My Take | Predicting China’s future is a fool’s errand
- Two new US studies chart four scenarios: a triumphant China, ascendant China, stagnant China or imploding China; one scenario is bound to be right

There is the oft-repeated mantra that Chinese communist leaders have a wide time horizon and think strategically deep into the future. We don’t actually know if that’s true; most probably not, not any more than other world leaders anyway. But even if they do, how?
Many commentators, though, both in China and overseas, envision a triumphant China in the coming decades. Now, is that forward policy planning, or just fantasising (in China) and fearmongering (in the West)?
“Prediction is very hard, particularly when it’s about the future,” quipped baseball legend Yogi Berra. I took this to heart after years of dabbling in the stock markets, religiously following so-called stock gurus, and in the end getting nowhere, nay, losing lots of money.
The only near certainty for me is that dumb money like mine almost always loses, and that “smart” money rarely beats a reasonably well-constructed index over a time period or outperforms the proverbial monkeys throwing darts, that is, random stock pickings.
Well, it turns out the track records of political analysts are pretty much the same as stock gurus. We are not talking about those on TV or YouTube, but seasoned diplomats and trained intelligence analysts.
A paper, “A Better Crystal Ball: The Right Way to Think About the Future”, published in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, offers an intriguing take on this phenomenon.