Opinion | China's Decline Became Undeniable This Week. Now What?
By: Bret Stephens (nytimes)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
For years, I've been writing columns predicting China's decline. This week, the decline became undeniable. The road downhill will not be smooth — not for it or for us.
The news is that the death rate in China outnumbered the birthrate for the first time in more than 60 years. Last time, it was famine caused by Mao Zedong's economic policies that led to an estimated 36 million deaths from starvation. Now, it's young Chinese couples who, like their peers in much of the developed world, don't want children.
So far, the demographic downshift has been small — 9.56 million births last year against 10.41 million deaths, according to Chinese government statistics. That's out of a total population of 1.4 billion. The country will not be running out of people anytime soon.
But the longer trend lines look awful for Beijing. In 1978, when Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms got underway, China's median age was 20.1 years. In 2021, it was 37.9, exceeding that of the United States. China's fertility rate is 1.18. The replacement rate necessary to maintain a stable population is 2.1. As of 2018, there were an estimated 34 million more males in China than females — the result of a one-child policy that led couples to abort girls at a higher rate than boys. China's working-age population has been shrinking for years; a government spokesman estimated that it will fall to 700 million by the middle of the century.
If you think the world has too many people already, then all this might sound like good news. It's not. China is increasingly likely to grow old before it gets rich, consigning hundreds of millions of Chinese to a penurious and often lonely old age. A declining population generally correlates with economic decline — roughly a one-percentage-point decline in economic growth for every percentage-point decline in population, according to Ruchir Sharma, a former head of emerging markets at Morgan Stanley. And China, both as an export hub and as a vast market, has been a major driver of global economic growth for four decades. Its weakness will ripple through the world economy.
But the scariest aspect of China's decline is geopolitical. When democracies experience economic problems, they tend to become inward looking and risk averse. When dictatorships do, they often become externally focused and risk inclined. Regimes that can't, or won't, address domestic discontents through political and economic reforms often try to do so through foreign adventures.
That's a point worth thinking about now that Beijing is also reporting the slowest rate of economic growth in nearly four decades. The immediate cause here is Xi Jinping's catastrophic mishandling of the Covid crisis — the punitive lockdowns, the rejection of foreign vaccines, the abrupt end of restrictions, the constant lying.
But China's economy was already in trouble before the pandemic: a real estate bubble at the point of bursting, record high capital flight, the end of Hong Kong as a relatively free city and Chinese companies like Huawei increasingly unwelcome in Western countries on account of espionage and intellectual-property-theft concerns.
A pragmatic government might have been able to tackle these challenges. But Mr. Xi has appointed a gang of yes men to the Politburo for his unprecedented third term as supreme leader. If — or as — economic conditions deteriorate, they are likelier to find answers to their problems in aggression rather than reform. Think of inflationary Argentina on the eve of the invasion of the Falklands or bankrupt Iraq just before the invasion of Kuwait.
What should the United States do? Three things.
First, deterrence. The better Kyiv does militarily against Moscow, the more deeply the lesson will be learned in Beijing that taking Taipei wouldn't be as easy as it seems. The sooner Taiwan acquires large stores of easy-to-use, hard-to-target weapons such as Stinger and Javelin missiles, the more hesitant China's military planners will be to step on a sea urchin. The more the United States does to help Japan, Australia and other allies strengthen their militaries, the greater the deterrent effect it will have on China's regional ambitions.
The administration is doing much of this already. It needs to do more of it, much faster.
Second, trade detente. Trying to punish Beijing via Donald Trump's tariffs aggravates the relationship while harming both sides economically. We should offer to roll them back in exchange for guarantees from China that it will end its hacking campaigns against U.S. institutions.
If it cheats, the tariffs can be reimposed and doubled.
Finally, human rights. At every opportunity, the State Department should speak up loudly for China's dissidents. Jimmy Lai and Qin Yongmin, among others, should be as familiar to Americans as Andrei Sakharov and Natan Sharansky were in the 1970s. Their names should be raised at every bilateral meeting with Chinese officials not only out of concern for their lives but also as reminders that our fundamental differences with Beijing aren't strategic. They're moral.
In the long run, the greatest hope we can have for China is its people. The greatest investment we can make in the coming decades of turbulence is to keep faith with them.
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China has never been a military threat to the United States and never will be. If conditions there do go south over the next few decades it will be more a humanitarian tragedy than anything else. They have so many people who wont be properly taken care of if their economy goes bad, especially the sick and elderly who depend on government services.
In the US we have a well ingrained group now that is obsessed with "Chinese communism" as if there were going to start parachuting their red horde into red states next week. It is a subset of the new McCarthyism.
Keep thinking that China has never been a military threat; and never will be.
They are a much bigger military threat as Russia is (yet we are pumping billions into propping up a corrupt pro fascist government in Ukraine). And both China and Russia will be a threat so long as they have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the planet.
When China grabs Taiwan we find out how quickly they are a threat to the US. The loss of an already constrained supply of semi and super conductors will push the US and the world to the brink.
Not sure if this article is trying to provide cover for Brandon over China; or pretending Russia is a bigger threat to promote continue funding for Ukraine.
Regardless it is naive in the extreme.
Talk about believing in American exceptionalism. For starters, do you think we are immune to nukes?
Britain, France, Israel , and India have nukes too. Are they all a military threat to us?
Why would china want to do a first strike on the US ?
Is China our ally now? When the hell did that change? Please let Brandon know so all sanctions against China can be dropped immediately.
Britain and France have nukes supplied by the US. We have to activate them for use. Rather diminishes the threat they pose.
Does Israel have intercontinental nuclear missiles? Highly doubtful. They are far more of a threat to the ME and Northern Africa. I supposed they are a threat to US troops stationed in those locations.
Why would Russia. Yet people are claiming Putin is close to doing just that. Maybe the US decides that Taiwan is too important to lose after a Chinese invasion. Maybe they get sick of the US squelching their ambitions in the Pacific. Maybe they realize there is no way in hell they can defeat the US; and the CCCP power starts to crumble as they cannot advance and grow. Without resources and growth their power diminishes and they decide to knock the US off it's pedestal for good.
So China would start a nuclear armageddon in order to "knock the US off its pedestal" ? Umm, sure.
Nuclear war isn't their only tool.
Or is Biden just blowing smoke?
Joe Biden disagrees.
China can afford to play the long game, as they have for millennia.
We, on the other hand, have a four year cycle where we eat each other in the quest for power. And that is not a condemnation of our system. Much rather live here than anywhere.
But they can sit back and build their economic strength (even more powerful than their military) while we debate the effects of gas stoves. Perhaps our priorities should lie in a more macro focus rather than the limitations of the micro model.
Lol. To what point? What game are they playing that they will finally win after centuries upon centuries of struggling for no purpose?
But as this article makes clear, China's economy and millitary is in trouble long term due to an aging and shrinking working population.
The one child policy kneecapped Chinese growth and means they have about 15 years before they face serious problems. China's in trouble mid to long term.
Talk about being backwards!
China has worked on reducing it's population for decades!
And it's economy only grew 3% !!!
We wish we could get that kind of growth from an Obama or a Biden.