Wars and the oil blockades may be waiting for Xi’s party congress — SkimNews
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- Xi Jinping is positioned to be "hailed as the first Chinese head of state in history to paint the great Western power into a corner" at the 2027 Party Congress, as Trump's approval falls over an oil crisis unlike any in 50 years driven by wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
- The US and China established a "real truce" at a September Washington meeting (following May's Beijing talks), expected to hold until at least the autumn 2027 Party Congress or potentially the 2028 US presidential election.
- Japan's PM Sanae Takaichi traveled to Washington the day before Xi's arrival and announced a phone call with Trump right after the Trump-Xi summit, revealing the meeting was effectively multilateral with Asian allies' needs factored in.
- China is detaching from dollar-based payments via its CIPS alternative to SWIFT, and in the joint statement opposed a nuclear-armed Iran while calling on Tehran to free the Straits of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb — making Iran a "first test" of the truce.
- Iran's economy is "imploding" under its own naval blockade, which also restricts Iran's own oil revenue; the source notes that China, by backing Russia and Iran, has "no medium- or long-term prospects of its own" while America retains many.
- China's fiscal authorities are pursuing unpaid taxes from the wealthy to address state cash shortfalls — a politically delicate reform that could be unveiled at the 2027 Congress, with its 1.4 billion population unable to grow on consumption from 350 million Americans or 500 million Europeans.
- The dollar is undergoing a "paradigm shift" into stablecoins backed by real assets, but the source flags a 2008-style risk that the underlying assets may not be real — a financial innovation challenge only the US is currently attempting.
Why it matters: A US-China "real truce" expected to last until at least the 2027 Party Congress gives Beijing a window to pursue domestic tax reform on the wealthy and continue shifting transactions off SWIFT via CIPS, while Washington stays consumed by two wars and the November 3 midterm results. For China, the strategic calculation is to do little and let American mistakes play out.
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