AND CURRENT:

It is a popular bit of wisdom that China is the up-and-coming superpower and that the United States is a nation in decline. While it is a popular saying, a cold and sober examination of the facts about China, the economic challenges that China faces, China's lack of natural resources, as well as the aging demographics of China, casts a sobering picture for the future of the People's Republic of China.

While many people rave about China's economic growth, and businesses' prostitute themselves to try and tap China's internal market, very few pay attention to the massive amount of debt that is an impending disaster for the Chinese economy, and the danger that such a collapse could cause.

Estimates of Chinese debt are to the order of $28 trillion. China's debt to GDP ratio is 282 percent of GDP. It is thought that due to shadow lending, the percentage of debt may be even higher.

Geopolitician Peter Zeihan compares and contrasts the idea of money between the United States and China. In the United States, money is regarded as an economic good. In China, money is regarded as a political good. In the United States, money has value in and of itself. In China, money is a political good, and only has value if it can be used to achieve a political goal. The concepts of rate of return or profit margins do not exist in China, and therein lies the danger; eventually the law of supply and demand will win out, and the Chinese economy will have to face a correction, and the longer it takes to face this economic correction, the greater damage that the inevitable correction will cause to the Chinese economy.

China's inability of China to feed itself is an even starker problem. Partly to address this issue, Chinese Premier Xi Jinping has launched a Clean Plate Campaign in China. In 2019, the National Bureau of Statistics reported that food prices increased by 11.2 percent. Pork prices, a staple in the Chinese diet, rose some 85 percent. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences estimates that domestic supplies of rice, wheat, and corn will fall short of demand by 25 million tons in 2025. Partly in response to its food crisis, China has dispatched fishing fleets all over the world. China has become a fishing superpower. From Ecuador and Ghana to the waters off of North Korea, Chinese fishing vessels prowl the world's oceans harvesting fish in numbers so huge as to threaten the sustainability of certain fish species.

Another serious issue facing China is the decline of its population. Currently, there are 1.4 billion people in China. The population in China declined for the first time in 2020. According to The Lancet, the Chinese population will drop to 732 million people by 2100. This is coupled with the fact that the majority of the Chinese population will be middle-aged or elderly.

China is also the largest net importer of oil in the world. In 2020, China imported 542.37 million tons of oil. The vast majority of this oil is transported over the ocean, and the ships carrying the oil must run a gauntlet of not only the Indian Ocean but the first island chain as well in order to reach China. In the event of a conflict, China could be strangled economically by denying the use of the sea route to China by any foreign power.

When these factors are considered, China's claim to great power status has to be questioned, if not denied.   

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