Hi Peter, I also voted for China, mainly for two reasons. First, its sheer scale and deep entanglement with global systems mean that whatever happens there—whether positive or catastrophic—will ripple across the entire world. Second, and perhaps more interestingly, this seems to be one of the few areas where our views diverge.
In my assessment, China is showing clear signs of a structural-demographic crisis and is likely to go through further major waves of instability before 2050. This might actually be a great opportunity for an SDT study—to test both perspectives empirically and see which one holds up better.
That said, my main issue with working on China is the data: they’re notoriously unreliable. That’s one of the reasons I shifted my focus to Japan. Flawed as Japan’s data may be—messy, patchy, in need of cleaning—they’re still far more trustworthy and transparent than anything out of Beijing. A good example: a few years ago I was working on youth unemployment. The Chinese government briefly admitted the real figure was over 40%. A month later, all the data vanished, and a new “harmonised” set was uploaded, magically lowering the rate to just over 20%. That sort of thing makes longitudinal modelling nearly impossible.
There’s also a bit of a China frenzy at play, pushed by both ends of the political spectrum—liberals touting the myth of the unstoppable socialist techno-state, and hawkish conservatives waving the China threat as a convenient bogeyman. Having spent seven years there, and earned both my MA and PhD from two separate Chinese universities, I’ve come to see that once you focus on net stocks rather than gross flows, a lot of China’s big numbers look far more modest than the headlines suggest.
Anyway, just tossing in my two cents. Could be a great case for testing competing frameworks scientifically! 🍻
I must respectfully disagree. You may hold a different view, but the empirical reality is far closer to what I outlined. I’ve already provided a concrete example, but allow me to elaborate further.
Are you seriously suggesting that agricultural output figures during the Great Leap Forward were accurate, let alone conservative? It is well documented that local cadres routinely fabricated agricultural output figures in order to satisfy central directives aligned with the utopian ambition to 超英趕美. These fabricated statistics were not isolated anomalies; they were systemic, driven by political pressure, ideological conformity, and a hierarchical incentive structure that punished truth-telling and rewarded exaggeration. In the decades since, even senior CCP figures have acknowledged the absurdity of those figures, so much so that the Maoist slogan 農業學大寨 eventually became a national joke.
This pattern persists. While no serious observer denies that China has experienced rapid economic growth, which I myself witnessed during my years living there, the claim that its official GDP figures are reliable is deeply problematic. Consider the 2019 study by Chen Wei, Hsieh Chang-Tai, Chen Xilu, and Song Zheng, none of whom could be credibly accused of ideological bias against China. Their findings suggest China’s GDP had been overstated by approximately 20 percent. In 2015, Chén Qiúfā, then governor of Liaoning, publicly admitted that provincial economic data had been falsified between 2011 and 2014. This was not a case of minor statistical smoothing: government revenue figures had been inflated by up to 127 percent. In 2018, officials in Inner Mongolia made similar admissions regarding GDP manipulation. These are not isolated provinces, nor are these errors attributable to methodological quirks: they reflect deep-rooted structural incentives to distort. Remember when during the COVID-19 pandemic, China reported positive GDP growth, even during periods of strict lockdowns in which vast sectors of the population were effectively immobilised? Also, during the so-called “zero-COVID” period, China claimed months of zero domestic infections, only to have infected travellers detected and quarantined upon arrival in other countries.
And yet these examples—though troubling—concern areas where independent proxies exist, allowing at least partial verification. In an SDT context, we would require reliable longitudinal data on sociopolitical instability, elite turnover, internal dissent, and unrest—including activity within the Politburo. None of this is observable with any confidence. In fact, opacity at the elite level has only increased over the past decade, as numerous scholars (including former colleagues of mine at Chinese institutions) have noted. In such a data environment, any SDT modelling must contend with extremely broad confidence intervals, which in turn reduce the precision and plausibility of its forecasts.
There are also important cultural dynamics to consider. Those familiar with Chinese administrative culture understand the profound importance of “face”. Local officials aim to satisfy mid-level superiors, who must in turn protect their image before central authorities. Data flows are filtered through this hierarchical concern for reputational preservation. The result is a self-reinforcing loop of misreporting that institutionalises dishonesty rather than correcting for it. Historically, this is not new. In imperial times, new dynasties systematically rewrote history to legitimise their rule and vilify their predecessors. Today, the CCP deploys data in the service of political narratives in much the same way, only with greater technical sophistication. Indeed, in recent years, political centralisation and ideological tightening have made the situation demonstrably worse, not better. To conclude, 聖人非所與熙也，寡人反取病焉.
Thanks all for this discussion. It's a dilemma. On one hand China is clearly a very consequential country; on the other hand, there are data limitations. As I wrote in the post, "... it is not yet clear to me whether my team will be able to collect all the necessary data. We will find out."
Peter. There’s a very active community that studies all kinds of proxy data for China to reality test official data. Some of this is done in private by investors and some in public. Some things are harder to hide from satellites like vehicles on the raids, certain industrial emissions and i believe there are ways to independently track power consumption too.
Peter Zeihan has talked at length about the incentives that local officials have to falsify population data to get resources from the province and from Beijing. Ironically this might mean that per capita GDP is much higher than reported, and population levels much lower. I’ve seen all kinds of wild estimates from the official number to well below 1 billion. I am not a demographer so I don’t know.
Talk to Zeihan. He’s fairly easy to get hold of. He’s a flamboyant character but don’t let that put you off. There’s rigor to him also.
Sarah Paine is also worth talking to. Also not hard to find.
After all," consequentiality” is good, but not necessary for studying the processes of elite formation. What is really useful, however, is to observe the process of forming elites in its entirety. Therefore, it can be better to choose another former communist country with better documentation. As I wrote earlier, the Czech Republic and Poland are good candidates. However, since the USSR had the longest period of equality, the process of forming elites in the countries into which it broke up could give more interesting results. Thus, Russia can be chosen as the most significant of them. But again, here, too, the greatest benefit would be to study such a country, where the documentation is most reliable.
Chinese data has a strong “Goodhart’s Law” problem—when a measure is used as a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Yes, the system creates strong incentives for mayors and others to promote economic activity, but it also creates incentives to manipulate the data and generates problems for matters not covered by such targets—hence the serious debt problems.
I am also sceptical that they will continue to make their financial repression work—which (on the analogy with Japan) points to stagnation rather than collapse.
The Belt and Road initiative runs into the fundamental problem that water transport is way cheaper than land, and technological change has not altered that. It looks like the CCP version of the massive loss Japan managed on its overseas investments by the time of the collapse of the “bubble economy”. (By one estimate, such losses amounted to about one year’s UK GDP.)
That was not remotely true in the past. Before the transition to a market economy, China’s economic statistics were fiction. For decades afterwards they were often …boosted. Few experts disagree. There is debate about the reliability of current numbers.
The US Federal Reserve’s economists give a qualified endorsement. The numbers are not as good as those of the developed nations, but as good as or better than those of other middle income nations:
In any case, China's instability will depend on the success of its competition with the United States. If successful, there will be no waves of instability, if there is no success, then there will still be waves.
If you're familiar with Peter’s work — and since you’re here, I’ll assume you are — including the Qing collapse paper we co-authored, you’ll know that sociopolitical instability is, more often than not, rooted in internal structural pressures, rather than being primarily triggered by external shocks like war or geopolitical competition. This time is no exception. China’s internal dynamics — particularly its demographic profile — are looking increasingly fragile and unsustainable.
I agree that socio-political instability is rooted in internal structural pressures. I would even use a stronger formulation: it is always rooted in them. However, external influences cannot be dismissed in the modern world. In the past, it was possible to view a country as a separate entity. But not in our time. In fact, this has been impossible since the formation of the first economic hierarchies (beginning in the 16th century), and it is becoming less and less possible with each passing century.
But your statement is still true, because foreign shocks will not significantly affect a country if there is no significant structural pressure within the country itself.
Thus, the correct approach would be to take both into account.
External influence becomes especially important when it is consciously exerted by an enemy, because in this case, external influence attempts to deepen and expand precisely these structural pressures.
If China wins the competition and becomes the world's economic leader, everything will change within China, and many structural pressures will simply disappear. But, of course, new ones will emerge. However, these will be different problems.
If China loses the battle for supremacy, all these structural pressures could become fatal for modern China.
By the way, do you have any articles in which you examine these structural pressures in greater depth? I would be very interested in reading them.
I live in Wuhan. Been here 15 years. I look forward to a continued study of China. Americans are utterly misinformed on the subject. That's not to say China is a beatific wonderland; it's to say Americans are spoon fed decontextualized nonsense in large quantities, and the scope and degree of misunderstanding is breathtaking.
Lots of people know what happened. Unfortunately, we all live in Wuhan and are not disposed to talking about it on social media. There's a lot of story there. Someday, it'll get talked about.
Specifically, I was in Wuhan in the initial outbreak, there was about a 7-8 day period in early January where it wasn't entirely under control, so we hightailed on back roads to West Hubei where my BIL has his farm in the mountains. We figured if the world was ending, we should get to the farm where we'd be isolated in a village. I wrote about it in a Substack post a year ago.
The Substack was done as a several part thing, in a small group of comments section liberation front friends. I can't find all the episodes on Substack...tells you how much I think about this stuff.
This was the original on Medium... (The photo is not me, it was an actual photo of what folks were doing at the time.)
“ I asked ChatGPT and DeepSeek, ‘If we consider a list of 100 world blockbuster movies in…’,”
No matter how many times chatbots (aka LLMs, Generative AIs) are shown to hallucinate - making up answers - people still treat them as if they were HAL 9000. This is a sad commentary on human credulity.
By definition, there can be only one hegemon. Thus, let's say by 2040, we will have one of three possible scenarios: (1) USA holds on to the role of hegemon, (2) USA will be replaced by some other country, most likely China, (3) we will have a multi-polar world with no single hegemonic power. As to Scenario 2, who else but China?
What I find curious about China is that combines high youth unemployment with labor shortages associated with a rapidly aging population. I would like to see an explanation of this seeming contradiction.
My guess (and I look forward to learn more) is that China is in the process of joining other East Asian countries, such as Japan and South Korea, in that all youth are expected to get university education, otherwise they are considered as failures. As structural-demographic theory shows, this is a rather socially destructive cultural norm.
In the 1950s/60s Paul Samuelson and others predicted that the Soviet Union would economically overtake the US. In the 1980s Paul Kennedy predicted the US hegemony would collapse before the Soviet imperial system. Also in the 1980s, Japan was going to overtake the US. In the 1990s/2000s the EU was going to overtake the US and the Euro become the new reserve currency. I would have a good hard look at why these predictions were made, and what they got wrong.
PPP tells less than folk think. (It is a bad geopolitics measure, for instance.) And Chinese statistics really are quite unreliable. Which is not to say that there has not been an amazing increase in prosperity and economic dynamism in China—there certainly has been.
On the other hand, Xi Jinping has been the best thing for the American alliance structure in the Pacific, just as Putin has been good for it in Europe.
I have very mixed feelings about China. I am sceptical that they are going to continue to make their financial repression work—their current situation has a very strong “collapse of Japanese bubble economy” feel to it. Which points to stagnation rather than collapse.
My feeling is that both the boosters and the doomsayers over-state their cases. The boom period was based on waves of economic reform to keep it going: this does not seem to be Xi Jinping’s thing, at least, not in a good way.
I am also sceptical about the Belt and Road. Transport by water is much cheaper than by land: this has been true forever because water generates way less friction than land and no technological change has altered that.
1. 'In other forms of social power, military and ideological/soft power, China still lags'. China overtook the US in global trust/leadership surveys this year, and overtook the US militarily many years ago. Their fleet, for example is twice the size of the USN, half its age and much better armed.
2. 'the major worry for the Chinese ruling class'. China has no ruling class. It's a meritocracy whose leaders rely on outcome legitimacy, but who come from and represent no hereditary class.
Measuring the strength of navies by the number of ships is absurd. China has regional defense force, with many smaller craft. The US has a global blue sea power projection force, build around larger vessels. This is probably changing, but slowly.
Total ships’ tonnage is one way to measure a navy’s size (though it is only one perspective to a complex picture). China’s navy is 68% of the US navy’s weight.
Hypersonics and other technologies that shorten the "find-fix-finish" kill chain could make larger surface vessels more of a liability, especially w.r.t. confilicts between near-peers.
And then you have/will/could have submarines equipped with hypersonics, unmanned submarines, and maybe one day unmanned submarines that can travel at hypersonic speeds?
Who better to talk/listen to about such possibilities than Rear Admiral (retd.) Tim Gallaudet, PhD - Annapolis grad, PhD in Oceanography, and former Oceanographer of the US Navy?
I too enjoyed watching Gerry Anderson’s “Stingray” shows as a kids, about a supersonic submarine. But it is far beyond our technology. Did Dr and admiral Gallaudet discuss that as a possibility in the visibility future?
The speed of sound in water is over 4700 feet per second, far faster than the muzzle velocity of a handgun - at the upper range of muzzle velocity from most rifles.
Hypersonic is 5x that. I don’t know what that would be like. Perhaps the water would boil around it. The hull temperature and pressure would be beyond that of anything we have today, not to mention the power source required.
Yes, strength of forces also depends on military strategy and its intended use. Naval power projection requires foreign naval bases, which USA has many all over the world.
You raise an issue unrelated to this post about China, but vital for the US. What’s the purpose of our blue water navy? Navies are expensive to build and operate, so they’re usually built for a clear purpose. 1930s Japan: to conquer SE Asia. 1930s German: commerce raiding and invasion of Britain. 19th C Britain: to protect its fabulously profitable Empire.
What does America get from its Navy? We face no threats from overseas nations. We get to meddle in everybody’s affairs as the unasked World Police. We finance this all on our the National Credit Card (a former Comptroller General said the US gov’t was a military and retirement plan).
We should look ahead to the day the world’s ATM refuses a withdrawal.
Zeihan is not a serious analyst. He's good at telling the American PMC what they want to hear and sounding knowledgeable until he talks about an area you know something about and then you find out how poor his analysis is.
I want to recommend a better (constructive) critic of China, one who lives in China, respects China and actually likes China: Michael Pettis. He's also one of my favorite economists.
“One thing to note is that Main Stream Media is a pretty useless source for gaining accurate information on China.” This is so true. It’s really difficult to find commentary that is not highly polarised. Thanks for your article.
Hi Peter, I also voted for China, mainly for two reasons. First, its sheer scale and deep entanglement with global systems mean that whatever happens there—whether positive or catastrophic—will ripple across the entire world. Second, and perhaps more interestingly, this seems to be one of the few areas where our views diverge.
In my assessment, China is showing clear signs of a structural-demographic crisis and is likely to go through further major waves of instability before 2050. This might actually be a great opportunity for an SDT study—to test both perspectives empirically and see which one holds up better.
That said, my main issue with working on China is the data: they’re notoriously unreliable. That’s one of the reasons I shifted my focus to Japan. Flawed as Japan’s data may be—messy, patchy, in need of cleaning—they’re still far more trustworthy and transparent than anything out of Beijing. A good example: a few years ago I was working on youth unemployment. The Chinese government briefly admitted the real figure was over 40%. A month later, all the data vanished, and a new “harmonised” set was uploaded, magically lowering the rate to just over 20%. That sort of thing makes longitudinal modelling nearly impossible.
There’s also a bit of a China frenzy at play, pushed by both ends of the political spectrum—liberals touting the myth of the unstoppable socialist techno-state, and hawkish conservatives waving the China threat as a convenient bogeyman. Having spent seven years there, and earned both my MA and PhD from two separate Chinese universities, I’ve come to see that once you focus on net stocks rather than gross flows, a lot of China’s big numbers look far more modest than the headlines suggest.
Anyway, just tossing in my two cents. Could be a great case for testing competing frameworks scientifically! 🍻
China's stats–and we have 75 years of them available–are among the most conservative and accurate of any nation.
Can you cite a counter-example?
I must respectfully disagree. You may hold a different view, but the empirical reality is far closer to what I outlined. I’ve already provided a concrete example, but allow me to elaborate further.
Are you seriously suggesting that agricultural output figures during the Great Leap Forward were accurate, let alone conservative? It is well documented that local cadres routinely fabricated agricultural output figures in order to satisfy central directives aligned with the utopian ambition to 超英趕美. These fabricated statistics were not isolated anomalies; they were systemic, driven by political pressure, ideological conformity, and a hierarchical incentive structure that punished truth-telling and rewarded exaggeration. In the decades since, even senior CCP figures have acknowledged the absurdity of those figures, so much so that the Maoist slogan 農業學大寨 eventually became a national joke.
This pattern persists. While no serious observer denies that China has experienced rapid economic growth, which I myself witnessed during my years living there, the claim that its official GDP figures are reliable is deeply problematic. Consider the 2019 study by Chen Wei, Hsieh Chang-Tai, Chen Xilu, and Song Zheng, none of whom could be credibly accused of ideological bias against China. Their findings suggest China’s GDP had been overstated by approximately 20 percent. In 2015, Chén Qiúfā, then governor of Liaoning, publicly admitted that provincial economic data had been falsified between 2011 and 2014. This was not a case of minor statistical smoothing: government revenue figures had been inflated by up to 127 percent. In 2018, officials in Inner Mongolia made similar admissions regarding GDP manipulation. These are not isolated provinces, nor are these errors attributable to methodological quirks: they reflect deep-rooted structural incentives to distort. Remember when during the COVID-19 pandemic, China reported positive GDP growth, even during periods of strict lockdowns in which vast sectors of the population were effectively immobilised? Also, during the so-called “zero-COVID” period, China claimed months of zero domestic infections, only to have infected travellers detected and quarantined upon arrival in other countries.
And yet these examples—though troubling—concern areas where independent proxies exist, allowing at least partial verification. In an SDT context, we would require reliable longitudinal data on sociopolitical instability, elite turnover, internal dissent, and unrest—including activity within the Politburo. None of this is observable with any confidence. In fact, opacity at the elite level has only increased over the past decade, as numerous scholars (including former colleagues of mine at Chinese institutions) have noted. In such a data environment, any SDT modelling must contend with extremely broad confidence intervals, which in turn reduce the precision and plausibility of its forecasts.
There are also important cultural dynamics to consider. Those familiar with Chinese administrative culture understand the profound importance of “face”. Local officials aim to satisfy mid-level superiors, who must in turn protect their image before central authorities. Data flows are filtered through this hierarchical concern for reputational preservation. The result is a self-reinforcing loop of misreporting that institutionalises dishonesty rather than correcting for it. Historically, this is not new. In imperial times, new dynasties systematically rewrote history to legitimise their rule and vilify their predecessors. Today, the CCP deploys data in the service of political narratives in much the same way, only with greater technical sophistication. Indeed, in recent years, political centralisation and ideological tightening have made the situation demonstrably worse, not better. To conclude, 聖人非所與熙也，寡人反取病焉.
Just a few references:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26798817
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2015-12/14/content_22705255.htm
https://www.ft.com/content/b25d1b32-dd37-11e6-9d7c-be108f1c1dce
https://qz.com/887709/chinas-Liáoníng-province-admitted-that-it-inflated-gdp-figures-from-2011-to-2014/
https://www.afr.com/world/china-admits-its-gdp-data-is-fake-20170119-gtuh42
https://www.straitstimes.com/business/economy/china-province-admits-faking-economic-data-for-years.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-data-idUSKBN1F60I1
Thanks all for this discussion. It's a dilemma. On one hand China is clearly a very consequential country; on the other hand, there are data limitations. As I wrote in the post, "... it is not yet clear to me whether my team will be able to collect all the necessary data. We will find out."
Peter. There’s a very active community that studies all kinds of proxy data for China to reality test official data. Some of this is done in private by investors and some in public. Some things are harder to hide from satellites like vehicles on the raids, certain industrial emissions and i believe there are ways to independently track power consumption too.
Peter Zeihan has talked at length about the incentives that local officials have to falsify population data to get resources from the province and from Beijing. Ironically this might mean that per capita GDP is much higher than reported, and population levels much lower. I’ve seen all kinds of wild estimates from the official number to well below 1 billion. I am not a demographer so I don’t know.
Talk to Zeihan. He’s fairly easy to get hold of. He’s a flamboyant character but don’t let that put you off. There’s rigor to him also.
Sarah Paine is also worth talking to. Also not hard to find.
Thanks, Simon. I am forwarding this to my team and we will follow up.
After all," consequentiality” is good, but not necessary for studying the processes of elite formation. What is really useful, however, is to observe the process of forming elites in its entirety. Therefore, it can be better to choose another former communist country with better documentation. As I wrote earlier, the Czech Republic and Poland are good candidates. However, since the USSR had the longest period of equality, the process of forming elites in the countries into which it broke up could give more interesting results. Thus, Russia can be chosen as the most significant of them. But again, here, too, the greatest benefit would be to study such a country, where the documentation is most reliable.
Chinese data has a strong “Goodhart’s Law” problem—when a measure is used as a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Yes, the system creates strong incentives for mayors and others to promote economic activity, but it also creates incentives to manipulate the data and generates problems for matters not covered by such targets—hence the serious debt problems.
I am also sceptical that they will continue to make their financial repression work—which (on the analogy with Japan) points to stagnation rather than collapse.
The Belt and Road initiative runs into the fundamental problem that water transport is way cheaper than land, and technological change has not altered that. It looks like the CCP version of the massive loss Japan managed on its overseas investments by the time of the collapse of the “bubble economy”. (By one estimate, such losses amounted to about one year’s UK GDP.)
That was not remotely true in the past. Before the transition to a market economy, China’s economic statistics were fiction. For decades afterwards they were often …boosted. Few experts disagree. There is debate about the reliability of current numbers.
Skeptics - foreign:
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econographics/sinographs/chinas-economic-performance-new-numbers-same-overstatement/
Skeptics - domestic:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/xi-jinping-muzzles-chinese-economist-who-dared-to-doubt-gdp-numbers/ar-AA1x92cM
The US Federal Reserve’s economists give a qualified endorsement. The numbers are not as good as those of the developed nations, but as good as or better than those of other middle income nations:
From 2017:
https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/second-quarter-2017/chinas-economic-data-an-accurate-reflection-or-just-smoke-and-mirrors
From 2025:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/is-china-really-growing-at-5-percent-20250606.html
In any case, China's instability will depend on the success of its competition with the United States. If successful, there will be no waves of instability, if there is no success, then there will still be waves.
If you're familiar with Peter’s work — and since you’re here, I’ll assume you are — including the Qing collapse paper we co-authored, you’ll know that sociopolitical instability is, more often than not, rooted in internal structural pressures, rather than being primarily triggered by external shocks like war or geopolitical competition. This time is no exception. China’s internal dynamics — particularly its demographic profile — are looking increasingly fragile and unsustainable.
I agree that socio-political instability is rooted in internal structural pressures. I would even use a stronger formulation: it is always rooted in them. However, external influences cannot be dismissed in the modern world. In the past, it was possible to view a country as a separate entity. But not in our time. In fact, this has been impossible since the formation of the first economic hierarchies (beginning in the 16th century), and it is becoming less and less possible with each passing century.
But your statement is still true, because foreign shocks will not significantly affect a country if there is no significant structural pressure within the country itself.
Thus, the correct approach would be to take both into account.
External influence becomes especially important when it is consciously exerted by an enemy, because in this case, external influence attempts to deepen and expand precisely these structural pressures.
If China wins the competition and becomes the world's economic leader, everything will change within China, and many structural pressures will simply disappear. But, of course, new ones will emerge. However, these will be different problems.
If China loses the battle for supremacy, all these structural pressures could become fatal for modern China.
By the way, do you have any articles in which you examine these structural pressures in greater depth? I would be very interested in reading them.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
I live in Wuhan. Been here 15 years. I look forward to a continued study of China. Americans are utterly misinformed on the subject. That's not to say China is a beatific wonderland; it's to say Americans are spoon fed decontextualized nonsense in large quantities, and the scope and degree of misunderstanding is breathtaking.
Live in Wuhan? Fascinating. Do you think the COVID virus was a lab leak?
Lots of people know what happened. Unfortunately, we all live in Wuhan and are not disposed to talking about it on social media. There's a lot of story there. Someday, it'll get talked about.
Specifically, I was in Wuhan in the initial outbreak, there was about a 7-8 day period in early January where it wasn't entirely under control, so we hightailed on back roads to West Hubei where my BIL has his farm in the mountains. We figured if the world was ending, we should get to the farm where we'd be isolated in a village. I wrote about it in a Substack post a year ago.
Sounds interesting -- could you please provide a link to your post?
The Substack was done as a several part thing, in a small group of comments section liberation front friends. I can't find all the episodes on Substack...tells you how much I think about this stuff.
This was the original on Medium... (The photo is not me, it was an actual photo of what folks were doing at the time.)
https://kurtmitenbuler.medium.com/10-months-wuhan-and-western-hubei-in-2020-2-5-2021-b04dcce6a3e1
Fascinating .... thanks!
There's a couple other pieces on Medium with more rambling on lockdown, you might find a little interest in those too.
Peter, please take a look at this piece: https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-402-dual-circulation-travels?r=ql02&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true
I hope it helps inform your work on China.
“ I asked ChatGPT and DeepSeek, ‘If we consider a list of 100 world blockbuster movies in…’,”
No matter how many times chatbots (aka LLMs, Generative AIs) are shown to hallucinate - making up answers - people still treat them as if they were HAL 9000. This is a sad commentary on human credulity.
Why do you seemingly assume there is going to be a single global hegemon?
And further, why do you think China will be a hegemonic power?
By definition, there can be only one hegemon. Thus, let's say by 2040, we will have one of three possible scenarios: (1) USA holds on to the role of hegemon, (2) USA will be replaced by some other country, most likely China, (3) we will have a multi-polar world with no single hegemonic power. As to Scenario 2, who else but China?
What I find curious about China is that combines high youth unemployment with labor shortages associated with a rapidly aging population. I would like to see an explanation of this seeming contradiction.
My guess (and I look forward to learn more) is that China is in the process of joining other East Asian countries, such as Japan and South Korea, in that all youth are expected to get university education, otherwise they are considered as failures. As structural-demographic theory shows, this is a rather socially destructive cultural norm.
Yeah. Three thousand years of continuous civilization and ‘nationhood’. Long term, don’t bet against China.
In the 1950s/60s Paul Samuelson and others predicted that the Soviet Union would economically overtake the US. In the 1980s Paul Kennedy predicted the US hegemony would collapse before the Soviet imperial system. Also in the 1980s, Japan was going to overtake the US. In the 1990s/2000s the EU was going to overtake the US and the Euro become the new reserve currency. I would have a good hard look at why these predictions were made, and what they got wrong.
PPP tells less than folk think. (It is a bad geopolitics measure, for instance.) And Chinese statistics really are quite unreliable. Which is not to say that there has not been an amazing increase in prosperity and economic dynamism in China—there certainly has been.
On the other hand, Xi Jinping has been the best thing for the American alliance structure in the Pacific, just as Putin has been good for it in Europe.
I have very mixed feelings about China. I am sceptical that they are going to continue to make their financial repression work—their current situation has a very strong “collapse of Japanese bubble economy” feel to it. Which points to stagnation rather than collapse.
My feeling is that both the boosters and the doomsayers over-state their cases. The boom period was based on waves of economic reform to keep it going: this does not seem to be Xi Jinping’s thing, at least, not in a good way.
I am also sceptical about the Belt and Road. Transport by water is much cheaper than by land: this has been true forever because water generates way less friction than land and no technological change has altered that.
On a somewhat related note I highly recommend people take a look at
perplexity
ChatGPT and DeepSeek are great resources however I prefer the aforementioned one. A really nice tool
Looking forward to your findings! Two niggles:
1. 'In other forms of social power, military and ideological/soft power, China still lags'. China overtook the US in global trust/leadership surveys this year, and overtook the US militarily many years ago. Their fleet, for example is twice the size of the USN, half its age and much better armed.
2. 'the major worry for the Chinese ruling class'. China has no ruling class. It's a meritocracy whose leaders rely on outcome legitimacy, but who come from and represent no hereditary class.
All large-scale polities organized as states have a ruling class. More on this in Ultrasociety.
Measuring the strength of navies by the number of ships is absurd. China has regional defense force, with many smaller craft. The US has a global blue sea power projection force, build around larger vessels. This is probably changing, but slowly.
Total ships’ tonnage is one way to measure a navy’s size (though it is only one perspective to a complex picture). China’s navy is 68% of the US navy’s weight.
https://www.globalfirepower.com/navy-force-by-tonnage.php
Hypersonics and other technologies that shorten the "find-fix-finish" kill chain could make larger surface vessels more of a liability, especially w.r.t. confilicts between near-peers.
If I see you first, I kill you first.
Submariners have long said that there will be two kinds of war vessels: submarines and targets.
And then you have/will/could have submarines equipped with hypersonics, unmanned submarines, and maybe one day unmanned submarines that can travel at hypersonic speeds?
Who better to talk/listen to about such possibilities than Rear Admiral (retd.) Tim Gallaudet, PhD - Annapolis grad, PhD in Oceanography, and former Oceanographer of the US Navy?
I too enjoyed watching Gerry Anderson’s “Stingray” shows as a kids, about a supersonic submarine. But it is far beyond our technology. Did Dr and admiral Gallaudet discuss that as a possibility in the visibility future?
The speed of sound in water is over 4700 feet per second, far faster than the muzzle velocity of a handgun - at the upper range of muzzle velocity from most rifles.
Hypersonic is 5x that. I don’t know what that would be like. Perhaps the water would boil around it. The hull temperature and pressure would be beyond that of anything we have today, not to mention the power source required.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/227943895-a-history-of-usos
Yes, strength of forces also depends on military strategy and its intended use. Naval power projection requires foreign naval bases, which USA has many all over the world.
Nicely said!
You raise an issue unrelated to this post about China, but vital for the US. What’s the purpose of our blue water navy? Navies are expensive to build and operate, so they’re usually built for a clear purpose. 1930s Japan: to conquer SE Asia. 1930s German: commerce raiding and invasion of Britain. 19th C Britain: to protect its fabulously profitable Empire.
What does America get from its Navy? We face no threats from overseas nations. We get to meddle in everybody’s affairs as the unasked World Police. We finance this all on our the National Credit Card (a former Comptroller General said the US gov’t was a military and retirement plan).
We should look ahead to the day the world’s ATM refuses a withdrawal.
Zeihan is not a serious analyst. He's good at telling the American PMC what they want to hear and sounding knowledgeable until he talks about an area you know something about and then you find out how poor his analysis is.
I want to recommend a better (constructive) critic of China, one who lives in China, respects China and actually likes China: Michael Pettis. He's also one of my favorite economists.
Pettis has been consistently wrong in his China predictions for 15 years. Put another way, he's always wrong.
Forget Zeihan. That Ex Stratfor guy is saying similar nonsense like his former boss George Friedman.
Still, we should be careful when it comes to China and reliable data. Specially rural data are said to be seen with lots of grain of salt.
Peter, this piece seems very perceptive about what is really going on in China: https://open.substack.com/pub/kamilkazani/p/is-china-communist?r=1yf3i3&utm_medium=ios
“One thing to note is that Main Stream Media is a pretty useless source for gaining accurate information on China.” This is so true. It’s really difficult to find commentary that is not highly polarised. Thanks for your article.
The top grossing movie this year is Chinese, it almost doubles the second one