So it’s not surprising that since Washington has launched full-spectrum warfare short of a hot war against China, Chang wannabes have been springing up like mushrooms after a spring shower.

At the most cynical level, when there is a market for something, there will always be suppliers. And let’s face it, “China is doomed” can be a pretty good gag for talking heads in the US with no particular expertise or specialised knowledge.

But even the most cynical person operates with some preconceived notions and assumptions typical of the class or society they operate in. These in turn shape their perceptions of the world. That’s why if you know how and where to look, you quickly realise these China doomers are really projecting their own experience and that of their country in which fortunes and businesses valued at billions – from dotcoms to bitcoin – can come and go, collapsing and disappearing into thin air at the brink of an eye. But not only those; entire real estate, banking and insurance sectors could crumble just like that, as we witnessed during the collapse of the national real estate market in the US that triggered the global financial crisis in 2007-08.

If we look at the even bigger picture, we will have to examine the increasingly frequent volatility and instability of the US-led global financial system since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s, something beyond our scope.

To put it simply, those China doomers all think the US is good and superior, and China is bad and inferior. If those bad things can happen to the US so frequently, then China must have it much worse. In other words, the whole country – and not just individual businesses or sectors – must at some point simply collapse. Of course, that’s highly improbable. No responsible economist or sinologist in the West would make such a blanket prediction.

But those China doomers are hacks. And they are projecting, as psychologists call it, rather than understanding. How do I know?

Even a rudimentary knowledge of China’s economy and its history would have disabused such “sky is falling on China” claims. But it seems those people lack even such rudimentary understanding.

Let’s first consider communist China’s economic history, then its broad economic picture as presented by current data.

Economic history

There have been periods of modern China under communist rule that are often assumed to have marked societal collapse and economic disaster. That’s the picture usually presented by Western historians, political analysts and ideologues about the Great Leap Forward, the great famine and the Cultural Revolution.

But the actual economic data presents a much more complicated picture, according to economists and econometricians.

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Depending on whose large-scale studies you reference, China’s GDP growth averaged between 8 per cent and 11 per cent from 1952 to 1966. This was despite the rapid down years of the Great Leap Forward and the great famine, sometimes described as the worst man-made disaster of its kind.

During the entire period of the cultural revolution, GDP growth still averaged over 5 per cent annually.

These were, in a sense, a repeat of the Soviet experience. Stalin’s brutal collectivisation and industrialisation from the 1930s have been, perhaps not inaccurately, understood to be unparalleled disasters at a human level. But they actually paved the way for the rise of Soviet Russia’s industrial might after the second world war that rivalled the US, at least until the mid – 1970s.

Infrastructure and heavy machinery being built up from the Great Leap Forward, and the rise of general literacy and healthcare, including declining infant mortality, paved the way for Deng Xiaoping’s economic opening-up.

Seen from this perspective, Deng was not a decisive break from Mao Zedong, but a continuation. Here, we may again recall that what is often perceived as breaks or revolutions in history were actually a continuation.

But if China could survive or even grow economically during periods of large-scale national disasters, you may reasonably assume – barring an unmitigated disaster such as a cross-strait war with Taiwan – that the economy, the second largest in the world, is likely to survive intact if not prosper.

Economic data

Any modern successful economy is a highly complex organic whole. No single scientific model, however sophisticated, can capture it in all its complexity and interrelated parts, let alone some talking heads on TV or YouTube.

This should be obvious if we are not so easily convinced or distracted by charlatans who may tell a likely tale, present a colourful narrative or offer a few plausible reasons to explain whether an entire country or economy would rise or decline within a given time frame. That’s why really informed people and real experts almost always prefer to make conditional statements and statements of probability or probable outcomes, over seemingly definitive if more dramatic statements. That may be unsatisfying to our need for certainty and to be free of doubt, it’s usually the best that intellectually honest people can offer.

So when someone says, “We are looking at the end of China as a political entity within a decade or two, and as an economic entity within a decade,” what can you do other than roll your eyes? (You should really hear the tone in which the guy said it! I doubt even Albert Einstein was so sure about his theory of relativity when he first proposed it.)

People who want to understand a particular economy should play around with its super-informative graphic interface.

By collating economic data from more than a quarter of a century for practically every country in the world, the atlas also offers spectacular data visualisation to help people understand intuitively the relationship between industrial capabilities and technical know-how, their implications for growth prospects, and how diversity and complexity of existing capabilities influence growth outcomes.

The squares and triangles within a grid, which proportionately represent every industrial and economic sector of an economy, give you a visual sense of the complexity and diversity of an economy and also relative to others.

From the data, the atlas also offers a ranking of countries on a complexity index.

For example, the US ranked ninth in the world while China was 46th in 1995. In 2021, while the US dropped to 14th, China rose to 18th.

India went through a wild ride, from the 60th place in 1995 to 43rd in just five years, then dropped to 54th at the end of the 2010s, and only went back to 42nd in 2021.

The atlas projects an annual 5.82 per cent growth until 2031 for China and 2.48 per cent for the US.

If I were to bet on the next big success story of the century, I would not pick democratic India, as many do today, but communist Vietnam, which jumped from 107th to 61st between 1995 and 2021.

Of course, the trade-offs between the complexity and robustness of a system are highly complicated, as engineers and complexity theorists have long known.

But a highly diversified and complex economy like China’s that is also constantly moving up the value-added production chain is unlikely to drop off the face of the earth any time soon.

Whatever its limitations, I think I would rather rely on the Harvard economic data atlas than some talking heads on YouTube.