This is CBS Eye on the World. Here's John Batchelor.

I welcome my colleague and mentor, Gregory Copley, editor and publisher of defense and foreign affairs,

the author of the new book, Noble State, about the success of constitutional monarchy.

We turn to the failure of dictatorship one more time with a headline in the Financial Times.

The topic here is Xi Jinping, the fall guy, the general secretary for the third unprecedented

term ruling over the Chinese Communist Party,

ruling over more than a billion people, and not doing well.

The Financial Times puts it this way.

China criticizes manufacturers over price wars, deflation fears mount.

Subhead, data this week expected to show prolonged bout of deflation in factory prices,

running unchecked.

Gregory, a very good evening to you.

What part of deflation did China not expect, given that it's given orders for years, to overproduce, to dump your products, to cut your prices, to compete with other state-owned enterprises that were subsidizing?

It was a model to create deflation, not to feed it.

So suddenly they've woken up to the fact that once the deflation cycle starts,

you can't stop it less before a crash, a complete crash of the economy. Shee Jinping didn't do this,

but they're blaming him. Is that fair-minded of them? Good evening to you, Gregory.

Good evening, John. Well, no, it's not fair of them because Xi Jinping had more to do with it than most.

At least when Deng Xiaoping was General Secretary, and he unleashed, if you like, the market economy,

he left the market to do its own thing. In other words, to produce what it needed and sell what it could and to buy what it needed.

The reality is, though, that the party could, once they saw all this money being created,

they couldn't stay away from it. They had to interfere, like most bureaucrats.

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