August 9, 2025: China is believed to have developed a plan to eliminate or greatly reduce Western interests in the Middle East and allow China to step in as the new foreign influence. With cooperation from Egypt and Iran, China would have a stranglehold on the world oil supply. China imports most of its oil from Iran and has strong diplomatic, economic, and military relationships with Iran. At the same time similar ties with Egypt have improved. This took a decade of effort and by now Egypt will at least listed to Chinese proposals and give them serious consideration.

While China has the second largest economy on the planet, it is still outmatched by the Western alliance led by the United States. Displacing Western economic, diplomatic and military in the Middle East is a lofty goal that even many Chinese officials see as unobtainable. But now this impossible dream is seriously discussed as a possibility. The gap between possibility and reality may be too wide to cross, but current proposals to do just that are the first step in having a go at it.

Over the last decade China has been seen as a major military and economic threat to the rest of the world, and especially to its neighbors in East Asia, and now the Middle East. There is another important aspect of this threat that is less visible outside China. While the Chinese government backs the aggressive strategy, the Chinese people are not cooperating. The population is shrinking dramatically and imposes restraints on this new Chinese aggression policy and the ability to use it. The population is shrinking because of the one-child population program of the 1980s. This was not lifted until recently when it became obvious that just eliminating the one-child rules did not increase the birth rate. The university grads that made the economic growth possible are disillusioned with how this worked out and the new Chinese army cannot attract enough well-educated recruits to support the new Chinese ambitions.

China’s explosive economic and military growth was the product of four decades of economic transformation, extraordinary economic growth, and modernization of all aspects of Chinese life. It started with a bold and seemingly desperate move; abandoning the principles the founder of Communist China, Mao Zedong, imposed. Mao defined the Chinese version of communism as different from the form popularized and imposed by the Russians. Maoist communism stressed the rural population, not the urban workers, as the key revolutionaries and that radical change was required to achieve the socialist paradise. Maoism in practice proved disastrous and killed 20-30 million Chinese, mainly from starvation, when imposed during the 1950s. To deal with the negative response to that, Mao launched the Great Cultural Revolution in the early 1960s and while this phase only killed a few million it wrecked the economy and educational system. In the 1970s Mao died and those who sought to continue his work were killed or jailed. This le

The Deng reforms lasted until 2016 when a new leader, Xi Jinping, decided that collective leadership was unsuitable for dealing with the problems the new affluence had created. Xi Jinping sought to become and remain leader-for-life. To justify this lifetime tenure, he had to reduce or at least make a reasonable try at reducing, the corruption and mismanagement that is endemic within the CCP and several millennia of Chinese governments in general. To make this work CCP leaders have, since Deng died, turned to nationalism and a buildup of conventional military power to support territorial expansion. If nothing else this is popular and could eventually mean getting Taiwan back while imposing Chinese rule on the South China Sea and grabbing a few other bits of territory. This only works if China does not trigger a major war. Xi Jinping convinced key members of the CCP to back him on this and that first became public in late 2016 when senior members of the CCP agreed to grant Xi Jinping a special powers and recog

While Mao has become popular with many Chinese, those who lived through the 1960s see Mao as a major failure. That is what led to acceptance by the CCP of the economic reforms that transformed China. Xi Jinping has, as expected, used this Mao-grade power to deal with the corruption that persists in the senior ranks of the government and military. To demonstrate that, as soon as Xi was declared a Mao caliber leader, the CCP Central Committee announced punishments for many senior party officials for corruption. Since then, there have been an unprecedented number of senior officials being accused of or punished for corruption. One thing these corrupt officials had in common that was not publicized was their opposition to Xi Jinping’s political plans and ambitions.

Over a decade ago it was noted that while China was getting rich, there was much corruption in the government, the military and even the universities. This created a growing number of unhappy Chinese, and they have a lot of unemployed, often because of corruption. Job seekers are cheated and exploited by corrupt employers and officials on a regular basis. These problems are especially painful for the half of new job seekers who have a university degree.

Difficulty for university grads getting a suitable job is nothing new. In the past, whenever there was an economic downturn, like in 2008, 30 percent of university students could not find a suitable job right away and this also caused problems later because, to future employers, that meant you were not a prime candidate right out of university.

Despite the tight censorship on Chinese Internet social media, there is an increasing amount of chatter by recent university graduates about the need for change. Attempts to fix the core problem, corruption, are not working for most Chinese, especially new university grads and that is seen as menacing by Chinese in general. Historically Chinese dynasties usually fell because they were weakened and torn apart by rebels enraged by corruption. That's one reason why communists gained power in 1949. But their virtuous new government began to show signs of corruption within a decade, and it's gotten much worse since communist economic policies were dumped in the 1980s. What goes around, comes around, slowly and inexorably.

Despite the booming economy, it’s still hard for many college grads to get a job. That means not getting married or even trying to have children. A growing number of Chinese come out of a university already disillusioned and unwilling to make a major effort to change their situation. This was obvious a decade ago when the unemployment rate of university graduates was over 10 percent, compared to 4.1 percent for urban workers in general. The government does not see this as a problem because a high proportion of the population having a university degree provides a reserve of talent for future crises. The less optimistic, or more realistic, senior leaders see this surplus of university grads as the organizers of the next revolution. So do Chinese in general.