Monthly Archives: March 2025

US and Allied Tariffs Could Democratize China

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Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 13, No. 3, March 2025

By Anders Corr

President of the United States Donald Trump speaking at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland.

President of the United States Donald Trump speaking at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland. Source: Gage Skidmore via Flickr.

The Chinese Communist Party is reacting to the Trump administration’s revolution in U.S. foreign policy with a full-court press in the media. President Donald Trump’s overtures to Russia’s Vladimir Putin are put front-and-center by Beijing so China can appeal to Europe, which sees Mr. Putin as anathema due to his invasion of Ukraine. And, the CCP is using Mr. Trump’s tariffs, against not only foes like China, but friends like Canada and the European Union, to criticize the United States as returning to the “law of the jungle.” In such a world, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi said on March 7, small countries are disadvantaged relative to large countries. However, Mr. Trump’s tariffs against China, if adopted by all U.S. allies, would so threaten China’s economy as to potentially increase public disapproval with the CCP and encourage China’s democratization. This would remove the CCP’s support for Russia, killing the two biggest authoritarian birds with one stone. It is the one policy around which the United States, Europe, and Japan can best unite to bring down America’s traditional adversaries. Continue reading →

DeepSeek’s Collision Course with Xi

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Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 13, No. 3, March 2025

By Vaibhav Panwar

President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing, 5 September 2024

President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing, 5 September 2024. Source: President Paul Kagame via Flickr.

Fresh from the highs of DeepSeek’s ‘Sputnik moment’ in the AI race, Xi Jinping hosted a rare meeting with the titans of industry — notably the tech sector — in Beijing on February 16th. The event was attended by heads of BYD, Huawei, Deepseek, and other stalwarts. However, amidst these giants stood a tiny man with a big pedigree: Jack Ma. The tech baron from Hangzhou, who once pulled the strings of one of China’s largest tech conglomerates, The Alibaba group, is renowned for his influence. The company had its fingers in profitable pies like online wholesaling, e-commerce, and online transactions. Its fintech arm, Alipay, had racked up north of a billion users by the end of 2020. Ma was having a dream run: in October 2014, he found himself on the front page of newspapers around the world when the recently concluded Alibaba IPO breached the $25 billion mark – the biggest ever— leaving the world in awe of his role as the symbol of Chinese entrepreneurial spirit and China’s sprawling economy. Ma’s empire was firing on all cylinders; on single’s day 2019 — China’s answer to Black Friday — Alibaba and its subsidiaries did $38 billion in sales in 24 hours. Now, fast-forward to fall 2020: another Alibaba entity, ANT Group, was about to go public, all set to raise north of $35 billion based on the pre-subscriptions. The largest stock-offering in history was set to take place in Shanghai, creating a landmark moment for the Chinese economy, and cementing Ma’s status as one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs. Beijing, however, was not so comfortable with the market consolidation of the tech giant from Hangzhou — or for that matter — the public criticism lobbed by Ma against Chinese banks at Shanghai’s Bund Conference. To nobody’s surprise — besides, perhaps his own — Jack Ma was called in for regulatory meetings by the Chinese central bank (PBOC) shortly after his remarks. Soon, the Chinese regulators would go on to pull the plug on the IPO right before the launch day, which was widely believed to be a disciplinary move against Ma over his comments. Ma was subsequently gone from the public eye, until he popped up in Japan a couple of years later.

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