This is bad for Canadians recently, with many arrests and accusations of spying, all because of political retaliation over that rich lady
At the rate things are going, in another five years nobody from a liberal nation will be able to safely visit Xi's new hermit kingdom.
It's a shame. I always thought it would be nice to visit Hong Kong.
Now, compared to then, China has a huge internal market thanks to the rising of the middle class that could take the clash of a potential export collapse by leveraging their internal market.
So said, whenever there's somebody exporting there's another one importing. Perhaps we should ask ourselves where are we going to get the goods that now are produced largely in China.
Wikipedia refers to it as:
"The term hermit kingdom is used to refer to any country, organization or society which willfully walls itself off, either metaphorically or physically, from the rest of the world."
Seems reasonable.
China is going to become increasingly walled off in terms of physical access into China (and they'll likely further restrict foreign travel by their citizens), matching how they've already walled the country off with regards to the Internet & foreign press. It had to happen, the smothering process has to continue indefinitely until or unless they reverse course on liberalization. These processes tend to spiral down by necessity. The more you clamp down, the more you have to clamp down; you can't allow challenges to the vast number of invented narratives (which comes from foreign injection: outside press, outside visitors, allowing a large number of your citizens to visit other nations and see that the narratives are falsified, etc).
The exports would be the last thing to get walled off, I'd expect. Neither side of the wall really wants that. It's not hard to see a scenario where China is highly isolated socially and culturally, while still being an immense export power.
One of my abiding impressions and favourite photos of the trip was a street where signage had proliferated so much that it was solid, and the only constraint on incursion into the street was whether or not it got hit by a bus. The ubiquitous vendors of fake watches and shops offering to make you a suit. Skyscrapers on every surface that wasn't a 45 degree slope. The outdoor escalator. Huge, neat, organised, airconditioned subway.
The death penalty threshold is 50 gram for methamphetamine in China, in absence of other 'good behavior' such as collaboration, etc. If any Chinese citizen attempted to smuggle this much drugs into China, it's going to be the same fate, except maybe faster.
Drug dealers in China are executed for much less. To paint that as 'retaliation for ongoing conflict' is laughable.
Sounds like a super convenient way to kill off politically inconvenient people.
Entertainment figures regularly gets shunned by the whole industry because they were caught smoking pot, which is not even a criminal offense in China. The whole mentality is worth a book but to the Chinese society (not just government) drugs are taken very seriously.