GETTING OLD BEFORE THEY GET RICH?

A century before the United States declared its independence, the Chinese Emperor built his version of the Indian Treaty Room in a garden containing two lakes, the better to impress the barbarians with the power of the Middle Kingdom.  The complex remains as a site for state occasions, including China's president hosting Our President for a formal tea and conversation to wrap up their meetings.

Thirty years ago, I took this photo of Chinese youngsters working on their footie not far from the Great Hall of the People and the Maosoleum, which was closed for renovations at the time.

Sometimes barbarian political power comes on a sesame seed bun.

Turning to the thesis of my post, which borrows from a Thomas Friedman prognostication of long standing, note Commander Salamander asking "Did China Culminate and No One Noticed?"  He's using "culminate" in the military sense of "incapable of further initiative," which is not necessarily "mission accomplished."

What we will have mid-century may not be defined by a race for global domination, but instead a race to try to manage unbalanced demographics, sagging with disproportionately large cohorts of unproductive, net-consuming elderly compared to a smaller and shrinking working-age, net-productive population.

If this data is correct—and the usual caveats about valid data coming out of China apply—we will need to watch the second half of this decade to see if the trend holds.

If it does, will it signal a more or less dangerous China as she tries to respond to this shift, or will it just shuffle along, having grown old before she could grow to dominate?

In Freight Waves, a year ago, J. P. Hampstead asserted, "China’s economy is sputtering."

China’s economic landscape in 2024 and 2025 is characterized by a delicate interplay of slowing growth, deflationary pressures and shifting investor sentiments. While short-term policy measures may provide modest economic support, the underlying structural challenges — from overinvestment in manufacturing to the need for a consumption-led growth model — pose significant obstacles to sustained recovery. The ongoing “authority bias” in official data further complicates the global community’s understanding of China’s true economic state, making it imperative for more transparent and comprehensive reporting to accurately gauge the nation’s economic trajectory.

There's not going to be much consumption-led growth when there aren't new consumers coming through the day-cares and the schools. and the changing correlation of forces in the world energy market make that gauging of China's economic trajectory more challenging.

A month before the recently-concluded summit, Hot Air's David Strom asserted, "China Is In Much Deeper Trouble Than Most Realize."  Perhaps their president's invocation of the "Thucydides trap" and the emphasis his communications staff placed on "Taiwan is our affair" are as an irritated cat ruffling its fur.  His column reinforces the conclusions Mr Hampstead reached.

The flow of information out of China on economic performance since the tariffs hit is sparse, but I have been checking in on the social media chatter coming out of China, and the news is bleak. Consumer spending is down, export products are being sold at firesale prices, and business owners are locking doors and leaving employees unpaid. This is all chatter right now, but also likely true.

Trade wars suck for everybody involved, and when the cost of Chinese-made products go up there will be some pain here in the United States, whatever Trump and his people say.

But none of this pain will be an existential threat to Trump, the country, or the Republican Party. There will be a price to pay, but it will be modest in the longer term.

Not so for China. Their regime is under threat because their hand is much, much weaker. Weaker than Trump's and weaker than people think.

Of course, if China were a normal country, what Trump is doing would be a horrible policy. Generally speaking, destroying a trading partner's economy is both morally questionable and terrible for business. Normally you would cut a deal.

But China and the United States are heading for a war, and a big one at that. Xi Jinping has made that abundantly clear, and he has counted on making the US economy dependent on China to keep us cowed.

In that last paragraph, the war he fears the countries are heading for is a shooting war, not a trade war, and that "economic dependence" brings delusions as well: consider the trains of Soviet coal headed for Germany that encountered columns of German armour heading the other way.

For that matter, there are ways for Taiwan to obtain arms that don't directly implicate the United States.  "Australia’s purchase of Japanese frigates reveals Trump’s emerging Indo-Pacific security architecture."  Rod Martin continues,

That sounds like a procurement story. It isn’t. Across the Indo-Pacific, a new order has come.

Like South Korea, Japan is beginning to arm the anti-China coalition. With frigates from Japan and nuclear submarines from America, Australia is becoming a serious maritime power. The First Island Chain is getting harder. The Straits of Malacca, Sunda, and Lombok through Indonesia are being secured. And the United States, far from withdrawing from Asia, is building a stronger, more distributed security architecture that prevents the next world war before it can start.

And those sesame seed buns?  That's what Matthew Continetti calls "America's unused weapon."  "It’s the idea of freedom, and the president should start talking in its terms."