Prominent retired Chinese colonel sees world heading for ‘Amerexit’ – by Nathan Vanderklippe – November 3, 2016)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

BEIJING – Call him China’s happy hawk. Liu Mingfu is a retired colonel who has become one of his country’s most prominent military conservatives, a man whose book The China Dream lays out a path for China to eclipse the United States and dominate the international order.

The world is heading toward an “Amerexit” – a kind of international divorce with the United States – he believes, and it has already begun.

The very idea stirs so much delight that he does not sit when he talks, instead maintaining a blur of motion for hours in a recent conversation, occasionally breaking into mocking imitation of the two people he sees as the flawed modern leaders of the American downfall, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

But Col. Liu has a dark warning. The Asia-Pacific region is entering into a dangerous decade as a resurgent China, buoyed by its own growing power and perceived weakness in the West, amplifies rivalry with the United States, he said.

“The best time for America to destroy China is in the next 10 years,” he said in an interview this week. But “those 10 years will also be a highly chaotic period in the U.S., which is in a state of unprecedented mania, impatience and grumpiness. They are impatient because they can see how fast China is developing and they want to control China, but they have no way to do it.”

For the rest of this column, click here: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/prominent-retired-chinese-colonel-sees-world-heading-for-amerexit/article32655180/