His audience listened skeptically. China’s economic, demographic and military growth has been unstoppable for decades, and the past two years have brought more hardships than victories. This has led some analysts to worry not about China’s rise to power, but rather about the irreversible decline of its economy.
These concerns are completely premature. Worse, if they represent the underlying assumptions of U.S. policy, the United States will be unable to meet the Chinese challenge. The main risk in the short term is not that Beijing’s rise to power is derailed, but rather that Washington is unable to muster the strength needed to respond appropriately.
Certainly the logic of China’s decline Apparently Frank. The double-digit growth rates that the country’s economy enjoyed for decades are long gone. According to official statistics, his growth rate has fallen to just over 5% (some think this rate may be as low as 1.5%). Official youth unemployment has reached 15%, debt problems plague the economy and the real estate sector is deteriorating. The country’s population will decline for the first time in 60 years in 2022, dropping by more than 2 million people last year. Efforts to boost population growth have proven ineffective, with one-fifth of China’s population now over 60 years old. Investor Ruchill Sharma, writing in the Financial Times, captured this sentiment. “We are now in a post-China world.”
Sharma is not alone. President Biden called China a “ticking time bomb” and suggested Beijing “probably doesn’t have the same capabilities as it did before.” The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos, a keen observer of China, wrote that “the sense that the rise is inevitable is fading.” To spend time in China at the end of Xi’s first decade is to witness a nation slipping from dynamism to stagnation. ” Some foreign policy analysts predict that the world will soon witness “peak China.” Some people already have it.
Despite these challenges, Beijing retains significant advantages. China’s economy is still very large, larger than ours by some measures, but although growth has slowed, China’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate last year likely exceeded that of the United States. China remains its largest trading partner with more than 120 countries and continues to innovate in key technologies such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing while avoiding U.S.-led restrictions on items such as advanced semiconductors.
China continues to translate these advantages into strategic power. Although smaller than the Pentagon, the defense budget is increasing, and the Pentagon projects that it may continue to increase for at least five to 10 years. The Chinese government currently has Asia’s largest air force and the world’s largest navy, with more than 370 ships and submarines. (The U.S. Navy remains large in tonnage, but unlike the Chinese fleet, it has struggled to grow in numbers.) China is rapidly expanding its stockpile of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, including new intercontinental ballistic missiles. . The Chinese government pursues military facilities and bases in many countries across multiple regions.
Moreover, its ambitions under President Xi Jinping remain grand. Last year, the Chinese government convened and expanded the BRICS group of developing countries to provide leadership to major non-Western countries. Chinese vessels have taken aggressive actions in the South China Sea, ramming Philippine ships in disputed waters. The Pentagon has reported dozens of dangerous interceptions of U.S. military aircraft, and Chinese military aircraft now routinely cross the median line in the Taiwan Strait. Last week, the Chinese government stripped the small Micronesian nation of Nauru, one of the few countries that recognized Taipei, two days after Taiwan’s presidential election. China’s leaders, especially in the Global South, are touting their leadership in contrast to a fastidious West that clings to historical privileges.
China’s economic downturn continues and could one day reduce defense spending and curb international activity, perhaps making China less of a formidable challenger. However, there are currently few signs of this and it would be foolish to rely on such results.
China continues to rise and appears bent on regional domination and international revisionism.However, in the grand competition between the United States and China that is increasingly driving international politics, the Chinese government absolute Strength is only half the equation. Relative In a contest of this kind, power ultimately matters most, and so America’s own strength will matter most. There’s something to be done here.
The strength of the United States—its economic size and vigor, its military capabilities and capabilities, the strength of its alliances and coalitions, and its ability to muster the political unity necessary to solve problems—will be sufficient to deal with a rising China. . However, these benefits do not combine alone. We should use China’s challenges to spur us on to success.