‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices’. Adam Smith

The state has an legitimate role to regulate and control businesses to prevent them becoming rentseeking parasites. It also must legitimately control the outputs of business where they impose a cost on the wider environment otherwise you are effectively subsidising the relevant enterprises at the expense all other citizens and often also future citizens.

The state must ideally stand above private corporate interests in order to perform these roles- the modern corporate sponsored western 'democracy' fails in this- the current Chinese regime mostly appears to succeed in this- thus in large part its phenomenal economic success to date.

Can you think of any nation that can afford not to trade with China? Can you name any nation that enjoys such massive trade surpluses with other nations? Chinas economic growth has been built upon its size and scale and ability to clone western technology to its planned infrastructure and workforce giving it the ability to process and add value to raw materials and export them in a way that no other nations can compete with. Chinas sphere of influence has of necessity grown as this process of unparalleled economic growth has occurred. Wealth brings complex obligations. China must now secure the global trade routes, payments protocols and institutional dominance that its global trade dominance implies. This is a difficult transition and obviously resisted by the west that has enjoyed global resource and institutional hegemony for centuries. Looking at the results of the last 4-5 decades China has won the trade war- it can pay the best price for commodities and can export the manufactured goods those commodities are transformed into at the most competitive prices. Chinas reverse engineering of western manufacturing processes has decimated western manufacturing capacity. China now controls the supply chains of most everyday manufactured product lines. To move beyond winning the trade war China must logically gain greater control over the global institutions which western hegemony is built upon. It was British banks based in Hong Kong backed by British military force that subjugated the Chinese economy and sovereignty to western resource hegemony. China has not forgotten The Opium Wars. Today China is reverse engineering the global trade payments routes via Hong Kong. Increasingly Chinese trade with other nations is settled outside of USD/SWIFT system. These alternative trade payments mechanisms are a direct challenge to US hegemony. They already support Iran and Russia and increasingly BRICS and other nations. China now finances far more global infrastructure investment than the World Bank. China is building its tertiary Belt and Road institutions and protocols bypassing and competing with those of the west. The west is in mostly denial about the scale and extent of this...certainly in terms of what is discussed in public/MSM narratives at least. Trade and war are not distant cousins, they are siblings. China appears to be continuing its advance as a rising empire gaining ground on a declining west. Trumps appeasement of Putin is also a concession to China - without China buying the gas that Europe now does not get(but instead imports from USA and elsewhere) and without China enabling alternative trade payments to SWIFT, Russia would not have been able to continue its attack on Ukraine. Ditto Iran. China like all rising empires, has reached the stage where its growth requires global power projection- and it is forced to achieve it or falter in its growth.

'Socialism with Chinese characteristics consists of a path, a theory, a system and a culture.' wikipedia - they go on to say it has evolved since Deng.

Since Deng China has been a mixed economy with the state always maintaining the upper hand and the market providing huge growth.

So far it's success has been phenomenal.

The market got out of hand in the real estate sector but now is being reigned in. Western financiers will bear a large share of the cost- https://fortune.com/2024/02/08/evergrande-liquidation-99-percent-haircut-hedge-funds/

Limiting parasitic rentseeking market capture cartel behaviour by private interests is a legitimate state role as is providing infrastructure and inputs at cost to enable competitive advantage over other nations- China does all this- the west no longer does and so has lost competitive advantage, market share and trade surpluses to China. China has won the trade war.