained because Theodore Roosevelt was willing to go to war to get it, and the British, preoccupied elsewhere, weren’t willing to fight him for it.)

As for Meng, she is clearly a political prisoner and pawn, as are all the Canadians that China has arrested in retaliation.

While it’s unlikely to happen, because Americans think they have the right to apply their law to anyone, anywhere and to kill anyone they want in most countries in the world, without even a trial, sensible politics would be to de-escalate this.

Locking up Meng, which is most likely (US prosecutors generally get their victims) will be a running sore. America is banking on Chinese fear outweighing Chinese anger. Maybe it will, for a time, but the Chinese strategic tradition also includes a hell of a lot of smiling at enemies until you can stomp them flat.

The US ought to think very carefully on that, and whether or not it really wants to go down this road, especially over such an unjust charge.

As for Canada, it is an American subject state, and, as the USMCA proved, when America gets serious, Canada does what it is told. I have explained this to Canadians for a couple decades now, including the need for an actual deterrent (it needn’t be nuclear), but Canadians think the US is Canada’s friend, not overlord.

This mistake, too, will continue to be punished.

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China and Saudi Arabia Show Anti-Corruption Is Often About Seizing Power

By Ian Welsh

On March 26, 2018

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Recently, the Chinese Communist Party proposed removing the normal ten year limit on how long someone can stay President. Xi Jingping looks likely to be President for life.

Xi is notable for a massive anti-corruption drive, which put a lot of senior party members in jail and terrified many others.

Anti-corruption is good, of course, but in nations where, well, essentially everyone is corrupt, one must watch who is hit for corruption charges and who isn’t. Somehow Xi’s enemies seemed to get hit disproportionately.

Meanwhile, Xi put himself as the leader of every committee of any significance, and lo and behold, he is the indispensable leader now.

And in Saudi Arabia, we have Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Salman is the designated heir, and has been replacing everyone who isn’t loyal to him. Last year, bin Salman took over a Four Seasons hotel, “invited” a number of his relatives and other important people to stay there, then by at least one account (which I find credible) tortured some of them.

Even very powerful Saudi princes, like Alwaleed, the most personally rich of the princes, were not entirely immune.

His release came hours after he told Reuters in an interview at Riyadh’s opulent Ritz-Carlton hotel that he expected to be cleared of any wrongdoing and be freed within days.

A senior Saudi official said Prince Alwaleed was freed after he reached a financial settlement with the attorney general.

“The attorney general has approved this morning the settlement that was reached with Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and the prince returned home at 1100 a.m. (0800 GMT),” the official told Reuters, without giving details of the terms.

The decision to free him, and the release of several other well-known tycoons on Friday, suggested the main part of the corruption probe was winding down after it sent shockwaves through Saudi Arabia’s business and political establishment.

Alwaleed was careful to make his bow:

Prince Alwaleed, who is in his early 60s, described his confinement as a “misunderstanding” and said he supported reform efforts by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. (my emphasis)

Mohammed has taken some actions that Westerners approve of, like somewhat improving rights for women, but he is also busily committing genocide in Yemen, screwed up by trying to blockade Qatar (which did not bring Qatar to its knees), kidnapped the President of Lebanon, and is proceeding with a vast privatization of money-earning Kingdom assets, which will earn Saudi Arabia money (but which will be insufficient to offset the loss of earning power).

But it appears as though the Crown Prince is more of a dictator than any ruler in ages (even if he isn’t officially king yet). He has the power, internally, to do things that were simply not possible when some consensus was expected among the royal family.

All of this should be reminiscent of what Putin did when he gained power: He broke a number of oligarchs, sent them to jail or into exile, and took most of their fortunes. But he made deals with others, so long as they were loyal. As a result, his “anti-corruption” efforts weren’t about eliminating corruption at all, they were about loyalty to Putin and the state. Russia continues to be a corrupt mafia state (mafia states have rules, they are just mafia rules). This corruption has hurt its economy, though Putin’s policies are still better than those that came before.

In India, what Modi has been doing bears some resemblance to this pattern as well: Consolidating control disguised as anti-corruption.

Anti-corruption is rather different from seizing power by using corruption charges to break one’s enemies or bring them to heel as new, terrified, allies while warning everyone else not to get out of line.

Real anti-corruption goes deep, hits almost everyone, and generally comes with increases in the wages of bureaucrats at the lower and middle levels, as much corruption is a result of inadequate compensation leading to bribes replacing the actual salary.

Much of this critique, minus the strong man bit, could be applied to the US, I might add, but perhaps another day. In the meantime, appreciate the good those seizing power do, when it exists, but recognize their motives and the dark side, as displayed in Yemen, or when Putin very likely set up the second Chechen war.

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