I think the author is trying to project China into becoming a new USSR, which China is not and will not. To be fair, I also pinned my hopes on China stepping up when the Ukraine war started, but over the years, it’s clear that this is not going to be the case.

So, in this sense, China is not waiting nor is it losing. In fact, I think China’s been playing its cards very competently against Trump’s trade war aggressions. There is only disappointment if one thinks this will lead to a new global order that will benefit the Global South. The opposite is happening, with China dumping its surplus industrial goods on the other countries, especially the EU, forcing them into running worsening trade deficits to protect China’s own domestic export industries.

In other words, China is exporting unemployment in a world where there is a surplus of productive capacity while the global demand for consumption is dwindling.

Furthermore, China standing up against the US would mean their trillions and trillions of accumulated US dollars would be turned worthless. Despite frantic purchase of gold, it still only constitutes a tiny fraction of China’s vast foreign reserves. The ruling class and the bourgeois elites would not want to see their wealth evaporates, so even the most revolutionary leaders would still have to confront heavy obstacles when trying to touch the elites’ interests.

This may seem like a contradiction but it is by design - the US de-industrializes itself and runs a perpetual trade deficit, while you get all the benefits of industrialization and GDP, yet you will find yourself entrenched so deeply into the system we designed that getting out of the rut becomes increasingly difficult by the day.

The only way out, as I have always pointed out, is for China to abandon the neoliberal ideology, a system that it has greatly benefited from for at least 30 years. And to be clear, China isn’t the only one playing this game. Before that, South Korea and Taiwan were the winners who took advantage of the early GATT (now known as WTO) arrangements to benefit from running trade surplus, and before them, Japan in the 1960s (under the Bretton Woods era).

Everyone is playing this neoliberal game, hoping that they too, can one day be a winner like China, South Korea, Japan etc. This is why Trump’s global tariffs, while seem like nightmares for some, also presented (the illusion of) opportunities for others. Everyone is secretly hoping that Trump would break up an entrenched system where upward mobility has now become stifled for most low/middle income developing countries, that somehow, with the ongoing US-China trade war, they could exploit the opening to become the next rising exporter country. Meanwhile, China’s maneuvers are all about preventing exactly that from happening, so the US will continue to rely on China.

That’s the true logic behind Trump’s trade war. It keeps the Global South disorganized and in competition with one another, while the US reaps and extracts from their bickering. Behind this is the “promise” of a collapsing order and where one can climb that ladder under chaos, only to fall into the designs of the imperialists. Laugh at the European vassals all you want, but at least they have class solidarity and understand well enough some of them will have to sacrifice themselves to preserve the system for the bourgeoisie to keep the treats flowing, like worker drones sacrificing for the queen to protect the colony under distress.

TL;DR: The fall of the USSR and its consequences. There is no international solidarity anymore.