If the world economy tanks, the West may be less inclined to add to its economic problems by pursuing confrontation with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the South China Sea.
The PRC will also derive some consolation from the outsized horror that neo-liberal globalists have expressed at the excesses of direct democracy as displayed in the referendum: “emotional, bigoted, low-information voters” delivering “catastrophic” outcomes against the earnest but unheeded advice of their intellectual and moral betters.
The practical consequences of Brexit to the PRC are probably more disadvantageous.
The PRC had made a sizable investment of time, effort, political capital and who knows what combination of behind the scenes arm twisting & enticements to get a ride for Xi Jinping in the royal coach with Queen Elizabeth. With Cameron out that plan will need some re-thinking. How much actual reworking is needed depends on the ability of Europhiles in the UK to turn “Brexit” into “Brexit-Lite” or even, with apologies to Sartre, “No Brexit.”
Beyond the sunk costs of its UK investment, the PRC leadership apparently regards the travails of the EU with some uneasy sympathy and fear of democratic/nationalist contagion.
The specter of regional political and economic disintegration, with indications that Brexit may spark EU-friendly secession movements by Scotland and Northern Ireland and even trigger a rush to the exits by disgruntled EU member states on the Continent is disconcerting to say the least.
The main bits are Han, Manchurian, Mongolian, Uyghur, Zhuang, Yi, Tujia, & Hui. Everybody’s favorite aggrieved PRC minority, the Tibetans, are around 9th on the list, with a population of about 5 million. In the PRC era, India has continually entertained hard-liner plans to wrong foot China by encouraging Tibetan separatist movements.
Today, there is increasing enthusiasm for playing the nationalities card as a weapon against PRC “assertiveness.” India hawks talk about putting both Tibet and Xinjiang in play by providing material and moral support to separatist movements. Hong Kong self-determination and Taiwan independence are well on their way to becoming default options for globally-minded liberals.
Keeping together a multi-national empire in the modern age, in other words, is not easy. Belt-tightening and testicle-squeezing-inclined German central bankers yielded youth unemployment rates of up to 50% in peripheral countries like Spain and Greece instead of EU-wide economic nirvana.
Open dysfunction in Europe, at the very heart of the globalist regime, might make things harder for the alliance of neo-liberal and neo-conservative strategists now constructing a “the rules-based liberal international order” and “revisionist authoritarianism.”