China is jostling for No. 1 world superpower status and intends to achieve that goal by 2049, the 100th anniversary of Mao’s Long March and the founding of the communist state.
Most analysts assume that China’s success is assured, given its totalitarian rule, powerful military, and massive economy.
Any day now, China could flex its power by attacking Taiwan and daring the United States and Taiwan’s immediate neighbor, Japan, to come to Taiwan’s rescue.
But if I were running China, I wouldn’t attack anyone. And I wouldn’t be so sure that China will rule the world anytime soon.
China faces massive, unsolvable problems that will make the country look less like a superpower and more like a paper tiger.
First, the economy. China survives economically today by dumping its products on foreign trading partners, but you can’t do that forever. The rest of the world is suffering economically because of relatively inexpensive Chinese goods. Rising tariffs and other forms of protectionism mean that China’s trading partners will eventually stop the flow of China’s exports.
Why can’t China sell more stuff to its own citizens? The leader for life, Xi Jinping, won’t let them. He sees consumerism and materialism as threats to the moral fiber of the country. If people buy stuff, he fears, they’ll end up like Americans — weak, spineless, and addicted to shopping. He won’t let that happen. So China’s economic power is tied to the rest of the world buying Chinese, and that won’t go on forever.
Next, real estate. China has radically overbuilt new cities, highways, rail lines, airports, you name it. They call some of those places “ghost cities” because they’re fully built…but no one’s living in them.
How’d this happen? The central government lent money to cities to buy land and build. For a while, everybody was happy because the money was flowing. But now, municipalities are swimming in debt. Contractors are out of work. The music stopped, and everybody’s stuck. If China came clean about its balance sheet, it would have to acknowledge being billions and maybe trillions of dollars in debt.
At the same time, the apartment boom has gone bust. For decades, Chinese citizens made fortunes buying and selling apartments. No longer. The market for apartments in China’s cities has tanked. People are either stuck with places they can’t sell or are extremely unhappy about their declining personal wealth. Or both.
Yet no one’s going to complain too loudly because the government monitors every bit of social media. If you speak negatively about the government, you could lose your social rating, which means you could lose your job, your apartment, your freedom, and even your ability to book flights. No one wants to take that kind of chance.
The unspoken deal was always, “You guys running the government can do whatever you want and limit our freedom as long as we can get rich.” Now that getting rich is much harder, people are not quite as happy with their leadership. They also harbor memories of brutal COVID-19 lockdowns. And they’re aware of the special treatment afforded to “princelings” — children and grandchildren of those who marched with Mao. As George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, in a supposedly equal society, some are more equal than others. And in China, everybody knows it.
Taking Taiwan is a massive temptation for Xi, but it can come at a steep price. For all the talk about peaceful unification, most of Taiwan doesn’t want to be ruled by Beijing. They look at how folks in Hong Kong have fared under communist rule and don’t want their freedom and democracy taken away. Resistance is guaranteed.
While attacking Taiwan might stir greater levels of nationalism within China, winning isn’t a gimme. So much could go wrong. The U.S. and Japan could get into the fight — our bases in Japan are a short flight away. Japan doesn’t want a communist Chinese outpost on its doorstep. So here’s China’s dilemma. Attacking a proud, fervently democratic country from 100 miles away, maintaining supply lines across the water, and fending off physical and cyber retaliation from the Taiwanese means that the whole thing could backfire and humiliate Beijing.
Xi is smart. He saw how Chinese military defense systems in Venezuela and Iran crumbled on first contact. He’s not about to risk his personal legitimacy on a war that would be a low percentage shot.
And then you’ve got the demographics problem. China’s huge population is aging and failing to reproduce itself. You’ve got a gazillion unmarried men due to the failed one-child policy, and they’re all going to need increasing levels of healthcare over the next couple of decades. Where will the money come from as the workforce gets smaller and the number of those in need grows?
Who’s going to provide the medical, hospital, and hospice care for the spiraling number of elderly people lacking families to take them in? Where will these healthcare workers come from and who will pay for them? And as China’s population shrinks, who’s going to work in the factories to make the stuff that the rest of the world won’t even want to buy?
Put it all together, and we’ll be seeing “peak China” over the next 10 years. After that, the country’s astonishing growth rate will shrink, and China will be more like Japan: a slow-growth behemoth that no longer challenges for supremacy on the world stage.
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Back in the 1970s, American economist Herb Stein said, “Things that can’t go on, stop.” So it will be with China, losing its totalitarian grip on over a billion people, its military less threatening to its neighbors, and its economic growth sputtering. The best strategy with China, therefore, is patience.
As an ancient Chinese proverb puts it, “If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.” America, start waiting.
Michael Levin is a two-time New York Times bestselling author. His next novel, 2028, A Political Thriller, will be published by Morgan James in April 2027.