Since the fall of the Soviet Union, an inevitable event in human history, the United States' primary geopolitical rival was and is the People's Republic of China, which is two lies in one: It's not the people's, and it's not a republic, but then, commies, like the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have always been fond of falsely tossing the term "republic" around.
China remains today a trade partner but also a rival. China is making inroads around the world, including most notably in the Middle East and Africa; they are funding infrastructure and development projects that just so happen to give China access to resources they don't have domestically, not to mention quite a few lovely ports - like two that the nation of Panama just kicked Chinese concerns out of.
But is China really all that secure, in the long run? For some years now, I've been saying no; China is in trouble. Now two more experts in the field are making similar cases for China's future. Foreign Affairs' Andrew J. Nathan has some details.
For many years, predicting the downfall of the Chinese Communist Party was something of a sport among China watchers. But few serious observers today suggest that China looks unstable. Despite facing numerous challenges, including the implosion of the country’s real estate sector since 2021 and high debt loads that have bogged down local government finances, China’s political system appears strong. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has a firm hold on all the levers of power, and the country is proving to be competitive, or even dominant, in a growing number of twenty-first-century technologies, such as electric vehicles and biotechnology. Moreover, scholars consistently find overwhelmingly high levels of public support for the CCP. In comparison to the growing fragility and divisiveness of political systems elsewhere, including in the United States, the Chinese regime appears to the outside world as competent and stable—an image that Beijing is eager to project.
Xi Jinping, we might note, has probably amassed more personal power and authority than anyone in the PRC since Chairman Mao himself, but that power will only last as long as XI does. China faces a number of problems right now. Are they truly a dying giant?
In Political Trust in China, the political scientist Lianjiang Li digs deep into survey methodology to question the way that most scholars have measured public support for leaders in Beijing. He concludes that citizens’ trust in the regime is weaker than other researchers believe. In Institutional Genes, the economist Chenggang Xu uses a sweeping comparative and historical analysis of China’s political institutions to argue that the country’s inability to reform them will condemn it to economic stagnation. In Xu’s view, the kind of authoritarian rule that worked for China’s imperial dynasties is strangling its modern economy.
So, an economic crisis in the works; and that's no shock. That was for the most part what brought down the Soviet Union, after all. Failure hard-wired into communism and indeed all socialist systems, which operate on the presumption that people will work as hard for "the common good" as for personal gain. That's just not true, no matter how many times leftist feather merchants insist it is.
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Dr. Nathan points out:
Both books offer a needed corrective to the conventional wisdom that the Chinese regime is stable, but neither is definitive. To translate local findings into national claims, Li reinterprets existing data sources in ways that stretch their meaning. Xu’s metaphor of “institutional genes,” meanwhile, shows that Chinese authoritarian institutions are resistant to change—but it does not adequately explain why they cannot be reformed. Still, it is difficult to read these deeply researched texts without worrying about China’s future. Sadly, if the two authors are correct, what follows regime collapse might be even worse than the system China has now.
There's one thing not mentioned here: Demographics.
As the saying goes, the future belongs to those who show up for it, and China, along with most of the nations of Europe, Russia, and Japan, appear to be opting out. For China in particular, after years of their idiotic one-child policy, this raises some unique problems.
First, the one-child policy and the perceived need for a male heir resulted in many girl infants being aborted or abandoned. This is leading to a couple of generations of young men with diminished hope of finding a wife and having a family; that's a frustrating place for these young men to be in, and sexually frustrated young men are hardly going to contribute to the stability of a society.
Second, the population is aging, and there are fewer young people coming up to care for the old in any respect. China has a couple of options here; start importing immigrants to fill those gaps. Maybe they can check with Germany or Sweden to see how well that works out. The other? Well, they are communists, and if there's anything communists are good at, it's... disposing of people who, for any reason, are no longer useful or desirable. We wouldn't countenance such a solution here - but would China?
If the CCP falls in the midst of a population bubble bursting, what follows won't be pretty. It also will probably be the end of China as a nation-state. The result may well be what existed before China was unified: A vast stretch of empty land, with a few regions populated by people at the subsistence level, ruled over by regional warlords, gangsters and strongmen-dictators. The bad news is, this will be a humanitarian crisis beyond compare in modern times, as well as being a global economic hit; like it or not, China's a big part of the global economy. The good news is that the last major communist country will, at least, not be a major communist country anymore. China's rivalry with the United States will be over, because China will be over.
The next decade or two will tell the tale.
