Welcome to the era of the Global Prepper. While the rest of us are busy worrying about whether our pronouns are sufficiently inclusive or if our 401ks are just elaborate Ponzi schemes—which they are—the 'invincible' Xi Jinping is currently LARPing as a survivalist in a tin-foil hat. The news that China is aggressively, almost frantically, stockpiling everything from soy to crude oil isn't a masterclass in Eastern strategy or a subtle move on the geopolitical chessboard; it is a panicked, high-stakes scream muffled by several million tons of copper ore. The Middle Kingdom is officially the Middle-Aisle-at-Costco Kingdom.

The catalyst for this logistical hysteria is, of course, the looming specter of the Tangerine Terror. We are living in a timeline where the economic stability of the world’s second-largest superpower depends entirely on whether a man who believes exercise drains a human’s limited battery life decides to put a sixty-percent tax on plastic trinkets. Xi is 'Trump-proofing' the nation. It is an adorable sentiment, really—akin to trying to hurricane-proof a sandcastle with a roll of Scotch tape and a sense of historical grievance. The Chinese Communist Party has realized that the 'globalization' they rode to prosperity was just a thirty-year fever dream where everyone pretended to like each other so they could buy cheaper televisions. Now that the lights are coming up, they are terrified of being caught with an empty pantry.

Let’s look at the hoard. They are sitting on mountains of iron ore while their domestic property market remains a smoldering, debt-ridden crater. They are building ghost cities and then hoarding the materials to build more ghosts. It is circular logic for the intellectually bankrupt. On the energy front, they are burying millions of barrels of crude oil in the ground just in case the Americans decide to park a carrier group in the wrong zip code. Nothing screams 'future-forward green superpower' quite like hiving off dead dinosaur juice in secret caverns because you’re afraid of a tweet from Mar-a-Lago. It is the ultimate admission of fragility. If your 'rejuvenated' nation were actually powerful, you wouldn't need to hide your lunch money; you would simply make sure no one was capable of taking it.

Then there is the food. Half the world’s wheat reserves are reportedly sitting in Chinese silos, likely being guarded by bored bureaucrats who haven't seen sunlight since the last Five-Year Plan failed to meet its imaginary targets. It is a cynical bet on a future where the rest of humanity is eating grass while Beijing enjoys a slightly stale baguette. But a nation that cannot feed its own population without begging for Midwestern corn is hardly the 'global hegemon' the state-run media claims it to be. It’s a hamster in a suit, stuffing its cheeks before the cage door slams shut. The sheer scale of the waste is breathtaking. Grain rots, oil degrades, and metals sit idle, all while the global economy stutters under the weight of this artificial scarcity.

But let us not pretend the West is any better. The reason Xi is hoarding is because the United States has become a volatile, unpredictable mess where policy is dictated by whoever can shout the loudest at a camera. The Americans have turned international trade into a game of Calvinball, changing the rules every time they lose a point. We are witnessing the death of the rational actor. On one side, you have a regime so paranoid it treats a soybean like a strategic asset; on the other, a decaying empire that treats its economy like a reality TV show finale. It is a race to the bottom, and the only winners are the people selling the storage containers.

This is the peak of human achievement in the twenty-first century: two superpowers, one led by a man who treats governance like a grudge match, and the other led by a man so terrified of the first that he’s filling every available basement with pork belly and lithium. It is pathetic. The Enlightenment gave us the scientific method and the promise of progress, and we have used it to calculate exactly how many years of soy rot we can tolerate before the peasants start looking for pitchforks. We have gone from the Silk Road to hiding copper pipes under the floorboards.

In the end, these stockpiles are a monument to our collective failure as a species. They represent a total lack of trust, a total lack of vision, and a total surrender to the most base human instinct: hoarding for the winter. When the inevitable collapse happens, the historians—if there are any left who aren't currently fighting over a can of SPAM in a bunker—will look back at this as the moment the 'Great Power Competition' turned into a race to see who could die with the most toys in their sandbox. Xi thinks he’s winning because his cupboards are full. In reality, he’s just the first one to realize the store is closing forever, and he’s decided to go out clutching a bag of raw iron and a handful of stale wheat.