You might want to take a gander at this article at Foreign Affairs by Elizabeth Economy on some of the risks that China is facing. Here’s a snippet:
The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2021, which assesses gender disparity across a range of economic, political, educational, and health criteria, ranks China 107th out of 144 countries—down from 69th in 2013, Xi’s first full year in power. Women’s participation in the labor force has also dropped precipitously. As a report by the Peterson Institute for International Economics reveals, China’s gender gap in labor force participation increased from 9.4 percent in 1990 to 14.1 percent in 2020, and Chinese women earn approximately 20 percent less than their male colleagues. More than 80 percent of female college graduates report encountering gender discrimination in job searches; jobs not infrequently advertise for men only or require applicants to be married women with children, so their tenure will not be interrupted by pregnancy.
Another challenge is income inequality—China’s Gini coefficient is among the highest in the world:
The top one percent in China has a greater share of wealth than the bottom 50 percent, and a 2019 Chinese central bank report revealed that among 30,000 urban families surveyed, 20 percent held 63 percent of total assets while the bottom 20 percent owned just 2.6 percent. Across China, the top 20 percent earn 10.2 times what the poorest 20 percent earn. As a result, China’s Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality that ranges from zero to one) has reached 0.47, among the highest in the world and far beyond the level that Chinese officials themselves have claimed would be destabilizing.
International Monetary Fund analysis suggests that such inequality stems from educational disparities and continued limits on freedom of movement (as well as technological changes that have increased the wages of more skilled workers). The Stanford economist Scott Rozelle has detailed Beijing’s failures to put in place the educational opportunities—in terms of both access and quality—necessary for many in rural China to be able to participate effectively in the country’s rapidly emerging technological revolution. The long-term ramifications are significant: high levels of income inequality can limit economic growth and sustainability, weaken investment in health and education, and slow economic reform.
Other challenges include China’s “creative class”. Schumpeter’s hypothesis applies to China just as much as to the United States. She concludes:
If Xi does not course correct, his China dream may be on the cusp of becoming his nightmare.
Fifteen years ago I wrote about China’s biggest challenges. At the time I had pretty fair confidence that the Chinese authorities could take the steps necessary to deal with them. Over the intervening years they have done little about any of them and my confidence that they will do anything about them or the challenges identified by Dr. Economy is waning.
China still has a huge population engaged in subsistence farming. One billion? That is what its GINI is all about. Before Deng nearly everyone was a subsistence farmer. The Deng reforms moved 400 million people into middle class status. They also created a highly creative, highly productive world class economy. Something like 30% of the WORLD’s manufacturing capacity now resides in China. And it is a highly modern, cutting edge manufactory. Lots of automation, lots of robots. China generates as many refereed science articles and as many patents as we do.
By any measure, China is the most successful society on the planet. It builds and populates the equivalent of one San Fransico a month. If you like high speed trains, about one half the world trackage is in China. If you like supercomputers, China has more than any other country, and all of them were built using Chinese hardware and software. Its navy is bigger than ours, more modern on average, and apparently much better trained and disciplined. It has an indigenous stealth fighter/bomber that is almost on a par with the F-35.
The continuing delusion that China is backward, failing, unsustainable may comfort our corrupt, incompetent, depraved, deranged, debauched Ruling Class, but it leads them into fatal errors. Like forcing Russia to become an ally of China.
Remember Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Medvedev, Putin? They all wanted a united Europe from (Putin’s words) Lisbon to Vladivostok. They all wanted Russia in the EU and NATO. The US, or at least our deluded Ruling Class, would have none of it, and they deliberately prevented the inclusion of Russia into the West. What would our world look like if the Russians had been admitted to the West, rather than driven away? Would China matter?
Of course, there is also the issue that our Ruling Class sold our industrial base to China for personal gain. Goldman Sachs et al.
PS. Our demented, pedophile President just publicly insulted a young woman.