Chinese Century

Top five countries by military expenditure in 2020. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.[40]

In 2011, Michael Beckley, a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, released his journal China's Century? Why America's Edge Will Endure which rejects that the U.S. is in decline relative to China or that the hegemonic burdens the U.S. bears to sustain a globalized system contributes to its decline. Beckley argues the U.S. power is durable, and "unipolarity" and globalization are the main reasons. He says, "The United States derives competitive advantages from its preponderant position, and globalization allows it to exploit these advantages, attracting economic activity and manipulating the international system to its benefit."[41]

Beckley believes that if the United States was in terminal decline, it would adopt neomercantilist economic policies and disengage from military commitments in Asia. "If however, the United States is not in decline, and if globalization and hegemony are the main reasons why, then the United States should do the opposite: it should contain China’s growth by maintaining a liberal international economic policy, and it should subdue China’s ambitions by sustaining a robust political and military presence in Asia."[41] Beckley believes that the United States benefits from being an extant hegemon—the U.S. did not overturn the international order to its benefit in 1990, but rather, the existing order collapsed around it.

Scholars that are skeptical of the U.S.' ability to maintain a leading position include Robert Pape, who has calculated that "one of the largest relative declines in modern history" stems from "the spread of technology to the rest of the world".[42] Similarly, Fareed Zakaria writes, "The unipolar order of the last two decades is waning not because of Iraq but because of the broader diffusion of power across the world."[43] Paul Kipchumba in Africa in China's 21st Century: In Search of a Strategy predicts a deadly cold war between the U.S. and China in the 21st century, and, if that cold war does not occur, he predicts China will supplant the U.S. in all aspects of global hegemony.[44]

Academic Rosemary Foot writes that the rise of China has led to some renegotiations of the U.S. hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region, but inconsistency between China's stated ambitions and policy actions has prompted various forms of resistance which leaves U.S. hegemony only partially challenged.[45] Meanwhile, C. Raja Mohan observes that "many of China’s neighbors are steadily drifting toward either neutrality between Beijing and Washington or simply acceptance of being dominated by their giant neighbor." However, he also notes that Australia, India, and Japan have readily challenged Beijing.[46] Richard Heyderian proposes that "America’s edge over China is its broad and surprisingly durable network of regional alliances, particularly with middle powers Japan, Australia and, increasingly, India, which share common, though not identical, concerns over China’s rising assertiveness."[47]

In the midst of global concerns that China's economic influence included political leverage, Chinese leader Xi Jinping stated "No matter how far China develops, it will never seek hegemony".[48] At several international summits, one being the World Economic Forum in January 2021, Chinese leader Xi Jinping stated a preference for multilateralism and international cooperation.[49] However, political scientist Stephen Walt contrasts the public message with China's intimidation of neighboring countries. Stephen Walt suggests that the U.S. "should take Xi up on his stated preference for multilateral engagement and use America’s vastly larger array of allies and partners to pursue favorable outcomes within various multilateral forums." Though encouraging the possibility of mutually beneficial cooperation, he argues that "competition between the two largest powers is to a considerable extent hardwired into the emerging structure of the international system."[49] According to former Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, China will "[initially] want to share this century as co-equals with the U.S.", but have "the intention to be the greatest power in the world" eventually.[47]

Writing in the Asia Europe Journal, Lei Yu and Sophia Sui suggest that the China-Russia strategic partnership "shows China’s strategic intention of enhancing its 'hard' power in order to elevate its status at the systemic (global) level."[50]

In 2018, Xiangming Chen wrote that China was potentially creating a New Great Game, shifted to geoeconomic competition compared with the original Great Game. Chen stated that China would play the role of the British Empire (and Russia the role of the 19th century Russian Empire) in the analogy as the "dominant power players vs. the weaker independent Central Asian states". Additionally, he suggested that ultimately the Belt and Road Initiative could turn the "China-Central Asia nexus into a vassal relationship characterized by cross-border investment by China for border security and political stability."[51]

Historical estimates of population, combined with the projected population to 2100 based on the UN's medium variant scenario for the top 3 countries with the largest current population: China, India, and the U.S.

World Bank projections of China's working-age population through 2050

China's emergence as a global economic power is tied to its large, working population.[11] However, the population in China is aging faster than almost any other country in history.[11][12] In 2050, the proportion of Chinese over retirement age will become 39 percent of the total population. China is rapidly aging at an earlier stage of its development than other countries.[11] Current demographic trends could hinder economic growth, create challenging social problems, and limit China's capabilities to act as a new global hegemony.[11][13][14][15]

Brendan O'Reilly, a guest expert at Geopolitical Intelligence Services, wrote, "A dark scenario of demographic decline sparking a negative feedback loop of economic crisis, political instability, emigration and further decreased fertility is very real for China".[52][53] Nicholas Eberstadt, an economist and demographic expert at the American Enterprise Institute, said that current demographic trends will overwhelm China's economy and geopolitics, making its rise much more uncertain. He said, "The age of heroic economic growth is over."[54]

Ryan Hass at the Brookings said that China's "working-age population is already shrinking; by 2050, China will go from having eight workers per retiree now to two workers per retiree. Moreover, it has already squeezed out most of the large productivity gains that come with a population becoming more educated and urban and adopting technologies to make manufacturing more efficient."[37]

According to American economist Scott Rozelle and researcher Natalie Hell, "China looks a lot more like 1980s Mexico or Turkey than 1980s Taiwan or South Korea. No country has ever made it to high-income status with high school attainment rates below 50 percent. With China's high school attainment rate of 30 percent, the country could be in grave trouble." They warn that China risks falling into the middle income trap due to the rural urban divide in education and structural unemployment.[55][56] Economists Martin Chorzempa and Tianlei Huang of the Peterson Institute agree with this assessment, adding that "China has overlooked rural development much too long", and must invest in the educational and health resources of its rural communities to solve an ongoing human capital crisis.[56]

China's share of global export (1990 - 2019)

The People's Republic of China was the only major economy that reported growth in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic.[57] The economy of China expanded by 2.3% while the U.S. economy and the eurozone are expected to have shrunk by 3.6% and 7.4% respectively. China's share of the global GDP rose to 16.8%, while the U.S. economy accounted for 22.2% of global GDP in 2020.[58] By the end of 2024, however, the Chinese economy is expected to be smaller than what was previously projected, while the U.S. economy is expected to be larger, according to the International Monetary Fund's 2021 report on the global economic outlook.[59] The United States' lead is expected to continue for at least a few quarters, the first sustained period since 1990 when the U.S. economy grew at a higher rate than China's.[60]

China's increased lending has been primarily driven by its desire to increase economic growth as fast as possible. The performance of local government officials has for decades been evaluated almost entirely on their ability to produce economic growth. Amanda Lee reports in the South China Morning Post that "as China’s growth has slowed, there are growing concerns that many of these debts are at risk of default, which could trigger a systemic crisis in China’s state-dominated financial system".[61]

Diana Choyleva of Enodo Economics predicts that China's debt ratio will soon surpass that of Japan at the peak of its crisis.[62] Choyleva argues "For evidence that Beijing realizes it is drowning in debt and needs a lifebuoy, look no further than the government's own actions. It is finally injecting a degree of pricing discipline into the corporate bond market and it is actively encouraging foreign investors to help finance the reduction of a huge pile of bad debt."[62]

China's debt-to-GDP ratio increased from 178% in the first quarter of 2010 to 275% in the first quarter of 2020.[62] China's debt-to-GDP ratio approached 335% in the second and third quarters of 2020.[61] Ryan Hass at the Brookings said, "China is running out of productive places to invest in infrastructure, and rising debt levels will further complicate its growth path."[37]

The PRC government regularly revises its GDP figures, often toward the end of the year. Because local governments face political pressure to meet pre-set growth targets, many doubt the accuracy of the statistics.[63] According to Chang-Tai Hsieh, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Michael Zheng Song, an economics professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and coauthors, China's economic growth may have been overstated by 1.7 percent each year between 2008 and 2016, meaning that the government may have been overstating the size of the Chinese economy by 12-16 percent in 2016.[64][65]

According to American strategist and historian Edward Luttwak, China will not be burdened by huge economic or population problems, but will fail strategically because "the emperor makes all the decisions and he doesn't have anybody to correct him." He said that geopolitically, China "gained one year in the race" in 2020 by using the measures of a totalitarian government, but this has brought the "China threat" to the fore, pushing other governments to respond.[66]

Sociologist Ho-Fung Hung stated that, although China's extensive lending during the COVID-19 pandemic allowed a quick rebound after the initial lockdown, it contributed to the already deep indebtedness of many of China's corporations, slowing the economy by 2021 and depressing long-term performance. Hung also pointed out that in 2008, although it was claimed mainly in propaganda that the Chinese yuan could overtake the US dollar as a reserve currency, after a decade the yuan has since stalled and decreased in international usage, ranking below the British pound sterling, let alone the dollar.[67]

Some scholars argue that China's rise will be over by the 2020s. According to foreign policy experts Michael Beckley and Hal Brands, China, as a revisionist power, has little time to change the status quo of the world in its favor due to "severe resource scarcity", "demographic collapse", and "losing access to the welcoming world that enabled its advance", adding that "peak China" has already come.[20]

According to Andrew Erickson of the U.S. Naval War College and Gabriel Collins of the Baker Institute, China's power is peaking, creating "a decade of danger from a system that increasingly realizes it only has a short time to fulfill some of its most critical, long-held goals".[21] David Von Drehle, a columnist for The Washington Post, wrote that it would be more difficult for the West to manage China's decline than its rise.[68]

According to John Mueller at the Cato Institute, a "descent or at least prolonged stagnation might come about, rather than a continued rise" for China. He listed the environment, corruption, ethnic and religious tensions, Chinese hostility toward foreign businesses, among others, as contributing factors to China's impending decline.[22]