Has China Peaked?

[Peter1469]

Has China Peaked?

Are China's aggressive actions in the Himalayas and the South China Sea acts of growing desperation or acts of growing confidence. The former I think.

Over the past year or so, China has made a series of bold moves across the Indo-Pacific region—moves that seem to reflect a growing confidence in Beijing that China’s moment has arrived. Those moves include aggressive actions along the border with India, continuing efforts to assert sovereignty over the South China Seas and the finalization of a new strategic partnership agreement with Iran. In addition, Beijing has carried out a crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong and dropped the word “peaceful” from its annual call for unification with the island democracy.


Taken together, Chinese actions seem to suggest that Beijing believes it is now powerful enough that it can finalize its bid for regional, perhaps even global, hegemony. In short, Beijing’s actions seem to suggest that China’s leadership has come to believe that China is no longer merely a rising power, but a rising power whose time has come.

But what if this is wrong? What if China is not a rising power? What if China is, instead, a once-rising power that is now faltering? What if what we are seeing in connection with the Himalayas or the South China Sea are not acts of growing confidence, but acts of growing desperation? And what if the prospect of further faltering and accelerating desperation inclines China’s leaders to act now to reshape the global order in their favor because they believe that in the future they will be increasingly less able to do so?

First, and in some ways most profoundly, China is simultaneously shrinking and growing old. As a result of the one-child policy and its cultural hangover (despite raising the limit in 2016 is two children, the cultural norm is still one), the country’s population declined in 2018 for the first time since the famines caused by the “Great Leap Forward” in the 1960s. While that may have been a blip, the long-term trend is not.

The Chinese Academy of Science predicts that China’s population will peak at 1.4 billion in 2029, drop to 1.36 billion by 2050, and shrink to as few as 1.17 billion people by 2065. Ominously, if fertility continues to drop from its current rate of 1.6 children per woman to a realistic 1.3, China’s population would be reduced by about 50% by the turn of the next century.

And the composition of that population will also change in significant ways. Most significantly, the population will continue to get older.

Read the entire article at the link.

[Peter1469]

A related article:

For China, Ending Poverty Is Just the Beginning

China vowed to end poverty (as it defines it):

Now, the Chinese government is set to declare victory. Poverty, it claims, will be eradicated by the end of 2020 despite the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting global economic downturn. That headline will strengthen the political legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) when it celebrates its 100th birthday next year.

But the reality of China’s antipoverty campaign is more complicated. The program is neither a figment of government propaganda nor an unalloyed success. Two things became clear to me after two years spent living side by side with the campaign’s rural beneficiaries: China will indeed have eradicated poverty by its own metrics by the end of this year, and it still has a long way to go to address the growing urban-rural divide.


POVERTY BY NUMBERS

When the Chinese government uses the catchall term “poverty,” it means extreme rural poverty, not urban privation. Its definition is based on income (the poverty line is set at 4,000 yuan ($590) per person per year), provision of basic needs such as food and clothing, and access to basic medical services, education, and safe housing. The government dispatched over 775,000 officials across China to survey all rural households on these metrics—a feat in itself—to determine if they qualified as impoverished. The paper on Zhang’s front door lists data from this survey, including the number of family members resident in his home, the amount of arable land attached to it, his family’s annual income, the cause of their poverty (“lacks skills”), and a nine-point plan to address their needs. Zhang’s photo and a red fingerprint complete the report.

After the survey, officials paired each impoverished household with a party member tasked with ensuring their rise out of poverty. Beijing also mobilized hundreds of millions of people, dollars, and labor hours as part of a national effort to improve the living standards of these households. Urban residents gifted cooking oil and leveraged personal networks to sell rural farmers’ produce. Some wealthy cities such as Shanghai adopted entire poor regions such as Yunnan, Bangdong’s home province. The party tapped anyone within the expansive state system—civil servants, teachers, state-owned enterprise employees, even tax auditors—to work on the campaign. Health-care workers visited remote areas to do checkups and minor surgeries, and universities sent teams to monitor and evaluate progress. Private companies also participated—garnering favor with officials—by sending executives into the countryside for team-building exercises. Some even sponsored the construction of entirely new villages. At least by government numbers, the campaign has been successful. Only 33 counties across China remain officially “impoverished”—down from roughly 50 at the end of last year.

Read the article at the link.

[PJL]

It's very hard to find a negative aspect to this.

[Peter1469]

It's very hard to find a negative aspect to this.

I agree. I have mentioned this before- the vast gulf between the urban centers (most, not all) and the rural areas.