In the latest episode of 'Authoritarianism vs. Reality,' the architect of China’s modern malaise, Xi Jinping, has declared war on the one thing more stubborn than a Party official: the laws of supply and demand. The news that the CCP is attempting to curb 'price wars'—those pesky situations where companies actually try to win customers by offering better deals—is the ultimate testament to the absurdity of the current global order. It seems the Great Helmsman has realized that his own industrial policies have created a Frankenstein’s monster of overcapacity, and his solution is to tell the monster to stop being so tall.

The irony is so thick you could choke on it, much like the smog over a subsidized coal plant. For years, the Chinese state has funneled astronomical sums into manufacturing, turning the country into a giant vending machine that the rest of the world can no longer afford to use. They’ve built enough electric vehicles to ferry the entire population of Mars to a suburban mall, and enough solar panels to blind the sun itself. But here is the catch that the central planners missed while they were busy measuring their GDP growth in reinforced concrete: if you produce everything and your own people can’t afford to buy anything, the price of 'everything' eventually hits the floor.

Enter the 'Price War.' In a sane world, this would be called competition. In the ossified corridors of Beijing, it is viewed as 'disorderly,' a word the Party uses for anything they can’t track with a QR code or suppress with a paramilitary unit. To Xi, a falling price isn't a win for the consumer; it’s a threat to the 'quality growth' narrative—a phrase that roughly translates to 'we are failing, but we are doing it with great dignity.' The state wants the prestige of being a high-tech superpower without the undignified reality of a market that actually functions. They want a capitalist engine with a communist brake pedal, and they are surprised when the whole vehicle starts to smoke.

But let us not save all our vitriol for the East. The Western reaction to this saga is equally pathetic. The neoliberal ghouls in Washington and Brussels, who spent forty years preaching that the 'invisible hand' was the only god worth worshipping, are now clutching their pearls because the hand is currently slapping them with cheaper lithium batteries. They cry about 'unfair subsidies' while simultaneously drafting their own massive corporate welfare packages to prop up their own failing industries. It is a race to the bottom where everyone is cheating, yet everyone is complaining that the other person isn't playing fair. The Left cries for protectionism to save jobs that were automated away a decade ago, and the Right demands tariffs while pretending to love the consumer. Both sides are fundamentally allergic to the truth: that global trade has become a hostage situation where the hostages have developed Stockholm Syndrome for their respective flags.

Xi’s war on price wars is, at its core, a war on the consequences of his own ego. By suppressing domestic consumption—refusing to give the Chinese proletariat a real social safety net or a living wage—he has forced his industries to export their way out of a crisis. But the world is full, and the wallets are empty. To then command these companies to stop lowering prices is like an arsonist complaining about the water damage from the fire hoses. It is a masterclass in state-sponsored gaslighting. The consumer, that inconvenient biological unit that is supposed to make the whole cycle work, is treated as an afterthought, a battery to be drained rather than a human to be fed.

The historical parallels are as grim as they are predictable. We have seen this before—the belief that a group of men in suits can out-calculate the collective desires and despairs of billions. Whether it’s the failed price controls of the Roman Empire or the catastrophic central planning of the 20th century, the result is always the same: a slow, grinding decline masked by increasingly frantic propaganda. Xi Jinping thinks he can legislate the value of a car or a kilowatt-hour through sheer force of will. He is trying to hold back a tidal wave with a silk fan, and we are all expected to applaud the technique while our feet get wet.

Ultimately, this isn't about economics; it’s about control. A price war is an admission that the state doesn't have the answers. And in the world of the CCP, an admission of fallibility is the only sin that can't be forgiven. So, the war will continue. The prices will be 'guided,' the companies will be 'counseled,' and the reality will be ignored until it becomes impossible to ignore. It’s a comedy of errors performed in a graveyard, and the only thing cheaper than the goods is the rhetoric used to defend them.