Lots of discussion, much of it great! Usually, I try to respond to specific comments, but today I won't do it, because I don't yet have a factual basis for doing so. For people asking about the details of what I plan to do with China, they are, of course, in my books -- a popular (and more up to date) version in End Times, while quantitative and modeling results in Ages of Discord. I am planning to do the same for China, but with several differences, of course. One is data, as everybody acknowledges. The other is a completely different structure of power and elite formation. We shall see.
Everyone is trying...or claims to already know...how China works and where it's going. One could learn a bit from Fei Xiaotong on the matter.
Mr. Fei claims that, in Western societies, individuals form organizations, whereby each organizations has its own boundaries defining who is part of the organization and who is not, and the relation of each individual to the organization is the same. All members in an organization are equivalent. He calls this an “organizational mode of association” (tuantigeju).
In China, on the contrary, each individual is claimed to be surrounded by a series of concentric circles, produced by one’s own social influence. Each web of social relations has a self as its center. Each circle spreading out from the center becomes more distant and at the same time more insignificant. Everyone’s circles are interrelated, and one touches different circles at different times and places. On different occasions, one’s own social network comes into contact with someone else’s. He calls this mode of organization a “differential mode of association” (chaxugeju).
A practical consequence of this difference in social networking is that, in the West, people struggle for their rights, while in China, people seek connections in higher places and do things for the sake of friendship which elevates their "rights" and/or economic/political power. Another consequence is that, in China, private selfishness is justified by moving toward the state: both public officials and private persons use the same conception of the social order to define the context of their action. This is different from a Western society, in which public and private rights and obligations belong to a different ‘organization’ and are divided distinctly.
A “differential mode of association” does not allow for individual rights to be an issue at all, and social morality makes sense only in terms of the personal connections.
I think I got that right. It's helpful in trying to understand China, to begin by trying to understand relationships. It's different here. It's not like America.
I’ve listened to several of his podcasts, and his arguments are riddled with factual errors and inaccuracies. eg here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UltVl2Qlf6A&t=314s he states that China "imports 75-80% of its energy" while the actual share of imported energy vs total consumed is ~20-25%. More appalling as he fashion himself as an expert of demography, on the same interview he states that China "has more people > 53 than under" (China's median age is 39).
Beyond his clear ideological biases, he lacks any credentials that would qualify him as a legitimate expert.
Lived in China off and on for five years. Left seven years ago. Married to a Chinese woman and have Chinese in-laws and friends. I try to follow events in China. In fact I think I'm more interested in what's happening there than my Chinese wife. Most of my online sources lean toward more pessimistic views of China. But my Chinese relatives and friends seem to be doing fairly well. They may be somewhat insulated from what's going on...being solidly middle class/professional/government...and they may be guarded in their posts on WeChat, etc., which are monitored by the government. One of my wife's nieces works in local tv, and at least once warned family members against "spreading rumors" that were seen as anti government. So it's hard to judge what is real. I used to follow Zeihan, but finally stopped as he seemed to me to be mainly a mouthpiece for the CIA. OTOH, I think China is facing serious problems, including possible serious infighting just now in the upper echelons of the CCP. Compared to the rest of the world? To me, it looks like the USA, China, Europe, and Russia are just four nags at the glue factory...and the "winner" will merely be the last horse standing.
I don't have the connections you had and have to China, but my limited view makes me think serious infighting by the higher ups in the CCP would quickly lead to demotion, expulsion or being un-alived. Dissent is either simmering or it's a full on coup?
May I suggest that in your researches of China, that you examine the inquiries of Dr. Steve Hsu, at both his weblog 'infoproc' (now moved to Substack), and his podcast, 'Manifold'. Dr. Hsu, a theoretical physicist who has also done good work in molecular biology and genetics, also did considerable work in plotting the development of new technologies in the US and elsewhere.
His current estimates are that the PRC has twice the technological and manufacturing base of the US, and between five to ten times the number of scientists, engineers, technicians, and skilled workers.
I, for one, find Hsu's analysis to be far more astute and informed than Zeihan's.
I've lived in Wuhan for about 15 years. Got my China credentials, but who cares? I have no interest in being a "China Watcher and Thinker".
You can feel very safe in dismissing Zeihan on nearly anything he has to say about China. He's been doing his bit so long, he's managed to become a parody of himself. He's about 2 or 3 steps away from being the joke punching bag for misbegotten China observations.
Something's changed in the last couple years. The goofy camo wearing guy on late night TV spouting Nationalist lunacy is gone. There's still the oversupply of TV programming showing the PLA bravely overcoming the Japanese, but direct shots at the West seems to have subsided. The Wolf Warrior stuff...haven't seen it anywhere, it seems gone too. All my friends in academia cite a less strident and imposing presence of hard ideology. Folks can talk. No one is taking direct shots at Big Daddy or current policy, but commenting on positives and pointing toward possible new directions is increasingly back.
If anyone has been paying attention, there has been a small mountain of policy papers coming out of the highest levels of academia and (Chinese) think tanks calling for increased reform and opening up. Everyone knows there's hard arguing going on behind closed doors, but given the current statements, it seems like maybe Big Daddy is listening to the smart advisers and acting accordingly.
I'm curious about your data collection. Who, what, where, and how? Looking forward to seeing what you have to say about all of it.
Christopher Balding @BaldingsWorld has written on several occasions about the dubiousness of official (public) statistics in China so I did wonder about the data collection issue.
Reminds me of the time, about 35 years ago, when a popular leftist economist assured us, in The Atlantic magazine, that because of its more aggressive government direction of the economy, Japan would soon bury the U.S. as the world's leading economic power. There followed a couple of decades of stagnation in Japan while we continued our erratic growth surge.
Keep doing what you’re doing, Peter, its sterling work.
Don’t let yourself get pulled into those endless end of empire political loops; your work does the opposite, its grounded in facts which have the potential to lift us all higher.
I started out as a China skeptic and it was reading Peter Zeihan and to a lesser extent Noah Smith (and others) that convinced me that there’s some propaganda going on. Noah is good elsewhere though.
Two examples come to mind. One was the China slowdown to 3% a few years ago. You can google it now. This was the end of China. Catchup was over. The US was growing faster. What was missing was that it was extrapolated from one quarter’s data (ie a quarterly growth of .8%) and wasn’t actually realised. The actually yearly growth was 5.2%. Furthermore, the US was recovering from covid while China grew during Covid so the US figures were flattering.
If you google it there’s lots of headlines saying the same thing. Almost entirely written the same way.
The other ridiculous claim was to do with China not having enough street lights relative to its GDP.
"Meanwhile my research team has started gathering data on China. There are two major sources of uncertainty: (1) what are the meaningful indicators and (2) how well we can get quantitative data on such indicators."
Regarding (1)
I know you're just getting started, but do you have a guess as to whether there's a pattern to meaningful indicators when comparing countries (countries with large populations tend to have these meaningful indicators, countries along the equator have these, rich countries have these, countries who always exit on the first round of the world cup have these)?
Were there any patterns of meaningful indicators with different species when looking at their population collapse?
Regarding (2)
Good luck. Be glad we didn't vote for North Korea.
Seriously, what's the plan for getting that? China probably does a good job of collecting and fudging data to please the higher ups. Do they share their potentially fudged data?
You're absolutely right about the bipartisan narrative on China, Peter. It’s one of the most persistently polarizing debates in geopolitical analysis. On one end of the spectrum, we have a succession of analysts — notably Gordon Chang — who have long subscribed to the “coming collapse” thesis. Some of the more dramatic claims from this camp have been addressed, if not outright refuted, in recent years — see, e.g., works like The Bubble That Never Pops, which explores why China’s economic contradictions haven’t led to systemic breakdown.
On the other side, we find the evangelists of the “Chinese century” — those convinced that China would imminently overtake the United States in economic, technological, and geopolitical primacy. Both narratives have suffered from serious forecasting failures. China didn’t collapse before 2020 (or 2025), but nor did it surpass the U.S. by those same dates. Projections now extend out to 2030, 2040, or even 2070, depending on the model and criteria applied.
To be fair, part of the forecasting difficulty lies in the nature of China’s data environment: figures are often opaque, irregular, selectively released, or politically manipulated, making longitudinal and comparative analyses extremely difficult. However, the deeper issue, in my view, is that much of the analysis on both sides has been ideologically overdetermined. Analysts often approached China not as an empirical case, but as a proxy battlefield for competing political or theoretical worldviews, leading to conclusions that were only loosely anchored in either quantitative metrics or serious qualitative fieldwork.
The dictionary definition of a strong economy has many parts to it but overall a strong economy is one that improves the quality of life of its people.
So how many Chinese people have been bought out of poverty in the past decade as opposed to how many people from the USA have gone into poverty in the past decade?
How has the average life expectancy of the people of China and the USA changed over the past decade?
While the Chinese use FIAT currency to benefit its people and other peoples of the world the USA uses Fiat as a weapon against its people and the rest of the world.
Really appreciated the approach here. I’d just add that beyond the data, the way other countries perceive China plays a major role too. Sometimes that perception matters as much as the facts themselves.
I appreciate your open-mindedness. It is a much-desired quality, but it is seldom found. My feeling is that China is a highly complex question, and no one has a complete grasp of the situation. Additionally, as chaos theory has shown, some minor occurrences can have significant implications, and outcomes can be totally unexpected.
Lots of discussion, much of it great! Usually, I try to respond to specific comments, but today I won't do it, because I don't yet have a factual basis for doing so. For people asking about the details of what I plan to do with China, they are, of course, in my books -- a popular (and more up to date) version in End Times, while quantitative and modeling results in Ages of Discord. I am planning to do the same for China, but with several differences, of course. One is data, as everybody acknowledges. The other is a completely different structure of power and elite formation. We shall see.
Everyone is trying...or claims to already know...how China works and where it's going. One could learn a bit from Fei Xiaotong on the matter.
Mr. Fei claims that, in Western societies, individuals form organizations, whereby each organizations has its own boundaries defining who is part of the organization and who is not, and the relation of each individual to the organization is the same. All members in an organization are equivalent. He calls this an “organizational mode of association” (tuantigeju).
In China, on the contrary, each individual is claimed to be surrounded by a series of concentric circles, produced by one’s own social influence. Each web of social relations has a self as its center. Each circle spreading out from the center becomes more distant and at the same time more insignificant. Everyone’s circles are interrelated, and one touches different circles at different times and places. On different occasions, one’s own social network comes into contact with someone else’s. He calls this mode of organization a “differential mode of association” (chaxugeju).
A practical consequence of this difference in social networking is that, in the West, people struggle for their rights, while in China, people seek connections in higher places and do things for the sake of friendship which elevates their "rights" and/or economic/political power. Another consequence is that, in China, private selfishness is justified by moving toward the state: both public officials and private persons use the same conception of the social order to define the context of their action. This is different from a Western society, in which public and private rights and obligations belong to a different ‘organization’ and are divided distinctly.
A “differential mode of association” does not allow for individual rights to be an issue at all, and social morality makes sense only in terms of the personal connections.
I think I got that right. It's helpful in trying to understand China, to begin by trying to understand relationships. It's different here. It's not like America.
You could flip this around and it would also sound totally legit :-)
Please don't compare yourself to Peter Zeihan.
I’ve listened to several of his podcasts, and his arguments are riddled with factual errors and inaccuracies. eg here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UltVl2Qlf6A&t=314s he states that China "imports 75-80% of its energy" while the actual share of imported energy vs total consumed is ~20-25%. More appalling as he fashion himself as an expert of demography, on the same interview he states that China "has more people > 53 than under" (China's median age is 39).
Beyond his clear ideological biases, he lacks any credentials that would qualify him as a legitimate expert.
The issue with Zeihan is that his views are packaged as truth when they are opinion, and flawed ones at that.
Lived in China off and on for five years. Left seven years ago. Married to a Chinese woman and have Chinese in-laws and friends. I try to follow events in China. In fact I think I'm more interested in what's happening there than my Chinese wife. Most of my online sources lean toward more pessimistic views of China. But my Chinese relatives and friends seem to be doing fairly well. They may be somewhat insulated from what's going on...being solidly middle class/professional/government...and they may be guarded in their posts on WeChat, etc., which are monitored by the government. One of my wife's nieces works in local tv, and at least once warned family members against "spreading rumors" that were seen as anti government. So it's hard to judge what is real. I used to follow Zeihan, but finally stopped as he seemed to me to be mainly a mouthpiece for the CIA. OTOH, I think China is facing serious problems, including possible serious infighting just now in the upper echelons of the CCP. Compared to the rest of the world? To me, it looks like the USA, China, Europe, and Russia are just four nags at the glue factory...and the "winner" will merely be the last horse standing.
That's pretty good.
I don't have the connections you had and have to China, but my limited view makes me think serious infighting by the higher ups in the CCP would quickly lead to demotion, expulsion or being un-alived. Dissent is either simmering or it's a full on coup?
But I could be wrong.
No. They have plenty of discussions and factions, if not specific parties
May I suggest that in your researches of China, that you examine the inquiries of Dr. Steve Hsu, at both his weblog 'infoproc' (now moved to Substack), and his podcast, 'Manifold'. Dr. Hsu, a theoretical physicist who has also done good work in molecular biology and genetics, also did considerable work in plotting the development of new technologies in the US and elsewhere.
His current estimates are that the PRC has twice the technological and manufacturing base of the US, and between five to ten times the number of scientists, engineers, technicians, and skilled workers.
I, for one, find Hsu's analysis to be far more astute and informed than Zeihan's.
I've lived in Wuhan for about 15 years. Got my China credentials, but who cares? I have no interest in being a "China Watcher and Thinker".
You can feel very safe in dismissing Zeihan on nearly anything he has to say about China. He's been doing his bit so long, he's managed to become a parody of himself. He's about 2 or 3 steps away from being the joke punching bag for misbegotten China observations.
Something's changed in the last couple years. The goofy camo wearing guy on late night TV spouting Nationalist lunacy is gone. There's still the oversupply of TV programming showing the PLA bravely overcoming the Japanese, but direct shots at the West seems to have subsided. The Wolf Warrior stuff...haven't seen it anywhere, it seems gone too. All my friends in academia cite a less strident and imposing presence of hard ideology. Folks can talk. No one is taking direct shots at Big Daddy or current policy, but commenting on positives and pointing toward possible new directions is increasingly back.
If anyone has been paying attention, there has been a small mountain of policy papers coming out of the highest levels of academia and (Chinese) think tanks calling for increased reform and opening up. Everyone knows there's hard arguing going on behind closed doors, but given the current statements, it seems like maybe Big Daddy is listening to the smart advisers and acting accordingly.
I'm curious about your data collection. Who, what, where, and how? Looking forward to seeing what you have to say about all of it.
Christopher Balding @BaldingsWorld has written on several occasions about the dubiousness of official (public) statistics in China so I did wonder about the data collection issue.
Yeah. I could extemporize at length on the topic. Good luck, Peter Turchin.
Reminds me of the time, about 35 years ago, when a popular leftist economist assured us, in The Atlantic magazine, that because of its more aggressive government direction of the economy, Japan would soon bury the U.S. as the world's leading economic power. There followed a couple of decades of stagnation in Japan while we continued our erratic growth surge.
Japan is a different kettle of fish. And it’s never really had a command economy anyway
On my way up the stairs, I recalled the author's name: it was James Fallows, hardly an economist but a popular journalist at the time.
Keep doing what you’re doing, Peter, its sterling work.
Don’t let yourself get pulled into those endless end of empire political loops; your work does the opposite, its grounded in facts which have the potential to lift us all higher.
I started out as a China skeptic and it was reading Peter Zeihan and to a lesser extent Noah Smith (and others) that convinced me that there’s some propaganda going on. Noah is good elsewhere though.
Two examples come to mind. One was the China slowdown to 3% a few years ago. You can google it now. This was the end of China. Catchup was over. The US was growing faster. What was missing was that it was extrapolated from one quarter’s data (ie a quarterly growth of .8%) and wasn’t actually realised. The actually yearly growth was 5.2%. Furthermore, the US was recovering from covid while China grew during Covid so the US figures were flattering.
If you google it there’s lots of headlines saying the same thing. Almost entirely written the same way.
The other ridiculous claim was to do with China not having enough street lights relative to its GDP.
"Meanwhile my research team has started gathering data on China. There are two major sources of uncertainty: (1) what are the meaningful indicators and (2) how well we can get quantitative data on such indicators."
Regarding (1)
I know you're just getting started, but do you have a guess as to whether there's a pattern to meaningful indicators when comparing countries (countries with large populations tend to have these meaningful indicators, countries along the equator have these, rich countries have these, countries who always exit on the first round of the world cup have these)?
Were there any patterns of meaningful indicators with different species when looking at their population collapse?
Regarding (2)
Good luck. Be glad we didn't vote for North Korea.
Seriously, what's the plan for getting that? China probably does a good job of collecting and fudging data to please the higher ups. Do they share their potentially fudged data?
There are plenty of ways to confirm Chinese data on their GDP given that they interact with the world.
You are correct. Trading data with the US and EU should be easy to get and those would be a huge trading partners.
Data from Russia, Iran, and North Korea are smaller but probably harder to get accurate data from them.
Zeihan seems clueless
You're absolutely right about the bipartisan narrative on China, Peter. It’s one of the most persistently polarizing debates in geopolitical analysis. On one end of the spectrum, we have a succession of analysts — notably Gordon Chang — who have long subscribed to the “coming collapse” thesis. Some of the more dramatic claims from this camp have been addressed, if not outright refuted, in recent years — see, e.g., works like The Bubble That Never Pops, which explores why China’s economic contradictions haven’t led to systemic breakdown.
On the other side, we find the evangelists of the “Chinese century” — those convinced that China would imminently overtake the United States in economic, technological, and geopolitical primacy. Both narratives have suffered from serious forecasting failures. China didn’t collapse before 2020 (or 2025), but nor did it surpass the U.S. by those same dates. Projections now extend out to 2030, 2040, or even 2070, depending on the model and criteria applied.
To be fair, part of the forecasting difficulty lies in the nature of China’s data environment: figures are often opaque, irregular, selectively released, or politically manipulated, making longitudinal and comparative analyses extremely difficult. However, the deeper issue, in my view, is that much of the analysis on both sides has been ideologically overdetermined. Analysts often approached China not as an empirical case, but as a proxy battlefield for competing political or theoretical worldviews, leading to conclusions that were only loosely anchored in either quantitative metrics or serious qualitative fieldwork.
The dictionary definition of a strong economy has many parts to it but overall a strong economy is one that improves the quality of life of its people.
So how many Chinese people have been bought out of poverty in the past decade as opposed to how many people from the USA have gone into poverty in the past decade?
How has the average life expectancy of the people of China and the USA changed over the past decade?
While the Chinese use FIAT currency to benefit its people and other peoples of the world the USA uses Fiat as a weapon against its people and the rest of the world.
Really appreciated the approach here. I’d just add that beyond the data, the way other countries perceive China plays a major role too. Sometimes that perception matters as much as the facts themselves.
I appreciate your open-mindedness. It is a much-desired quality, but it is seldom found. My feeling is that China is a highly complex question, and no one has a complete grasp of the situation. Additionally, as chaos theory has shown, some minor occurrences can have significant implications, and outcomes can be totally unexpected.
One fascinating thing about China is that in such a huge country changes always happen quickly. In the US the federal government has always been too small and weak to be effective, so there's huge inertia and policy changes usually have slow and limited effect. In China even small changes in government policy can lead to instant and profound changes, for better or for worse. Here's a chart showing the number of new startups in China per year, just look at it: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fone-of-the-most-shocking-charts-ive-seen-in-a-while-v0-gj7aqd0ldeod1.jpeg%3Fwidth%3D640%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Daa630e3d350bf3420cc55994a841f989156d4d8f