Too “Xi” to fail?

–Then: Which way Africa? Kenyatta or Nyerere? Today: Which way development? Xi or Modi?

–The first words in Shakespeare’s Hamlet are, “Who’s there?” Indeed.

–“Which political conditions and cultural practices allow for the expression of fallibility?” Great question, but: systematically misleading? As in: Do the conditions and practices need to be stable enough for the expression of fallibility or do their very uncertainties undermine it?

–Much of migration talk is about rights without accounting for the relative absence of emerging better practices, if any, across a run of very different migration cases, worldwide.

–If anything is universally ethical, it is to experiment globally only after having canvassed actually-existing practices and ways to modify them.

–Since the crisis is global (except where it isn’t), therefore global coordination is needed (always a good principle, except when….), especially among rich nations (or others as and when needed. . .)

–Read something like, “Getting the Social Cost of Carbon Right,” and you have to ask: Are these people barking mad?

–Xi should abolish the hukou system, expand PRC’s social safety net, enable workers’ organizations to fight for higher wages, distribute dividends from state-owned enterprises to the people, invest more in environmental protection, tax the rich, reign in imaginaries like tianxia, and, well you know the rest . .

No, say the realists. Instead we should pray that China: doesn’t support a strong yuan, imports high inflation from Russia and elsewhere, suffers an even worse demographic crisis than currently inevitable, and witnesses the world’s largest real-estate collapse and the uprising of the planet’s biggest proletariat. And, oh yes, before it’s too late: the West should liberate Taiwan from China like the free world coalition liberated Kuwait after Saddam reunified it with Iraq.