My Take | Why ‘China doomers’ are almost always wrong

People should really get a sense of the scale and complexity of a country’s economy before making sage pronouncements on its rise or fall

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A worker in a production workshop located in Qingzhou Economic Development Zone, Shandong Province, China. Photo: Xinhua

Published: 9:00pm, 1 Jan 2024

A new generation of Gordon Chang wannabes has emerged in the United States. Long the butt of jokes among sinologists and China economists, the author of The Coming Collapse of China, first published in 2001, has been nothing if not consistent. The man has made it twice on Foreign Policy magazine’s “10 worst predictions of the year”.

Still, Chang has never lacked an audience eager to see the imminent collapse of China, perhaps hoping for a second helping of the highly gratifying demise of the Soviet Union.

In business and the economics profession, such an impressively bad record would have meant unemployment. In American politics, though, it’s not accuracy that counts, but ideological affinity. China doomsayers will always find an audience and therefore gainful employment.

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.

Peter Zeihan is probably the most famous of the bunch. I recently devoted half a column to his intriguing claim: “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.”

Now it would be a complete waste of time and column space to sort through their claims and arguments. But if you would like a rundown of such people, Cyrus Janssen, a China affairs commentator on YouTube, offers a pretty good take in his latest clip.

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.