China is kidding itself if it thinks Western mining corporations and tax-hungry governments are going to sit around and let Xi Jinping be the sole beneficiary of the Net Zero fortune.

While it was convenient to let China soil itself with toxic rare earths mining and outsource its child labour to the fringes of the third world (invisible to the United Nations ?), the resulting piles of gold are starting to cast a shadow over Western empires. Yes, China has poisoned its rivers fashioning solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries for climate luvvies, but the price of rapid geopolitical growth is universal suspicion.

Xi Jinping isn’t helping calm international scrutiny with his ‘I heart Stalin and I’m basically the new Mao’ routine. Installed as dictator for life, he parades weapons of mass destruction through the streets and heckles nearby nations with threats of ‘re-unification’ in the hope that his international reputation as ‘fearsome’ will transfer domestically. Like all powerful emperors, Xi lives every moment in terror.

Those who fought to sneak China into the World Trade Organisation made a grave error for which they’ll never apologise. Plenty of politicians and bureaucrats have walked away with personal wealth in return for gilding the communist empire with a membership privilege it did not earn. Surrounding nations will pick up the bill using the lives of young men as payment.

The waiter may already be wandering over with the eftpos machine, as China greedily reaches for the world’s resources. While poor nations led by despots routinely exchange minerals for bribes – eventually someone is going to say ‘no’ and China will reveal itself to be a violent regional bully. How firmly Xi is told ‘no’ will determine the safety of the Pacific for the next hundred years. If the era of ‘Woke’ teaches us something, let it be that those who are never punished for poor behaviour in their youth become unhinged, irrational, and unstable adults. So it is with nations. Decades of convenient blindness toward China has created a leadership that does not understand when no means no.

Greens leader Adam Bandt – whose naivety borders on calamity – thinks he can ‘hug it out’ with China. He will be doing so, desperately mounting the leg of Xi Jinping while the world’s largest polluter and fossil fuel user watches Taiwan burn and the Pacific Islands tear open their veins, filling China’s ships with rare earths destined for enslaved European power grids.

Lately, Xi has been toying with a ‘Great Hop Forward’, tossing his restless citizens and ethnic captives into an aggressively digital Utopia where communism’s prison bars are manufactured with DNA while iPhones stand in place of guards, armed with software co-created by Silicon Valley. It is a system designed to cement power over 1.4 billion souls that was first trialled in the ‘autonomous’ regions of Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong. It has been made necessary by rising opposition…

Xi should remember that the more force a political system requires to maintain power, the more spectacular its collapse – like a star, crushed beneath its own mass that suddenly obliterates itself in a supernova, tossing the forces of control into the abyss in an instant. Never mind. No one is rushing to stop the inevitable failure of ‘Communism with Chinese characteristics’ or the cult of Xi, fed into children like dogmatic Woke teachers staring down the barrel of TikTok, demanding emotional gratification from kindergarten children. If anything, Western leaders such as Canada’s manic Justin Trudeau have verbally praised holistic tyranny while the United Nations preaches communism as a necessary mechanism to ‘save the climate’. That statement alone is enough to write off their organisation off as a peddler of nonsense.

The transfer of wealth – orchestrated by international bureaucracies, selfish CEOs, and ignorant politicians – has turned China into the world’s Great Aunt. It is an ancient empire with a freshly plundered fortune, a fragile regime, and a population assembling pitchforks. A line of nations have assembled at the door, trying to work out who gets what when the CCP carks it. That said, the CCP will vanish Xi Jinping long before they accept their fate as another footnote in history’s ‘Why Communism is a Really Bad Idea’ book. Who knows how much damage will be done to the world before then – if China lashes out in anger, or delves inward to stem domestic wounds.

When all is said and done, China’s wealth comes from the West. Cultural Marxism’s politics of historic guilt and ethnic extortion partnered with suffocating eco-fascism has successfully damaged the machine of free market capitalism. Like robbing a bank, plenty of undeserving despots hanging off the United Nations have cashed their pay cheques – but they shot the creator of wealth on their way out. Killing capitalism ultimately kills parasitic collectivist regimes and then everyone finds out the hard way that only one system actually works.

It is in this fragile political ecosystem that one of the largest, globally coordinated propaganda campaigns is coming to fruition. A significant proportion of the public have been successfully convinced – despite no tangible change in their lived experience – that the world is definitely on the brink of apocalypse. The climate is teetering on the knife edge, dipping toward some sort of every-changing, nondescript, mutually exclusive end lost somewhere between ice and fire. The only way to save themselves from the end times is to let the renewables barons and digital tyrants build them a carbon-neutral ark out of tax dollars. This is the modern equivalent of throwing virgins into volcanoes and waiting for the rain. When people accuse eco-fascism of being a cult, they do not mean it as a cheap slander – it is a description of a belief system adhered to by zealots and ruled over by churches, preachers, and popes cashing in on sinful guilt in the hope of salvation.

Those who started this China-centric eco-cult have lost control of their ideology. It is too big – too powerful – and too dangerous. We are beyond commerce. The coffers of climate change cannot be left sitting in Beijing for much longer – certainly not if politicians adhere to their election promises to restructure the whole of society around ‘renewable’ energy.

Green money has painted a target on Xi. He may not realise it yet, but he holds too much influence to be allowed to continue. China was played once and it will be played again. While it’s true that China is the only country with a complete industrial supply chain for renewable technology – that is a cradle to watery grave capacity for wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries – it is not certain that things will remain that way. If the West cannot regain control of ‘Net Zero’, they will abandon it, covet traditional supplies of energy, and leave China a wasteland of empty factories and angry workers.

We are already starting to see this future shuffle around at the edge of conversation. When Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese decided that he was going to copy the Canadians and place limitations upon Chinese investment in critical renewables mining, he did the right thing. It’s something the Liberal Party should have done ten years ago but they were too afraid of being labelled ‘racist’ by Labor – such is the ethical weakness of the former Morrison government.

Jim Chalmers told The Critical Minerals Conference:

‘Foreign investment is a good thing when it’s in our national interest. But as investment interest grows, and as the sources of that investment interest grow, we’ll need to be more assertive about encouraging investment that clearly aligns with our national interest.

‘When we’re talking about investments in critical minerals we’re talking about investments in valuable resources, in strategically important land, in a product that has important future implications, and in industries that will underpin much of the global growth and progress in the 21st century. This touches every tenet of our national interest.’

It may be the only intelligent thing uttered by Chalmers in his life. Australia is in possession of a $20 billion critical minerals industry – possibly larger. By ‘critical’ we mean minerals that are used in the creation of defence technologies, communications, national security, and other miscellaneous ‘national interest’ avenues.

Even if we can protect future assets, former governments left our primary ports in the hands of China in what may be one of the biggest security errors in Australian history. Well, that and the poodle’s submarine fiasco, critically endangering our sovereignty. Leaving politicians in charge has been like watching infants toddle around a line of dominoes where those dominoes represent decades of mistakes. Where they lead and how hard they fall, no one can say.

The one person who won’t walk away from this mess is Xi Jinping. His ‘Wolf Warrior Diplomacy’ relies on a pack of hungry, vicious dogs sitting at his feet that could turn on him at any moment.

Alexandra Marshall is an independent writer. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.