#ETH The China-U.S. game has reached a critical stage. The most serious threat China faces now is war and economic harvesting. The United States believes it has a grip on causing significant turmoil in our economy, aiming to harvest China as it did with Soviet assets to extend the dollar's lifespan. If this does not go as planned, there may be risks of recklessly initiating a war. But China is not the Soviet Union, nor is it India. The outcome of this game could be completely different from what the U.S. imagines. The strategies the U.S. employs against major powers are actually quite fixed: first, use the financial sickle to harvest; if harvesting doesn't work, then reveal the war card. This method was typically used against the Soviet Union; in 1986, international oil prices plummeted, and the Soviets experienced the taste of being harvested for the first time. That was not an ordinary market fluctuation, but a meticulously planned hunt. The U.S. joined forces with Saudi Arabia to drive oil prices down from $30 to $10, causing the oil-export-dependent Soviet Union to lose $20 billion annually, equivalent to three years of military spending evaporating into thin air. This was just the beginning. Subsequently, the Fed suddenly raised interest rates to 20%, instantly tripling the interest on the Soviet Union's $50 billion foreign debt. When the Soviet Union attempted to sell gold to bail itself out, Wall Street concentrated on shorting 2,000 tons of gold reserves, causing gold prices to plummet by 28%. The final fatal blow came from the sale of 140 billion rubles manipulated by agents, directly triggering a price surge of 2,500%, leaving ordinary citizens' life savings in ruins. This combination of attacks was once invincible, but today, when the U.S. raises the same sickle against China, it unexpectedly discovers that the blade has curled. This is not because China is lucky, but because we have built an economic Great Wall over 30 years. By 2022, when the Fed raised interest rates to 5% and global capital began to flow back to the U.S., they encountered a wall of copper and iron composed of three major defenses. The first line of defense is a diversified industrial matrix. Just as the U.S. fantasizes about replicating the oil war, China's new energy vehicles have already achieved an annual production breakthrough of 5 million units, the self-sufficiency rate of chips has surged to 30%, and high-tech investment accounts for 3% of GDP. It's like setting up a firewall at every critical point in the economy, where any single field's impact will be quickly dispersed and absorbed.

It is even more felt that the three red lines policy introduced in advance in 2020 placed a protective shield on the real estate industry before the wave of dollar interest rate hikes, requiring real estate companies to maintain an asset-liability ratio of no more than 70%◆a net debt ratio of no more than 100%◆a cash short-term debt ratio of no less than 1, which is equivalent to actively dismantling potential financial bombs. The second line of defense is intelligent financial control, with a buffer of $3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves◆combined with a pre-reporting system for cross-border capital flows, making it impossible for international speculative capital to launch a sudden attack.
In 2022 and 2024, during the Fed's aggressive interest rate hikes, the Chinese yuan only depreciated by 5%, which is a textbook-level stability among emerging markets. What makes the United States even more uneasy is that trade with countries like Brazil and Saudi Arabia has begun to use the yuan for settlement. With the establishment of the BRICS independent payment system, the foundation of dollar hegemony is quietly being undermined. The third line of defense comes from the dilemma faced by the opponent itself; when the U.S. raises the sickle, it seems to forget the $37 trillion national debt it bears, a figure that could exceed 106% of GDP by 2027. If you want to harvest from others, you must first ask yourself whether you can bear trillion-level interest expenses every year, which is like a physically exhausted hunter chasing prey who suddenly realizes he is already out of breath. So, when financial harvesting fails, will the U.S. take the risk of starting a war? This question is indeed worth vigilance, but today's China's anti-access area denial capability has raised the cost of military conflict to a level that no rational country can afford. The 2800 km range of the DF-21D and DF-26 anti-ship ballistic missiles forces U.S. aircraft carriers to retreat to waters 2,700 kilometers away from the Chinese mainland, with the entire first island chain within the coverage of China's medium-range missiles, not to mention the devastating consequences between nuclear powers. American arms dealers do indeed profit from wars, but they want small-scale proxy wars, not direct clashes with equally matched opponents. At the deepest point of this game, the real determinant of victory lies in the generational differences in development models. Behind China's 5% economic growth rate is a dual-driven model of consumption upgrade and technological innovation, a local government’s determination to bid farewell to land finance, and a comprehensive breakthrough in strategic industries such as semiconductors, new energy, and artificial intelligence. The lesson from the collapse of the Soviet Union teaches us that we cannot pin our national fortune on a single resource, we cannot exhaust civilian resources for an arms race, and we cannot abandon regulatory sovereignty in financial openness. Therefore, when we see the cross-border use of the yuan surpassing 5%, and we see Chinese manufacturing leap to Chinese manufacturing, we will understand that the essence of this game is no longer a simple zero-sum game, but a historical alternation of old and new development paradigms. The U.S. may still be flipping through the script from the Cold War, but China has long since rewritten the rules of the game. Great power games are never about whose voice is louder, but about whose foundation is more stable. While Americans are still calculating short-term gains and losses, Chinese people are already planning for the next 50 years. The most exciting part of this contest has just begun, and the outcome is likely to rewrite the world structure of the 21st century. The days when China was at the mercy of others are gone forever, and China will return to the pinnacle of the world. After seeing so much finance, this is what is uplifting. Down with the Americans, who are always thinking of ways to harvest us.