Beeson asserted in this piece:

“Even the much-discussed threat to our sea-lanes of communication seems a bit unlikely: why would the world’s largest trading nation want to disrupt the very system upon which its economic wellbeing depends?”

This assertion is clearly baseless:

• The CCP wilfully put China in even greater peril by holding back its troops in the fight against the Japanese during WWII, to ensure that the KMT troops were weakened by having to bear the brunt of the fighting against Japan.
  
  
• The CCP wilfully starved its own people during the Great Leap Forward just to make a point of enforcing obedience from the people insofar as they were made to do ridiculously stupid things like melting farm tools to make steel even after it became apparent that it doesn’t work.
  
  
• The CCP wilfully killed off the post-GLF course correction induced economic recovery and destroyed centuries or not millennia of Chinese knowledge, history and culture in launching the Cultural Revolution as a power play.
  
  
• The CCP wilfully allowed its troops to be slaughtered by the Vietnamese by engaging in border incursions even though it knew that the PLA was not ready for war post-CR, just to make cheap nationalistic points. And to an extent they still do such things
  
  
• The CCP wilfully killing its own narrative of opening up and causing sanctions to be imposed on itself by killing lots of its own people in 1989 - it took Deng Xiaoping effectively to admit that things are not right by doing “southern tours” and the like for the downward trend to be reversed.
  
  
• The CCP wilfully killing the goose that lay the golden egg by its Hong Kong crackdown in which reached into the business and financial world and which, despite all its efforts to pump money into HK capital markets and painting a “HK is back” picture, the stock market is still well off its highs when other competitors are hitting record highs. All this for the sake of a perception of “national security”.
  
  
• The CCP wilfully starving local governments of money to make its own fiscal position look good, which led to property market bubbles as local governments feast on land revenues, followed by the now never ending property bust which is harming the Chinese economy badly throughout.
  
  
• The CCP wilfully continuing with the one child policy even after hordes of demographers warned them of a demographic cliff to come, and which now has started to come.
  
  
• Leaving aside specific historical examples of the CCP’s actions being inconsistent with Beeson’s rosy assertion, I am also surprised that for a member of a research centre headed by an economist, Beeson had zero grasp of monopolistic economics, whereby a market player with market power would engage in extended stints of loss-making activities in order to try and push out competitors, before re-emerging as a monopolist that reset pricing and other conditions. Why wouldn’t the CCP inflict economic self-harm if it believes that by doing so, it can edge out rivals and then reset the terms of engagement to its dominant favour?
  
  So in making such a bold assertion, one has to wonder whether Beeson is ignorant, stupid, wilfully blind, or seeking to mislead.