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[The author’s point is that China can lose a LOT of people in order to defeat Trump.

It is unimportant that the one-child policy was lifted in 2015.]

The author’s profound ignorance about Chinese history has led him astray. The thing about Chinese rulers isn’t that they think centuries ahead. In fact, their visions are much more constricted than those of Western rulers, because unlike in the West, their lives and the lives of their clans are always at risk if they lose power. And Chinese propensity for successful coups mounted by rival elites and revolts started by the hoi polloi far exceeds that of any other civilization in recorded history.

What distinguishes Chinese rulers from others isn’t how far forward they look, but how far backwards they reach in looking for pitfalls and challenges that might lead to a disastrous end for them and their kin. Mao’s twin bibles during his successful insurrection against the ruling Nationalists were two works about peasant revolts that form half of China’s Four Classic Novels - the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the Water Margin.

The coincidence of major crises leading to the literal extermination of ruling clans is a recurrent pattern in Chinese history. While the saying about the Chinese word for crisis being similar to the word for opportunity isn’t actually true, Chinese regime changes have certainly revolved around major crises. For most civilizations, the population’s reaction to Four Horsemen-style calamities is to hunker down and grit their teeth through it, pretty much like drones on an ant hill. In China’s case, the internal reaction can be and has periodically been extremely violent. As I’ve noted elsewhere, for 800 out of the last 2200 years, China has been ruled by regimes established by peasant rebels* who went for broke and struck at the throne, while muttering the usual pieties about looking to replace the corrupt courtiers giving the emperor bad advice.

Once they lay their hands on the emperor (or his designated heir), the narrative would evolve. After a suitable interlude during which they held the emperor hostage in all but name, the emperor would abdicate (or disappear), handing over the reins of power to the new regime. The emperor’s and principal courtiers’ kin and acquaintances would be erased from the gene pool, with a body count rising to the tens or hundreds of thousands. That is the worst-case scenario, but a specter that faces Communist Party bigwigs if a latter day rebel strikes at the throne again, and prevails.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fang_Xiaoru
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_familial_exterminations

Individual revolts generally don’t have a huge chance of success. But China’s history isn’t of individual revolts. It’s of one large-scale failed revolt after another, each hammering away at the resources and loyalties of the regime’s supporters, while offering opportunities for advancement at the expense of the regime. Until the regime runs out of resources and loyal supporters, at which point it is toppled and its adherents and their kin are wiped out in a bloodbath.

The potential for a new cycle of revolts followed by regime collapse is why Xi Jinping worries about this disease, the way he worries about every aspect of Chinese society that might threaten his rule. Whether the rest of the world should be as worried is an open question. At the moment, though, the cure for the disease - drastic quarantines and mass hysteria dwarfing the actual mortality numbers vis-a-vis something like the flu - almost seems worse than the disease itself.

* Prior to the last 2 or 3 centuries, it’s hard to think of any regime outside of China where peasants upended existing regimes. In China, it occurred 2200 years ago, with the establishment of Liu Bang as emperor and the founder of the Han dynasty. Spartacus’s revolt, over a century later, consisted of little more than rabble fighting the organized formations of the Roman army. Liu’s involved hundreds of thousands of trained men in armor going up against the ancien regime’s front line troops. He wasn’t only a charismatic leader - he co-opted large numbers of regime stalwarts to his side during the ebbs and flows of his campaigns throughout the empire. And then made them hand over their personal armies or crushed their revolts once he won power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Gaozu_of_Han#Birth_and_early_life