Comments by "yop yop" (@yopyop3241) on "Don't Be Surprised by China's Collapse || Peter Zeihan" video.

  1.  @TonyTooTuff  Big differences this time: 1. China’s inherent precariousness. In a world that has figured out the techs of industrialization, China’s natural condition is to be locked into Centuries of Humiliation. When China falls, it will fall a very long way. 2. The sheer magnitude of China’s problems. The CCP has repeatedly chosen to kick the can down the road instead of biting the bullet and facing the music when it should have. The result is that China’s bubbles are far bigger than anything ever seen before. 3. Worse, those bubbles were allowed to become intertwined with each other. There is no way to face them one at a time anymore. When it finally arrives, the resulting multi bubble collapse is certain to be far worse than the sum of its parts.
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  2. You can easily dig up publicly available demographic data yourself. Zeihan’s in-person, on-stage talks (many available on YouTube) include PowerPoints with the data. His books likewise have the figures plus a more in-depth discussion. The Chinese call it the “4-2-1” problem. Due to the One Child Policy, the majority of Chinese families have 4 grandparents, 2 parents, and 1 child (or would have that structure if someone hadn’t died already). The “4” were almost all born from 1963 to 1970, and the Chinese retirement age is 60, so it is a done deal that that the size of their working population is about to plummet. More people needing their adult diapers changed than young people to do the changing = zero economic dynamism.
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  3.  @JonySmith-bb4gx  US factory construction has doubled over the last twelve months, and the trend line shows no signs of bending back down. We are currently at levels not seen since WW2. Simultaneously, unemployment has hit numbers not matched since the 1960s and not beaten since the 1950s. Also simultaneously, imports from China are down by 20% year on year. The US is finally decoupling from China. Making the transition isn’t cheap, and much of the cost is being passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices, but this is exactly what the start of “Morning in America” looks like.
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  4. ⁠​⁠ @enrac China’s retirement crisis is starting to collapse the size of the Chinese workforce. To “take steps to avoid this possible future,” China needed to act 20+ years ago. You can’t instantly create new 20 year old workers with 20 years worth of life experience. It’s too late. This is an unpleasant future that cannot be avoided. That would be bad enough, but it looks like CCP mismanagement has allowed China’s unavoidable demographic crisis to become entangled with its real estate and debt problems. Instead of being able to handle those three crises separately, China is going to end up facing all of them simultaneously. The resulting combined collapse is going to be far more painful than just the sum of its parts.
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  5. Things look rosy right up until the bubble pops.
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  6. Good news for the USA is the fastest American GDP growth since the 1960s, driven by US factory construction doubling over the last year. That is a far healthier sort of economic growth than debt-fueled construction of ghost cities. Lots of underemployed Americans who could be far more productive working in a modern factory than doing their current low end service jobs like taking orders at McDonalds. Contrast that sort of growth with the effect of building new condo buildings in a country with huge numbers of vacant units and a rapidly declining population. More good news for the USA is allies like Japan, Germany, Taiwan, Australia, etc. finally boosting their defense spending like the US has been requesting for decades.
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  7. Imports from China are down by 20% year on year. Simultaneously, US factory construction doubled over the course of the latest twelve months of data. We are building factories at a rate not seen since WW2, and the rate that that construction is increasing shows no indications of slowing down. How many underemployed people does the US have toiling away in low productivity service jobs— taking fast food orders, filling orders in Amazon warehouses, etc.? Watch what happens to the US economy when the new factories from this surge in construction actually get finished and new factory jobs start opening up. Tons of the service jobs that will be left behind can be automated (e.g. touch screens for ordering at McDonalds), and many of the former service and new factory workers have high school and college degrees and other knowledge that will be far more useful in a factory setting.
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  8. Incorrect. 2030. The year he specifies has always been 2030. And he has been specify 2030 for significantly more than ten years now. The date is based on the retirement of the “4” in China’s “4-2-1” demographic structure. By 2030, most of the “4” will be retired.
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  9. I bet he doesn’t think it really matters all that much in the long run….
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  10. Zeihan predicts that East Asia will devolve into decades of war. It’ll be war where Japan, Taiwan, Korea, the Philippines, etc. remain connected to the global resources necessary to remain industrialized while China will be cut off, but Chinese desperation will drive them to try over and over and over anyway. He predicts similar devolution in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
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  11. We are already seeing cracks in the Chinese system (deflation, housing developers going bust, local governments unable to pay government workers’ salaries, etc.), and this has been just the very first year of China’s Boomers turning 60. They’re still on the easiest difficulty level. It’s going to get a LOT harder over the next five years or so.
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  12.  @JonySmith-bb4gx  Population decline in other countries is a big issue. But China’s population decline is going to be faster than anyone else’s. You simply don’t get a faster decline in the birth rate than you get when an authoritarian government imposes a draconian One Child Policy. In addition, China has huge bubbles in real estate and finance. Those bubbles are intertwined with their demographic crisis. So China is going to face a triple crash— demographic, real estate, and finance. Other countries are only facing one crash, maybe two. USA had two financial crises… and had the sense to deal with them before the demographic challenge of the Baby Boomers retiring needed to be dealt with. China lacked that sense. China did not have a One Child Policy between 1963 and 1970. The One Child Policy was imposed in 1980. (The “Later, Longer, Fewer” policies, sometimes referred to as China’s “Two Child Policy,” were in place from 1970-1980.) Yes, other countries experienced birth rate decline. But not as bad as China. Those other countries’ declines are another problem for China, btw. That’s a longish explanation though. China is nowhere close to self sufficient. Are you kidding me? China requires massive imports of food, energy, fertilizers, metal ores, etc., etc. Almost everything.
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  13. Peak bubble is just-before-collapse bubble.
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  14. The coastal cities from Shanghai to Hong Kong are the most food insecure parts of China. The starvation that will be coming to China will hit those cities first and hardest. Their disproportionate suffering may trigger them to secede in order to forge connections to outsiders who can provide food. Impossible to know what the exact outcome will be: gutted by starvation, secession, or some combination of the two.
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  15. 2030. Zeihan’s prediction has always been for 2030. If your attention span doesn’t go out that far, he has had a prediction for deflation in China by the end of 2024. That one is looking pretty likely to be another bull’s eye.
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  16. Lol. The prediction is for a globe-spanning collapse. I guess no one is allowed to comment unless they speak every language on Earth. Nah. He’s right to point out that the world is incredibly fragile now. Retirement crises everywhere. War in Ukraine and Israel and the Caucuses. The difficulty of defending against drone attacks. China’s real estate and finance bubbles. General discord in the US and Europe. Biggest protests in Iran since the fall of the Shah. American withdrawal of forces from the Middle East and American isolationism in general. Inflation in the advanced democracies. Deflation in China. And if the global system breaks, he’s right that China is certain to suffer more than anyone. Longest, most at-risk logistical lifelines on the planet.
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  17. Not for China. In the global robotics sector, almost half of the value-added comes from Japan, Germany is in second place with around 10%, then there is a glut of countries at around 2% that includes the US, the Netherlands, Italy, Korea, Taiwan, Canada, France, and the UK. China is below 1%. Factor in population size, and you can see how inadequate China’s position in robotics is. Robotics might be enough for Japan and maybe some wealthy micro nations like Singapore, but it won’t be anywhere close to enough for China. AI isn’t there yet. Training current AIs is extremely labor intensive. Unless we have a huge unexpected breakthrough, AI isn’t going to save anyone. It will help a bit around the margins, but it isn’t a game changer.
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  18. Zeihan is predicting a far greater loss than a mere 200 million in China. He is predicting the loss of billions around the world with China getting hit harder than anyone else because China happens to have the longest, most at-risk trade lifelines on the planet.
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  19.  @bsmithhammer The casino doesn’t win every time, but they win enough to be ridiculously profitable. Zeihan’s predictions are like the casino’s win percentage. The haters pointing out his misses are completely missing the point.
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  20.  @ammoniawilder4451 ”I live in the hottest and most humid climate in America.” Lol. Here’s what Hong Kong is like. Start with, say, the climate of New Orleans. Now shift the city south to nearly the latitude of Miami. Now shift is south by that same amount again. Now, instead of the flat terrain that you have around New Orleans, let’s surround the city with hills to still the air (like what happens to Los Angeles and contributes to LA’s infamous smog). Finally, the Pearl River Delta region that Hong Kong is just one part of covers an area almost twice the size of the state of Maryland while hosting a population of 85 million people (more than one quarter of the entire US population in a single extended integrated urban region). That much crowded city— let’s amp up the urban heat island effect accordingly. Voila! Welcome to Hong Kong! Edit to add: And mega cities like Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, and Singapore are still further south….
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  21. China’s debt situation is undoubtedly much worse than the USA’s. It’s just harder to see because the Chinese system is non-transparent.
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  22. US GDP growth in the last couple of years has been spearheaded by increased factory construction. It is easy to see how the US economy can benefit from more manufacturing. Good match with the US’s plentiful labor, cheapest-in-the-world energy, and abundant raw resources. In contrast, China’s GDP growth has been spearheaded by unneeded real estate and infrastructure spending, even as the Chinese population is receding. There is no plausible case to be made for that GDP growth to be productive.
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  23. US factory construction doubled from May 2022 to April 2023 (the latest data we have) to reach levels not seen since WW2. In the last twelve months, imports from China are down by 20%.
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  24. That’s what almost everyone for all of human history has said just before their asset bubbles popped.
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  25. US factory construction doubled from May 2022 to April 2023, and the curve shows no indications of bending back down to the baseline. We are now at levels not seen since WW2. That’s not as impressive as one might first imagine, because the US economy is so much bigger than it was back then. There’s plenty of potential for that curve to climb higher, and the current trend line indicates that that is exactly what is happening. (Edit to note that April 2023 is the latest data available, I believe.)
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  26. By 2030. Their retirement crisis is going to shift them from tons of workers vs hardly any non-workers that need to be supported to the opposite.
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  27. Only a small fraction of the value-added that is embodied in the stuff loaded onto a ship from China to the US is from China. The Chinese have nearly cornered the market on final assembly, but that’s the easiest thing there is to replace. Just reroute the complex, high value-added intermediate manufactured components that were made in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, Germany, etc. to some alternative final assembly location. In many cases, it only takes a matter of a few minutes to train up a new worker for that new final assembly factory. It takes time to work out the logistics, but companies have long known about China’s upcoming (in progress) demographic implosion, so they already have plans in motion to relocate the final assembly operations that have been China’s forte. It’ll be fine. Definitely less disruptive than the covid supply chain snafus, where we got completely blindsided. It won’t be entirely painless, but if you were able to survive the covid toilet paper apocalypse, this will be a comparative walk in the park.
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  28.  @georgehenderson7783  The US government is currently paying a NEGATIVE real interest rate on its debt. For the moment at least, the bigger the debt, the better off the USA is. Obviously, the interest rate vs inflation rate situation can and will change sooner or later, so there is a good argument for paying down the US debt at least somewhat. But it’s definitely a weird time for internet commenters to be focusing in on US debt. At the moment, it’s the rest of the world’s debt that is problematic. China deserves special mention, because Chinese local government income streams have dried up, and China’s current condition of deflation is only exacerbating their debt problems. Again, obviously things could change, but the current environment is very favorable to the US and very unfavorable for most of the rest of the world with China as a notable standout for suffering.
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  29. People need to eat. Countries that cannot meet that need are countries that collapse. China depends on imports of fuel, fertilizer, and food from an ocean or more away. China has undermined the rules based international order that allows it to import those resources. China has angered just about every country that has any ability to impact those trade lifelines. Global demographics ensure that those facts are going to hit China over the coming handful of years.
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  30. He has always given “by 2030” as the date to watch. He gave “by 2022” as the date to watch for a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
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  31.  @saberswordsmen1  Your post is factually incorrect. China is one of the most immigration-unfriendly countries on the planet. In terms of immigration, China is to Japan as Japan is to the USA. And that’s in total numbers. Scaling by population makes it that much worse. The real idiocy of China is that they have allowed their real estate and debt bubbles to become intertwined with their demographic collapse. Instead of being able to face those three challenges one at a time, China is going to end up facing them all at the same time. And then to decide to piss off basically every country with the ability to affect events in East Asia? Via militarized artificial islands in other countries’ EEZs, wolf warrior diplomacy, the brutal crackdown on Hong Kong, and the uncooperative response to covid? New Chinese Century of Humiliation incoming. At best.
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  32.  @TD-yj8ch  The CCP is terrified of immigration. That’s a potential solution that is out of reach until the CCP is disposed of.
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  33.  @homersimpson5899 He predicts global chaos. America will do well because it is self sufficient in food, energy, and fertilizer, and it has the combination of military might and a global network of overseas military bases that will be needed to secure access to the stuff it doesn’t have within its borders. In contrast, China would die from lack of oil caused by the chaos between them and the Persian Gulf before it could even suppress the South China Sea countries to the point that they could run lumbering defenseless tankers through the SCS. Malacca and the Indian Ocean? Lol.
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  34. The US was never dumb enough to impose a draconian One Child Policy for 35 years, and so the US does not have a “4-2-1” population structure. The US was smart enough to deal with its housing bubble back in 2008. The US gets its energy, food, and fertilizer from within the US or from parts of Canada that cannot reach the wider world in bulk without using the US rail system and the Mississippi. The US has no hidden or implied debt. We know exactly how big our debt problem is. There is very little wiggle room in the shadows for corrupt officials to exploit the system. And currently, the US is paying a negative real interest rate on its debt. Foreigners are paying the US government in order to be granted the privilege of lending money to the US. The US basically owns the oceans. We choose who gets to trade in bulk. We have chosen to allow anyone, but we have the power to choose otherwise.
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  35. The US is self sufficient in food and energy. Throw in Canada’s potash which has to go through the US to get to the wider world, and the US is self sufficient in fertilizers and pesticides, too. It would take a lot to collapse the USA to the extent we are talking about here. In contrast, China is completely dependent on sources of food, energy, fertilizers, and pesticides that are at least an ocean away, and China has turned almost every country with any ability to affect transport along the way into an enemy. The nice thing is that China likely screwed themselves with their real estate, finance, and demographic bubbles. They would have almost certainly been screwed anyway, but this way no one has to feel guilty about offing them.
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  36. For years, going back to at least the early 2010s, Zeihan has been saying that China will collapse by 2030. People used to laugh at that prediction. But over that same period of time, Zeihan was also laughed at for predicting that Russia would invade Ukraine by 2022. That prediction doesn’t produce the same derision anymore. And now in 2023, China is the slowest growing economy in Asia. Japan had 2x China’s GDP growth in the second quarter of 2023, India is projected to be the fastest growing country in the world this year. Two hostile-to-China countries that Zeihan predicts to surge as China falls, both starting to surge as China starts to stumble. Zeihan’s prediction of a Chinese collapse by 2030 seems to be homing in on its target….
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  37. He says that China’s strict capital controls will make it nearly impossible to cash out your winnings from shorting China. Instead of shorting China, he recommends betting on the explosive rise of US manufacturing. The winnings will be similarly huge, and you will actually be able to take your winnings home with you.
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  38. Lol. One-third that much, and the US is currently paying a negative real interest rate on its debt, so the joke is on you.
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  39. Real growth or unhealthy debt-fueled growth that will come unwound and have to be paid back with interest when the bubble pops?
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  40. He did. Check out his books or one of his long form (~1 hr) presentations where he brings his PowerPoint slides.
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  41. Both doomed. You need good demographics and good access to resources. Germany and China fail on both counts.
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  42. Famine and then likely the permanent end of any sort of a unified Chinese civilization. Rise of multiple new and separate nationalities instead. Similar to how the Roman Empire ended and was succeeded by French, Italian, Swiss, etc. nations. China’s growth over the last decade or more has been fake. Debt driven. Like someone who loses their job and, instead of facing that challenging reality, goes on an escapist credit card fueled spending spree.
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  43. Imports from China are down by 20% year on year. US factory construction has exploded, doubling over the latest 12 month period that we have data for, reaching levels not seen since WW2. Dependence on China seems to be falling fast.
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  44. You have to be capable of playing it forward. Much of the world is facing a retirement crisis. What does that mean at different scales and going forward in time? At the country scale, a retirement crisis equates to an inability to meet its own needs. Fewer workers trying to provide for basically the same number of people. The only country that has gone through a retirement crisis so far has been Japan. The result of Japan’s retirement crisis is that Japan’s exports fell while their imports of many products rose. But that result obviously isn’t possible when it’s the entire world as a whole that will be going through this transition. So if we don’t have the outlets that Japan did what are the consequences to that happening on a global scale? And how do you expect things to play out over time? There simply isn’t going to be enough to go around. There are going to be some major losers. Collapse level losers. China is at the head of the list. China is utterly dependent on imports of food, energy, fertilizers, and pesticides. Worse, those inputs come from at least an ocean away. China happens to have the world’s longest maritime trade lifelines. In a world that doesn’t have enough to go around, are the desperate countries along the way going to just sit there and die passively as lumbering, defenseless modern commercial vessels carrying civilization sustaining stuff stroll along their shores? Or are they going to act like cornered savage beasts and lunge at even the smallest chance of survival? The only country that has the combination of military might and the global network of hundreds of military bases necessary to possibly cowe the savage beasts into even partial, temporary submission is the US. And the US now sees China as enemy #1. Instead of protecting China’s trade, the US is likely to tell the savage beasts, “Look, I understand you’re getting desperate. So if you have to go after someone’s trade shipments, you might prefer to go after China’s. Just sayin’.”
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  45. By 2030. He has been specifying 2030 since at least the early 2010s.
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  46.  @hejohn9227  Zeihan’s prediction is for a globe-spanning collapse. China will only be one part of the collapse, but it will be the worst part. Which is entirely appropriate since China is more responsible for the coming horror than anyone else. China is going to find itself with many countries in various stages of collapse between it and the overseas resources and markets that China is utterly dependent upon. In their desperation, those failed and near-failed states are going to ensure that no one suffers more deprivation than China. China happens to have the world’s longest and most at-risk maritime trade lifelines. In contrast, the US is self sufficient in food and energy. Add in Canada’s potash which has to go via the Mississippi to reach the wider world, and the US is basically self sufficient in fertilizer as well. Access to just about everything is far more secure for the US than for China. China is nowhere close, and the result is likely to be the death by starvation or starvation-driven violence of the majority of the Chinese population. Countries like Japan, Taiwan, and Korea would be just as screwed as China, but for one key difference. They are all close US allies, and so they will be granted access to the US’s globe spanning network of military bases. That will allow them to use their navies to convoy the trade that they need safely past the collapse zones. The PLA lacks the overseas military bases needed to make that strategy feasible for China. It also helps tremendously that Japan, Taiwan, and Kore all have excellent relations with key countries like India and Indonesia along the way. China chose the wrong path, and the Chinese people are going to pay a terrible price for that shortsightedness.
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  47. To be clear, he’s been saying, “collapse by 2030,” for a long long long time.
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  48. He has always set the expiration date at 2030.
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  49. Zeihan has a track record of accurate predictions.
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  50.  @KayyHong  Zeihan is right that (1) the global system has become incredibly brittle and (2) if the global system breaks, no one will suffer more than than China. Some facts to consider: Iran’s population has gone up by more than 5x since the end of WW2. Saudi Arabia’s population has gone up by more than 10x. The rest of the region is similar. Oil wealth is impressive, but it’s basically all they have, and it doesn’t go up exponentially. The protests in Iran earlier this year? Inevitable and just the start of the regional instability that is to come. What do you think will happen in the Middle East if oil prices fall and/or wheat prices rise? A war between Russia and Ukraine could cause wheat prices to rise sharply. A slowdown in China from bubbles in real estate, finance, and demography popping could cause oil prices to fall sharply. And both the Saudis and the Iranians have increased the reach of their militaries. Have you seen how hard it has been for both the Ukrainians and the Russians to defend against drone attacks? How far are their oil facilities from the other’s territory? 150 miles? Less? What happens to China if the amount of oil coming out of the Gulf falls off drastically? Will, say, India allow China’s market power to take everything? Or will India use military force to ensure that its own needs are met first? The US has the combination of military power and overseas military bases to compel India to stop, but will the American people support Americans fighting and dying to preserve China’s ability to import oil? If the US doesn’t act, can China subdue India before the Chinese strategic petroleum reserve runs out? China’s reserves have been estimated to be about three weeks worth. And what if it’s not just India, what if every country along the route is desperate to take whatever they can get? Can China beat down a dozen counties to secure its access to oil? In just a handful of weeks before its oil reserve runs out?
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  51.  @KayyHong  700 million. That’s what Zeihan says is the most likely Chinese toll if/when the global system cracks. “More than half.” 14x the toll of the Great Chinese Famine. For any Chinese reading this: Do your own due diligence. Research for yourself what China’s real vulnerabilities are. Take action accordingly.
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  52. Where would China be today if the US had not defeated Imperial Japan and then instituted the rules based international order? What the Chinese fail to appreciate is that the Century of Humiliation was not an aberration. An industrialized economy requires maritime access to select locations that are scattered all over the globe. China just happens to have worse natural access to those locations than any other country. In an industrialized world that operates under the rules of ancient times, China is destined to be prey. The US changed China’s fate by defeating Japan and then by instituting the rules based order which includes freedom of navigation. With freedom of navigation, China’s naturally worst access to resources didn’t matter. With freedom of navigation, everyone has equal access. Ironic that China has chosen to undermine the rules based international order that provides the freedom of navigation that has spared China from never ending Humiliation. The CCP has mismanaged China so that it is going to face multiple massive crises all at the same time. But the loss of access to freedom of navigation will be the screw up that will burn the longest. China was gifted with the opportunity to escape never ending Humiliation. The CCP spurned that offer on behalf of all of China.
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  53.  @stavroshadjiyiannis6283  Doesn’t matter why the US defeated the Imperial Japanese. It only matters that they did and that after having done so, the US did not lay claim to Japan’s conquered continental territory as spoils of war. Russia cannot supply China. Modern trade is maritime trade. Around 98% of ton-miles of international trade is conducted via ship. Ships simply have that much more capacity and are simply that much more efficient. Overland transport options between the core Russian territories and the core Chinese territories are particularly awful. Siberia sucks for transport. Continent sized swamp in summer, beastly cold in winter. Crap tier terrain for infrastructure and even worse for the people needed to build and maintain infrastructure. I doubt an entire year’s worth of overland trade between Russia and China will ever be able to match even half a day’s worth of China’s current maritime trade. In theory, it could work if you connected the Chinese core directly to the Russian resources, but I don’t think Russia is so dumb that they would fail to grasp the significance of bypassing their core territory out of the main economic flow to their much more powerful and totally untrustworthy neighbor. Also, it’s meaningless to compare the peacetime industrial capacities of the US vs China as part of this discussion. In any conflict, China will be cut off from maritime trade— alone and facing massive shortages in almost everything. In contrast, the US will be plugged in to the entire world. So the comparison you need to make is between China alone with massive shortages in everything vs the rest of the globe. Giant “L” for China (and anyone dumb enough to side with them).
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  54.  @stavroshadjiyiannis6283  Pipelines for metal ores, fertilizers, coal, grain, cooking oil, etc., etc.? Good luck with that. Lol: pipelines for livestock! It also needs to be pointed out that the current pipelines to China are only capable of supplying a tiny fraction of China’s oil needs. Further, Russian natural gas pipelines to China have so far proven to be quite unreliable. Water keeps finding its way into the system which freezes and causes problems that require shutting the flow down to fix. If Russia can’t even keep natural gas flowing, what are the odds that they’ll be able to manage the far more difficult task of keeping oil pipelines running? Also, we’re talking about an armed conflict, right? Pipelines make for juicy targets, and their length makes them very, very difficult to defend.
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  55. Read the provisions of the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the Investing in America Bill. Enormous pieces of legislation designed to build up the USA and cut out China. Imports from China are down by 20% in the last year while US factory construction has doubled to reach levels not seen in the US since WW2. And that’s just the start. Keep in mind that new American factories tend to be ultra complicated state of the art facilities. They often take more than a year to construct and get up and running, so the surge in US factory construction has barely gotten started on enhancing US factory output.
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  56.  @AtomkeySinclair  Trump talked a good game, but his Administration’s ability to follow through was abysmal. The Trump Presidency was like a company with killer commercials but crappy products. In contrast, Biden might be “Weekend at Bernie’s” as a commercial spokesperson, but his Administration seems to be able to create the Legislative/Executive equivalent of the first iPhone every few months.
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  57. China’s debt to GDP ratio is at least 2x the US’s. Likely much worse. The 2x number is based on China’s official (sketchy) GDP numbers and is based on official (extremely sketchy) figures for local government and local government financing vehicle debt. Nor does the 2x number include implicit debts such as the CCP’s implied promise to never allow real estate prices to crash.
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  58. By 2030. “4-2-1” problem sets the date. All of the bubbles will pop by then. Likely all at once, which is the worst possible way.
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  59. Except unlike that hypothetical 18 year old, Zeihan has a stellar record of accurate predictions….
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  60. Zeihan is predicting that China collapses and takes the whole world down with it. That will hurt everyone, but it will absolutely devastate China. Especially over the long term. No one is more dependent on the American led order than China, because no one has longer, more at-risk logistical lifelines than China. If the American led order falls, China falls. In contrast, America is not dependent on the order, because it is self sufficient in the most critical resources (energy, food, fertilizer, most metal ores), has the world’s only growing consumer market of size, and has the combination of military power and 800+ overseas military bases to secure access to whatever else it might possibly need. If/when the American led order falls, America falls but will quickly get back up. If/when the American led order falls, China falls and likely will never get back up again. The PRC is likely to lose three quarters of its population over the coming decade or so. How much of that will be from famine vs famine-driven violence vs famine-driven secession remains to be determined. The saddest part of this is how incredibly unnecessary it is. The American led order has always been brittle, but it has remained strong for decades because the countries that prospered under it have strengthened it. As countries like Japan and Germany recovered from WW2, they joined the order and helped support it. Later, as countries like Korea and Poland developed and prospered, they joined the order and made it stronger. Sadly, that pattern has not held up with China. The order is American led. The US started it, and America’s global network of 800+ overseas military bases is one of the fundamental keys to sustaining it. As countries developed under the order, they also became trusting enough and trustworthy enough to integrate with the American military and trusting enough and trustworthy enough to operate out of the global network of American bases. As the world developed and got stronger, the structure that supports the global order got stronger. Until China. The order has benefited China more than anyone else. (How much Persian Gulf oil did China import before Deng opened China up vs how much does China import now?) But none of the core countries of the order trusts China at all. China’s reputation among the peoples of the advanced democracies is at the bottom of the barrel. China certainly doesn’t look like it is going to integrate its military with those of the main order countries anytime soon. PLA access to the American base network? Lol. It didn’t have to be this way. As recently as 2017, the populaces of the majority of the advanced democracies had a favorable opinion of China. As recently as the mid-2010s, the US was trying to learn to integrate with the PLA to combat piracy. In 2015, the US sponsored China to acquire its first overseas military base to further that anti-piracy military integration and cooperation. China chose to take the world down this path by building militarized artificial islands, by “wolf warrior” diplomacy, by its brutal crackdown on Hong Kong, by its inability to cooperate on covid. If China can’t even be trusted to cooperate in fighting against a deadly, mindless pathogen, how can China be trusted on anything? China is at fault for wrecking the system, and the result is going to be tragic. For the Chinese most of all.
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  61. The Century of Humiliation is China’s natural state in a world that has discovered how to industrialize. If the current unnatural rules based global order breaks like Zeihan predicts, countries will revert to acting naturally, the way they did before the order going back to ancient times. That reversion to the natural way of operating will knock China back to its natural state of Humiliation. China just happens to have the world’s worst access to the resources needed to maintain an industrialized economy. No one has to go further and get past more hostile countries than China to acquire energy, fertilizer, metal ores, etc.
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  62.  @pmnichols10  World’s worst access to the resources needed for industrialization. Least industrialized = prey. For everyone.
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  63.  @pmnichols10  You’re projecting. Seriously, China has to get to the Persian Gulf for oil and gas, and it has to get to Belarus for potash. Can you give a pairing of country and critical resource that is separated by more distance and with more hostiles along the way? Bet you can’t. China is absolutely screwed if the US-led rules-based international order ever breaks down.
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  64.  @pmnichols10  Believe it or not, but Russian oil gets to China via ships that load up in the Baltic or Black Sea. That’s an even longer trip than to the Gulf, so you’re only making China’s situation worse.
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  65.  @pmnichols10  Russia is an empire. Resources derived from the periphery of an empire have to go to the core region/population center before they go anywhere else. It’s about control. Empires don’t trust their peripheries. Forcing all flows of money, resources, everything to go through the core is a key way they maintain control. So, yes, huge pipelines would be a hole in the analysis, but just be aware of the fact that you’re talking about building giant pipelines from the Moscow/St. Petersburg area to Beijing. All the way across the full extent of Siberia. Compared to oil tankers, the cost of such pipelines would be absolutely prohibitive. (BTW, China is the same way. For example, it would make a ton of economic and environmental sense to build giant solar arrays in Tibet and run the electricity over/through the Himalayas to the teeming hordes of northern India. The transmission distance is short, and electricity doesn’t care about mountains. But the center of the Chinese empire would see that as a potential economic centerpiece for an independent Tibet, so Beijing will never allow such a project to happen. In contrast, there are no such concerns involved in any prospective projects involving American outlying territories such as Hawaii, Alaska, or Guam. And of course, America’s allies are their own sovereign countries, so of course they are free of any such considerations, too. Proves that the US is not imperialist while Russia and China are.)
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  66.  @pmnichols10  The fact is that China’s position is inherently incredibly weak. The Chinese need to come to terms with that reality. By creating the rules-based international order, the US gifted China with a chance to rise above its terrible position. Unfortunately for everyone but especially unfortunately for the Chinese, the CCP has chosen to squander that chance. “They survived the crises in 19th and 20th centuries.They rises from the bottom of the deepest hole of sufferings.” Those were mere bumps in the road compared to what China will face when it is forcibly confronted with the reality of its position again.
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  67.  @pmnichols10  It used to be that the ingredients that went into national power were (1) area of flat land and (2) predictable monsoonal rains. For the thousands of years when that was the recipe, China had more of the inputs for power than anyone else, so China was the globe’s top power. That era is over. With the determinants of national power dictated by modern tech, China now has basically the worst position on the board. In one direction, you have the Pacific which ends at the Rockies/Andes. Long distance and high mountains separate China from the plentiful spare resources of the sparsely inhabited New World. In the other direction, you have to go past the other territories that benefited from same predictable Asian monsoon rains that benefited China for millennia. Massive populations of competitors between China and the resources of the Old World. Worst position on the board.
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  68. Peak bubble is just before popped bubble.
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  69. Incorrect. About 3/4ths of US debt is held by American institutions and individuals. The largest holders of US debt are other parts of the US government. That debt is more of an accounting measure than actual debt. The world holds about $7.4 trillion of US debt with the largest chunk held by close US allies. Japan and the UK hold about twice as much as China does.
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  70. I think it’s the opposite of wishful thinking. But you are likely correct about mentally sick. I think he is horrified and distraught about what he sees coming. You know how much hiking and backpacking he does? I think that’s the equivalent of self medication for him. It’s also probably a way to keep himself from overdoing the all too common form of self medication.
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  71. Already happening. Factory construction up 100% over the last twelve months that we have data for. We’re at levels not seen since WW2. And the curve only points up. No sign of a bending back towards the baseline. Note that new factories aren’t cheap, and companies have to pay for the construction before the new facilities come online. They pass the cost on to consumers via higher prices— that’s a major source of the inflation that the US is currently dealing with. Also note that most of the factories from the surge in construction aren’t finished yet, so we haven’t seen the inevitable big gains for labor yet. We’re in the “darkest before the dawn” transition phase. Just around the corner: Morning in America.
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  72.  @rongreen4231  Mix of both. In the medium and long term, it will have to be mostly Americans, because there simply won’t be any other options. With so much of the world aging out, the sort of high skilled labor needed for jobs in American factories is going to be in very short supply. The US will definitely skim off the cream of the crop from around the globe, but we’re also going to have to become a lot better at training up our own people.
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  73. Xi Jinping’s daughter is living in the US. That suggests that Xi agrees with Zeihan’s analysis.
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  74.  @leezhieng  Is that what the CCP is telling you? Nope. She’s been living in the US for years now.
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  75. A House of Representatives member of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China accidentally(?) leaked the information on Xi’s daughter’s country of residence. The disgust and outrage at the breach of trust that the other Commissioners responded with when blindsided by reporters’ unexpectedly specific questioning on the matter lends credence to the veracity of the report.
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  76. The fact that Chinese shills like yourself are pushing these narratives tells you something. Everything you wrote is false. In reality, in the last twelve months of data, US imports from China are down by 20% while US factory construction is up by more than 100%. The US is currently building new factories at a rate unseen in the US since the industrial ramp up in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Trump was all talk, no execution. Biden has actually gotten things done.
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  77. Incorrect. Zeihan’s forecast has always pointed to 2030 as China’s “collapsed by” date. The date is set by the retirement of China’s “4”s from their “4-2-1” demographic structure. By 2030, the Chinese Boomers (the people who were born after the Great Chinese Famine finally ended) will almost all be retired. But that’s just one part of several intertwined globe-spanning trends that are going to take China down.
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  78.  @icet6665  Value-added to the global robotics industry by country in 2019 (before the pandemic scrambled things): Japan, almost 50%; Germany, 10%; multiple countries (USA, Korea, Taiwan, Netherlands, Italy, Canada, etc.), 2%; China, less than 1%. I doubt that buying robots from Japan and Germany is going to solve China’s problems. Youth unemployment in China is an ominous sign. That shows that employers are afraid that the resources needed to train up a new, young worker will not be recouped.
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  79.  @bpfromowc  Unfortunately, both Russia and Ukraine were doomed for demographic reasons anyway. A country dead sooner vs a country dead later— in the long run and in the big picture, it’s pretty much the same. That’s the freaky thing with Zeihan’s prediction— it’s just so depressingly robust.
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  80. He knows that China can’t sustain an industrialized economy without ship-borne oil imports. He knows that China can’t feed itself without ship-borne imports of food and fertilizer. That’s enough China-specific knowledge to know that China is screwed.
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  81. Zeihan has always said that China will collapse by 2030. The date is set by China’s retirement crisis. The “4” in China’s “4-2-1” problem has only just started to retire. By 2030, they will almost all be retired. The reason he predicts collapse and not just slow down is because he expects the wave of retirements to trigger the popping of the real estate and finance bubbles. So China won’t just be facing one giant challenge, it will be facing a multifaceted multiheaded hydra of a challenge.
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  82.  @hannibalyin8853  Zeihan has credibility after correctly predicting that Russia would invade Ukraine in 2022.
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  83. Check the video he posted a week after this one.
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  84. Um… everywhere? The globe is awash in underemployed low skill workers.
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  85. Zeihan’s prediction has always been “by 2030.” The lock-in date has always been set by the retirement crisis, the retirement of the “4” from their “4-2-1” demographic structure. The oldest of the post-Great Famine Baby Boom “4”s just reached retirement age in the last few months. By 2030, they will almost all be retired. When the Chinese demographic house of cards falls, it will certainly also take down the Chinese houses of cards in their housing and finance markets. The resulting multi factor crash will be epic. But it will likely go largely unnoticed, because of the global turmoil that is certain to erupt around the same time and for the same demographic reasons. That global turmoil is only going to further cement China’s doom, because China happens to have the longest, most indefensible critical supply lifelines on the planet.
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  86. You have apparently never heard about the godawful state of China’s local government financing vehicles. No one knows what China’s government debt situation actually is, because those LGFVs were designed to be non-transparent, but China’s debt situation is definitely far worse than the USA’s. Simple minded Chinese like to delude themselves into the belief that only national debt matters. That’s wrong. What actually matters is the ability to provide critical government services. In most countries, those critical services are provided by the national government, so it makes sense to focus on national debt in those cases. But in China’s case, that’s completely wrong. In China, most critical government services are provided by local governments. And China’s local governments and their black box local government financing vehicles seem to be in very bad shape.
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  87.  @rodhill7888  Because there has never been even the faintest hint that an audit would be anything other than a waste of resources. The Federal Reserve’s actions are supposed to be 100% transparent, and as far as anyone who knows anything can tell, the Federal Reserve’s actions have always been 100% transparent. If you think you know otherwise, you have lots of avenues available to lay out your case. This is one of the main benefits of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and democracy. So, do you have anything useful to say beyond the equivalent of pointing out the equivalent of: “That extremely well-respected person over there has never been arrested. That makes me suspicious. Doesn’t it make you suspicious?” Um, yes… it makes me suspicious of YOU.
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  88. It will be very, very bad in China, the Middle East, and Africa. Major population decline. The rest will experience high inflation and suffer from shortages of many goods. Most will see their standard of living fall significantly, but at least they probably won’t face starvation. A select few countries (who happen to be independently blessed with good, reliable access to the ingredients for industrialization) will have explosive economic growth as they step up to try to fix the inflation and shortages.
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  89. Child’s play compared to what is coming.
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  90. You misspelled “blight.”
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  91. He predicts decades of warfare in the Middle East. The ultimate outcome is going to depend on what Turkey and India choose to do, which is still up in the air. But in all cases, the Middle East as a whole is going to suffer very badly. With the US backing away from protecting freedom of navigation, many fewer buyers are going to be able to reach all the way to the Middle East. With so many fewer buyers, it will be a buyer’s market. If you can reach the Middle East, you’ll be able to buy oil for barely enough to cover the production cost. The countries of the Middle East are going to find themselves with way more people than they can feed. At the same time as oil is dirt cheap in the Middle East, the countries at the far end of the line, countries like Germany and China, are going to find that they can’t buy oil even at $1000 per barrel. The split in price between dirt cheap at the source vs crazy expensive at distance is the way things have been for most of human history. For example, in centuries past, porcelain that was common enough to be used by ordinary merchants in China was beyond the reach of anyone except kings and queens in Europe. We are going to revert to that normal. But instead of the fracture of markets being constrained to luxuries like porcelain teacups for sovereigns, it is going to be in everything, including the resources that allow a country to sustain an industrialized system.
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  92. He has always put the date at 2030, because the timing of his prediction has always been tied to the retirement of the “4” from China’s “4-2-1” population structure.
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  93. For a long time, he has been saying that China would be dead by 2030. We’ll see how it turns out….
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  94. Ten years ago, he said that China would collapse by 2030. He says the same thing today. By 2030. If you are in China, you need to escape while you can. If you cannot escape, you need to prep. The closest thing there is to a zombie apocalypse is almost upon you.
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  95. It’s not anything sinister like you might be imagining. It’s the echoing effect of the Great Chinese Famine. Silent Generation to Boomers to X to Millennials to Zoomers to Alpha to Beta. China’s Boom came late. Where most of the world Boomed when WW2 ended, China went from WW2 to civil war to Mao’s incompetence which culminated with the Great Chinese Famine. China’s Boom happened when the Famine ended. The important thing to note for responding to your post is that Famine doesn’t just slow the birth rate, it also kills off a lot of the kids born in the years before the Famine. Net result is that China has an incredibly skewed demographic pyramid. Amazingly tiny Silent Generation (killed off by famine), absolutely enormous cadre of Boomers. That echoes through the generations: tiny Silent, huge Boomer, tiny X (children of tiny Silent), huge Millennial (children of huge Boomer), tiny Zoomer (children of tiny X), huge Alpha, tiny Beta…. The main reason for the decline in birth rate is that they are changing generations. The kids born a few years ago were part of large Alpha. The ones being born today are with tiny Beta.
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  96. Peak bubble is just-before-collapse bubble.
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  97.  @JonySmith-bb4gx  China’s demographic data is publicly available. The first babies conceived after the Great Chinese Famine (1958-1962) just turned 60 over the last several months. The post Great Chinese Famine Baby Boom generation was almost all born between 1963 and 1970. Famine ended in 1962, and it takes most of a year to pop out a baby. Thus the start of the Baby Boom in 1963– first Chinese Boomers turned 60 over the last year (1963 + 60 = 2023). The Chinese Baby Boom ended when Mao started to bring in the “Later, Longer, Fewer” policies in 1970, so the youngest Chinese Boomers turn 60 in 2030 (1970 + 60 = 2030). Experience from all corners of the globe, even in countries with retirement ages above 60, even in countries with no retirement system at all, has found that people who have spent their working lives as manual laborers tend to retire between 58 and 61. China’s Boomers have almost all spent their working lives as manual laborers. So by 2030, the Chinese Boomers will almost all be retired. China is in the very most nascent part of their retirement crisis. The pressure is going to get much, much, much worse over the coming few years. Collapse by 2030.
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  98. 2.6%. Nowhere close to “most.” And the US is currently paying a negative real interest rate on its debt.
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  99. Zeihan has been saying “by 2030” for many years now.
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  100. I’m thinking it’s a sculpture made of hand-wrought iron. The artist/craftsman had to make some practical compromises and also took some artistic liberties. Really cool work of art. Zeihan loves the great outdoors and undoubtedly has windows that look out onto greenery, so you know this piece has to mean a lot to him for him to use it as his backdrop instead of one of those window views.
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  101. China’s problems are far worse.
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  102. China holds something like 2.3% of US debt. And the US is currently paying a negative real interest rate on its debt.
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  103. Zeihan’s prediction is that China will collapse by 2030. He has been specifying that date for over a dozen years now. The date is based on China’s demographic problem. The “4” in their “4-2-1” population structure only just began to retire in the last few months. By 2030, they will almost all be retired.
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  104.  @BSPBuilder  Nope, sorry. Many decades of experience from countries all around the world has shown that people who have spent their lives doing manual labor are inevitably forced to retire at around age 60, give or take. It is a biological reality that the human body breaks down. The Chinese “4”s are almost all unskilled manual laborers with only an elementary school education. This isn’t like raising the retirement age in a country of mostly white collar service sector workers like one of the advanced economies. Keeping, say, construction workers on site until age 65 simply creates far more problems than it solves.
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  105.  @BSPBuilder  My guess is that you haven’t fully grasped Zeihan’s argument. The entire world is going through a Japan style demographic transition, but the entire world doesn’t enjoy Japan’s advantages of wealth; a dominating position in robotics; security from being an island nation and close US ally; the concomitant minuscule spending on defense; regional prosperity driven by the demographic dividend enjoyed by a giant neighbor; a global environment of minimal conflict, low inflation, and low interest rates; etc. Where Japan’s advantages allowed it to maintain itself at zero growth, the global demographic transition will not go nearly as smoothly. Add in the already deteriorating security situation as seen with the war in Ukraine and the tensions in the Middle East, and the global situation looks even more grim. Zeihan predicts major regression. Billions dead of starvation and starvation-driven violence. The losses will fall disproportionately hard on China. China’s demographic transition is going to be the worst in the world. In addition, China has inflated huge real estate and debt bubbles. But the absolute killer is China’s geography. China has longer, more fraught maritime trade lifelines than anyone else. Countries and individuals along the route of China’s trade lifelines that are facing extinction are not going to just sit back and passively allow themselves to be snuffed out as giant ships full of valuable China-bound cargo run past their shores. They’re going to grab for what they can get. China’s maritime trade lifelines are going to be severed. Extreme demographic challenge, massive bubbles bursting, and loss of access to critical overseas resources and markets. China is doomed.
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  106. By 2030. That’s the year he specifies in all of his books. Could happen before, but it will definitely happen by then. The 2030 limit is a consequence of China’s retirement crisis. By 2030, almost all of the “4”s from China’s “4-2-1” population structure will be retired.
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  107. China’s holdings of forex, US Treasuries, other countries’ debt obligations, etc. will all go to zero if/when Zeihan’s predictions come to pass. Those sorts of obligations only have teeth under the auspices of the US-created global order. Zeihan is predicting that that order is going to fall. But that’s the least of China’s problems. The real problem is that China won’t be able to import oil, gas, food, fertilizer, metal ores, etc. when the fall of the global order includes the end of freedom of navigation.
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  108. Currently, the US is paying a negative real interest rate on its debt. Hard to imagine that triggering any sort of collapse. That negative rate means that US government debt is currently a source of strength, not weakness for the US. And of course, US debt is in US dollars, so the US always has the backstop option to just print more dollars to pay off its debts. That wouldn’t be completely painless, the US would experience some inflation via the impact on exchange rates, but as the least trade-involved country in the world relative to GDP, the US’s pain would only be a small fraction as bad as most people probably imagine. Much of the pain would be dumped onto countries that hold US dollars and rely on exporting to the US for a major part of their economic well being. It should also be pointed out that the US system is believed to be reliably transparent. There are no rumblings about under appreciated risks like there were in the lead up to the 2008 financial crisis and like there currently are with China’s local government financing vehicles. All in all, the US’s debt position seems stable. It could definitely be better, and the observed pathetic return on the tax cuts over the last thirty years says that it should be better, but short of a complete black swan event, there doesn’t appear to be any risk of a US debt driven collapse.
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  109. Peak bubble is just-before-collapse bubble. Zeihan presents the evidence in his books and in the long form talks where he brings his PowerPoints.
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  110. This isn’t a “make a trip to see the real China” thing. This is a “take a step back and look at the global perspective “ thing. The global system has become incredibly brittle, and China’s exposure to the possible failure of that system is extreme. China’s bubbles in real estate, finance, and demographics are a major part of the brittleness. So is US debt and discord. So are the wars in Ukraine and Israel. So is aging in Europe, Japan, Korea, Thailand, etc. So is the population growth in Middle East countries in the last 70+ years (Iran’s population has increased by more than 5x; Saudi Arabia’s by more than 10x). There is little strength in reserve anywhere to hold the global system together anymore. If China and Russia had joined the global order and integrated to the point that Russian and Chinese military forces were welcome to run operations out of US military bases, the system might still be sustainable. But that obviously didn’t happen, so the system is going to break sooner or later. And when it does, the resulting avalanche is going to come crashing down on China harder than anyone else.
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  111.  @kewenLu Zeihan is predicting a globe-spanning collapse. Could be China that sets off the avalanche, could be outside events that pull China down. In the broader view, it doesn’t matter which. China’s problem is that in a global scramble for, say, oil, China is doomed to be the biggest loser. Longest supply line with the most competitors along the line. Same story in almost everything— food, fertilizer, metal ores, and on and on.
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  112. The USA and the rest of the advanced democracies are the real reason for the end of China’s Century of Humiliation. In a world that has unlocked the techs that allow industrialization, it is China’s natural condition to be prey. China happens to have the world’s worst access to the resources necessary to support an industrialized economy. No other country has to go further afield than China to acquire oil, food, and fertilizer. Luckily for China, the US and the rest of the advanced democracies decided to create the rules based international order. That order is why the industrialized countries stopped preying on China. That order is why freedom of navigation exists which is why China is able to access the resources needed to become industrialized. Which is why it is so incredibly, incredibly stupid for China to side against the advanced democracies and work to undermine the rules based international order. Industrialization is not going to go away. If the rules based international order falls, and we return to a multipolar world like the world has had from “ancient times” up to WW2, China will fall back, deindustrialize, return to being prey, and enter a new Century of Humiliation.
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  113. He has always pegged China’s “collapsed by” date at 2030. The timing is based on the retirement of the “4” from China’s “4-2-1” demographic structure. The “4”have only just begun to reach retirement age. By 2030, they will almost all be retired.
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  114. Do you realize that a couple of years ago when China was feuding with Australia (over the Aussies having the temerity to suggest an unhindered investigation into the origins of covid), China decided to buy a load of coal from Kazakhstan? Shared border, completed BRI links. Kazakhstan’s biggest city of Almaty runs on coal, has a robust system to bring in coal from the rest of the country, and is less than 200 miles along the BRI rail line to the border with China. So of course China’s load of coal originated in Almaty and arrived by BRI, right? Nope. Cheaper to grab coal located at the other end of Kazakhstan, and put it on a ship. River to the Caspian Sea. River to canal to river through Russia to Sea of Azov, Kerch Strait, and the Black Sea. Turkish Straits to Aegean Sea to Mediterranean to Suez, Red Sea, Indian Ocean, Malacca, South China Sea, Taiwan Strait, and eventually to its destination in a Northern Chinese port. Ships are waaaaaay more efficient/cheaper for transporting commodities than any other option.
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  115. It’s down to seven now. At most. Could be less than one if the US decides not to stop escalation in the Persian Gulf by smacking Iran down for the attack on Israel.
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  116. Imports from China are down by 20% over the last year of data. US factory construction is up 100% over the last year of data. BTW, the US never fell below #2 in the world for manufacturing. The US has not manufactured very many products in recent years, but the US has always been far and away the best at producing manufacturing methods. For almost every new product that hits the market, it is hyper skilled American engineers who figure out exactly how to produce it. Then, once a process is perfected, it is dropped into whichever location is best for logistics. In recent years, the perfected processes have been dropped into East Asia, but those processes could easily be deployed somewhere else.
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  117. ⁠ @icet6665 Meh. Most American spending goes to services, housing, and food. We don’t get those things from China. We’ll have inflation in specific things like electronics and white goods, but the price sensitive can delay those sorts of purchases for several years— long enough for supply chains to relocate and prices to return to normal. Avoidable inflation. In contrast, China faces the prospect of unavoidable famine and famine-driven killing.
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  118.  @icet6665  The electorates of the advanced democracies see China as the enemy. Getting cut off from advanced microchips was just the start. Look for China to be cut off from more and more— tech, SWIFT, maritime insurance, naval protection for Chinese trade, freedom of navigation…. Good relations with, say, Brazil aren’t going to matter much when the trade connections between them dwindle to nothing.
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  119. You can camouflage regression by taking on debt. Like how a person who loses their job can maintain their lifestyle by running up their credit cards. This is why you see so much (incredibly boring, incredibly hard to comprehend) news coverage of the financial difficulties with China’s Local Government Financing Vehicles (LGFVs). When the unemployed person runs out of credit cards to run up, things go crunch in a hurry. The LGFVs are China’s province-scale credit cards.
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  120. Which means that it is especially China. No one has longer and more at-risk trade lifelines than China. In the coming era, China will always be last in line to access oil, fertilizers, metal ores, etc. Kind of short-sighted to undermine the rules based international order that eliminated proximity to resources as the prime determinant and replaced that system with one based on free markets, don’t you think? China could rise when it came down to deep pockets. Proximity? Death by a thousand cuts for China.
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  121. Zeihan has always pegged China’s “dead by” date as 2030. It’s based on demographics. By 2030, almost all of the “4”s from China’s “4-2-1” population structure will be retired. That popping of China’s demographic bubble will undoubtedly also burst China’s housing and debt bubbles. The CCP has stupidly allowed those bubbles to become intertwined. The sudden decline in Chinese housing and infrastructure construction will slash energy usage, creating waves that smash into the Middle East and then reverberate into the wider world. The resulting swathe of failed and near-failed states all along the route from the Middle East to China will leave China without energy and unable to even feed itself. Collapse with no chance of recovery until all of the countries between China and its sources of energy have recovered.
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  122. He has always pegged China’s “collapsed by” date at 2030. The timing is set be China’s retirement crisis. The “4” from China’s “4-2-1” demographic structure have only just started to retire. By 2030, they will almost all be retired.
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  123.  @ZZZ1368  The youth unemployment rate says that the more education strategy is not working. The CCPs crackdowns on tech and tutoring have had a chilling effect. Ditto for the problems with real estate and debt. A lot of students chose to pursue education in fields that have turned out to have poor prospects because abuse of CCP mismanagement. Raising the retirement age won’t work either. Experience from around the world has found that people who have spent their entire working lives doing manual labor are forced to retire at around age 60. The Chinese who are heading into retirement have spent their entire working lives doing manual labor, and analysts like Zeihan are assuming that they will retire around age 60. Raising the retirement age is a valid strategy for advanced economies where the majority of the workforce does knowledge based work, because knowledge based workers can remain productive into their 70s. For manual laborers like China’s older workers, human biology sets the limit at around age 60.
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  124. Zeihan has been saying that China would collapse by 2030. He has always referenced the Chinese retirement crisis as the backstop for the death of China. The oldest Chinese Boomers just started to reach retirement age (60 years old) within the last few months. By 2030, the Chinese Boomers will basically all be retired. The overwhelming majority of China’s Boomers were born between 1963 and 1970. They had an absolutely epic baby boom when they came out of the Great Chinese Famine (1958-1962). That baby boom was capped off by the introduction of the “Longer, Later, Fewer” policies starting in 1970 which limited families to two children, a mark that most families had already reached during the unrestricted baby boom years. From there, by the time those Chinese Boomers were old enough to have kids, the One Child Policy was in place. Net result is that from 2023-2030, China faces an absolute tidal wave of retirements, and because of the One Child Policy, there won’t be enough workers to do much of anything except “996” (Chinese work culture = 9am to 9pm, six days per week) changing adult diapers. There’s no way out, either. The first generation born under One Child are in their upper thirties now. Even if they wanted to pump out a couple hundred million babies over the next couple of years before the retirement crisis shifts into high gear, they probably wouldn’t be able to. So the earliest that China will be able to even hypothetically try to start addressing this population problem is with the second One Child generation who are all still minors. Zeihan’s prediction is that the retirement tidal wave driven collapse will preclude any such potential progress. So now we’re out to what? The 2070s or 2080s before they could even potentially start to rebuild the Chinese working age population? China is screwed.
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  125. Keep an eye on Israel. And on the US. In the past, Israel’s response would be contained and local. Any necessary long range retaliation would have been handled by the US. The net effect is that by voluntarily taking the (thankless) enforcer role, the US would have prevented escalation to wide scale regional war. If it turns out that Iran is behind this attack— and Iran is almost certainly behind this attack— and the US does not act as the enforcer, we will likely be seeing the long-delayed large scale war in the Middle East starting. If that is the case, we also just witnessed the trigger to China’s collapse. We’ll see what Biden decides to do. My guess is that he will have the US take on the enforcer role again. So China will be spared for now. But my guess is that Biden is the last US President who will be willing to put US lives on the line to keep the peace and protect access to oil that the US doesn’t use. So that’s another “by 2030” sword of Damocles hanging over China’s head.
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  126. China is screwed. It undercut itself with the One Child Policy and by inflating huge bubbles in its real estate and financial sectors. And even if it hadn’t screwed itself over that way, China is on borrowed time. The Century of Humiliation was not an aberration. So-called Humiliation is China’s norm in a world that has figured out how to navigate the oceans and harness the internal combustion engine. China just happens to have crap tier level maritime access to the resources that determine national power in an industrialized world. The US gifted China with a reprieve from its natural condition as prey, but instead of being grateful and working to help strengthen the US led order that produced that reprieve, China elected to undermine that order. So even if it can recover from its idiocy with One Child and its asset bubbles, it’s back to Humiliation as the best that China is likely to be able to manage for at least another Century.
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  127. China’s debts are far riskier and undoubtedly far larger. Unlike the US debt situation, China’s is almost entirely non-transparent. If you are worried about the US debt situation (and you are correct to worry), you should be absolutely terrified of China’s. China’s debt situation is probably bad enough to crash the global system on its own. Add in its real estate and demographic problems, and it’s hopeless. The US debt situation is bad enough that when the China crash happens, the US won’t be able to keep the global system from breaking up. And when the global rules based system, China is going to suffer the longest and hardest due to its having the world’s worst access to energy, food, and fertilizer. Loss of more than half of the Chinese population is the most likely outcome in Zeihan’s analysis.
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  128. China is a major part of the reason for the homelessness problem in cities like SF and NYC. Any American cheering for the misfortune falling on SF and NYC people is on the same level as the people who cheered at American farmers going bankrupt during the previous Administration’s trade war.
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  129. That’s what he is arguing. Globe-spanning collapse. Weaknesses and instabilities everywhere— in China, in the US, in Europe, in the Middle East, everywhere. Like a landscape of tinder-dry vegetation, fire/collapse is going to sweep through and lay much of the land bare. The US will come through singed but largely intact. Self sufficient in energy, food, and fertilizer gives resilience against the incoming wave of fire/collapse. So does the combination of the world’s strongest military and 800+ overseas military bases. In contrast, as the country with the world’s worst access to energy, food, and fertilizer— no one has longer and more at-risk critical logistical lifelines than China— China is going to be entirely consumed by the fire/collapse and likely will never rise again. Zeihan is predicting that more than half of the Chinese alive today will be consumed by the fire/collapse and that there is a strong possibility that we will be witness to the end of the Chinese Empire, similar to how the Roman Empire fell to be replaced by the array of countries and ethnicities that we know today.
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  130. It’s not going to be China’s choice. The only way China would have been able to avoid the catastrophic negative consequences of the coming global demographic collapse is if it had managed to join the US-centric inner circle of nations.
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  131. Century of Humiliation = China’s default state The US gifted China with a chance to rise above that state. To maintain that elevated state, all China needed to do is prove itself trustworthy. Nope. Complete failure. So back to the default it is.
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  132. Deflation, nearly the entire real estate development industry at risk of implosion (30% of China’s GDP), provinces in bankruptcy, etc. And keep in mind that this is only the very earliest stage of China’s demographic crisis. It’s going to get a LOT worse.
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  133. The US is currently paying China a negative real interest rate on those bonds. Thanks for the gift of free money, China!
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  134. The Century of Humiliation was not an aberration. China’s inherent ability to access oil, iron ore, fertilizer, etc. is among the worst in the world. Without US intervention, the lingua franca in China would be Japanese. US intervention only delayed the shift. If/when the US stops intervening, Humiliation will return to China. It will be interesting to see what the lingua franca ends up being. Could be Japanese, but probably won’t be. Maybe Hindi?
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  135.  @icet6665  The US was never at risk of Japanese invasion. Almost all of China’s population was under Japanese occupation.
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  136. Peak bubble is just-before-collapse bubble.
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  137. According to the official statistics, China as a whole has seen its birth rate fall by 46.5% over that period. That’s more than bad enough to be catastrophic. And that’s the official value, so the reality is likely significantly worse. As bad as 70%? Possibly. China’s Millennials are in their mid-thirties now. With most families only wanting to have one child, it’s possible that they have had their one child and so the number of births has dropped off accordingly.
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  138. China was basically collapsed until the US saved its ass in WW2. As recently as 2017, the majority of Americans had a favorable opinion of China. Not anymore. Between wolf warrior diplomacy, the brutal crackdown on peaceful Hong Kong protesters, and the lack of cooperation on covid, Americans (along with the people of all of the advanced democracies) now see China as enemy #1. That shift in global opinion means that China is doomed. China’s stupidity in creating its real estate, finance, and demographic bubbles means that its doom will slam down fast and hard, by 2030 at the latest.
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  139.  @JonySmith-bb4gx  95%+ of the Chinese population was under Japanese occupation when Japan surrendered to the US. That percentage never went down until that event. China was all but kaput as an independent country until the US resurrected it by defeating the Japanese. Polling data on countries’ opinions of China is freely available on the websites of Pew and Gallup, two of the most respected pollsters in the world. The 2030 date is Zeihan’s prediction. The timing is based on China’s “4-2-1” demographic problem. By 2030, the “4” in “4-2-1” will almost all be retired, and the resulting strain will make preventing China’s other bubbles from popping into an impossible task.
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  140. That fits with Zeihan’s hypothesis. The entire world, including the US, is becoming more and more brittle. No one, including the US, has the strength in reserve needed to hold the global system together in the face of a serious crack. The global demographic crisis that is worst in China but which applies to almost all of the world’s significant economies is certain to create such a crack. As a result, Zeihan predicts that the entire global system is going to come crashing down at some point in the next few years. Everyone is going to fall. Everyone is going to take damage. But the countries that will fall the furthest, take the most damage, and stay down the longest are the countries that have the longest and most at-risk logistical lifelines to acquire energy, fertilizer, food, and other critical inputs to support an industrialized economy. China has the globe’s worst position and so will fall the hardest. In contrast, the US is self sufficient in energy, fertilizer, etc. and has the combination of military power and a global network of hundreds of overseas military bases to allow it to acquire what it needs. The US won’t fall anywhere near as far or anywhere near as hard. And in the aftermath of the crash, while most of the world is still racked by famine and war, the US will have the opportunity for explosive growth thanks to the crash cutting down the competition.
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  141. Post WW2 US efforts allowed China to escape the Century of Humiliation. China’s efforts to bypass the rules is backfiring. The US is now backing away from its efforts that allowed China to escape its previous fate. New Century of Humiliation incoming. Except it may not stop at just one Century. And BTW, it won’t be the US or Europeans that choke China out this time. It will be the swathe of countries from India to Japan to Oceania and all in between that are positioned to prey on Chinese shipping that will choke China out this time.
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  142. The self inflicted Great Chinese Famine and 4-2-1 problem should make you question Chinese intelligence. They might be book smart, but they definitely seem to be lacking in common sense.
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  143. He’s predicting a globe-spanning collapse. The problems you mention are some of the weaknesses that will contribute. But once the system collapses, and countries find themselves fighting over every possible scrap of resources to stave off national oblivion, China is going to find itself on the wrong spot on the globe. No one has longer, more at-risk trade lifelines than China.
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  144. Check his long form talks, the ones where he brings the data on PowerPoint slides. Several of his talks are available on different channels from this one. (I guess the groups that hire him to speak own the rights to the video instead of him.) He’s extremely bullish on the USA, nearly as bearish on Germany and Russia as he is on China, and sees France and the Scandinavians as the winners of Europe. Japan, India, Uzbekistan, Turkey, and some of the SE Asian nations (can’t remember which ones) are the winners in Asia. Argentina in South America. Angola in Africa. Or if you have the attention span, his books go into even more depth.
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  145. The unemployed go back to the countryside. One way the CCP controls people is via the hukou system. Things like a tiny stipend, cheap healthcare, free education, cheap housing, cheap food, etc. can be accessed in your ancestral village. The communal stuff from the Mao era, basically. Anywhere else except your ancestral village, and everything is market rate which is much, much more expensive. China’s unemployment numbers are only for people who are away from their ancestral village. People in their ancestral village are all counted as employed. The weakness of the system is that the jobs are all concentrated in the big cities which is not where most people’s ancestral homes are. And if you go back to your ancestral village, the right to free education or free medical care doesn’t do you any good if there are no teachers or doctors in your podunk little village in the middle of nowhere.
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  146. Everyone should be horrified at what is coming. The amount of human suffering is going to be absolutely horrific. Unfortunately for the Chinese, the suffering is going to be especially acute in China. The China-Iran-Syria thing? Piffle.
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  147. Doesn’t matter. They’re both doomed.
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  148.  @nathrogers7  Still doesn’t matter. China would be screwed by outside forces almost no matter what. Likely the only way for China to have escaped being doomed to abject collapse would have been if China had managed to find a way into the US’s inner circle of friends and allies. Even then, its bubbles in real estate, finance, and demographics would have made national survival difficult, but at least we probably wouldn’t be talking about the end of mankind’s most enduring civilization and culture. China is likely about to go the way of Rome, crashed and then permanently split into a multitude of pieces that will each go their own way for the rest of time.
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  149.  @nathrogers7  Still doesn’t matter all that much. I guess it’s going to make China’s fall somewhat worse, and that will definitely matter for some. Maybe some millions. But from a big picture point of view, there’s probably not going to be a noticeable difference between “dead China” and “very dead China.”
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  150.  @leezhieng  No, China’s problems are far worse. For starters, you simply don’t get a drop in the birth rate bigger than with an authoritarian government imposing a draconian One Child Policy. China has just started to see the effect. The oldest of the post-Great Chinese Famine birth cohort started turning 60 over the last several months. The “4” from China’s “4-2-1” demographic structure have just started to retire; they will almost all be retired by 2030. In addition, Japan was able to increase the workforce participation rate to offset some of the decline in the working age population. At Japan’s peak, it was the norm for women to become stay-at-home housewives/mothers upon getting married. As the labor supply became constricted, Japan was able to compensate by bringing women back into the workforce. Shinzo Abe said that increasing the women’s workforce participation rate was the greatest success of his tenure as Prime Minister. China doesn’t have that buffer available, because Chinese women already work. Japan’s peak was stunted by removing women from the workforce, but Japan’s fall has been cushioned by bringing women back into the workforce. In addition, Japan is much, much better at automation than China is. In the global robotics sector, almost half of the value-added is contributed by Japan. China is less than 1%. (Germany is #2 at 10%. Then there is a slew of countries at 2% that includes the US, Canada, the advanced European countries, Korea, and Taiwan.) A major benefit of automation is that the dearth of human workers allows remote factories to be viable, even halfway around the globe. The biggest and most profitable Toyota factories these days aren’t in Japan. They’re in Kentucky and Texas. But that’s a strategy that China can’t capitalize on, because China fears having those sorts of overseas assets seized. Japan is way ahead in automation, and their friendly relations with the countries of the big consumer markets in the advanced world allow them to profit from automation in a way that China cannot. On that note, Japan’s friendly relations with the countries of the advanced world ensures that they are at no risk of being cut off from advanced microprocessors or other tech. China’s situation is obviously far worse for tech access. Japan’s real estate bubble popped in 1992. Their Boomers didn’t retire until the 2010s. Japan had the luxury of facing those challenges one at a time. China has set itself up to face both at the same time. Where Japan has stalled out, China is going to regress. Hard. Chinese collapse is the most likely outcome.
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  151.  @gliu1431  Nope, China undoubtedly has far more debt than the US. Sum up the national government debt, local government debt, and local government financing vehicle debt for both countries, and China’s total is definitely far higher. In addition, China’s banking sector has more debt. China’s household debt even recently surpassed America’s which is totally astounding. Then you have to consider the implied debt of Chinese expectations that the CCP will not allow real estate prices to fall. The only comparison where China comes out ahead is if you limit the comparison to national government debt. But that’s a pointless comparison. The value of the national government debt isn’t what matters. Just a number on a spreadsheet. What actually matters is the country’s ability to provide critical government services. Things like education, infrastructure, police protection, security from invasion, etc. For most countries, it’s the national government that provides all of those government services, so it makes sense to look at the national government debt. For the US, that’s not quite right, because in the US many core government services are provided at the state and local government level. For the US, you should account for state and local government debt. In practice, we usually don’t bother, though, because US state and local governments are forbidden by law to carry much debt. Those terms are small compared to the national debt, so it doesn’t affect the bottom line to ignore the state and local government debts. As a result in practice, we usually just look at national government debt when evaluating the US. In China, as in the US, many government services are provided by local governments. But unlike in the US, China’s local governments have racked up huge amounts of debt. To assess China’s ability to provide critical government services, you have to account for those debts. How huge are they? No one knows. Local government financing vehicles were designed from the start to be non-transparent. But that lack of transparency should terrify the Chinese public. Graft and corruption have the ugly tendency of being far worse than you expect even when you try to take into account that they are probably far worse than you expect.
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  152.  @gliu1431  China’s debts are far bigger and far riskier. Probably several-fold larger. Just the implied debt is much bigger. Add the explicit debts on top of that, and China’s debts are much, much bigger. Default? Don’t be silly. Neither country is at risk of default. You can’t run out of USD if you are able to print USD; you can’t run out of RMB if you are able to print RMB. What you actually want to worry about is a liquidity crisis. Like what happened to the US with the 2008 financial crisis. Spots in the economy that have too much bad debt, and when the bad debts come due, the disrupted flow at those spots threatens to propagate out to large swathes of the economy. The resulting cascade can cause massive unnecessary harm. Both countries obviously have the funds to get money into the spots that need it. Just print what you need. The problem is that it is hard to identify the spots that need the funds. The combination of opacity and complexity in the mortgage backed securities market is what made it difficult in 2008. In a possible Chinese crisis, the difficulty will come from whatever is stashed away under the “local government financing vehicle” moniker. How much opacity and complexity do you think corrupt Chinese officials and their co-conspirators were able to cook up?
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  153. China’s real growth ended years ago. The CCP has camouflaged that fact by building up massive debt and asset bubbles, but that is only going to end up making the inevitable reckoning exponentially worse.
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  154. Zeihan has always had China’s collapse by date as 2030.
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  155. He has been saying by 2030 for many years now. The “4-2-1” problem is the ultimate schedule determiner. When the rate of retirements goes into high gear, that will definitely set off the collapses in the real estate and financial sectors if those bubbles haven’t been allowed to pop yet.
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  156.  @icet6665  The PRC is going to collapse within the next seven years. And it’s entirely self inflicted. China’s housing market, debt, and demographic problems lie entirely at the feet of the CCP. With autocratic governance, a collapse was inevitable, but this? This is going to be heartbreakingly awful. BTW, Zeihan is 50 years old, if I remember correctly. He’s younger than the “4” in China’s “4-2-1” demographic structure. If you honestly think he’s at major risk of Alzheimer’s, maybe it’s because Alzheimer’s has been running rampant through the Chinese Boomer cadre? Did you just let the curtain slip? Has China been covering up another huge epidemic? This time, instead of covid, it’s Alzheimer’s? Actually, this would explain a lot…. And medical science still hasn’t nailed down the cause of Alzheimer’s…. China has had incredible levels of air and water pollution…. Then there’s the incredibly sketchy Chinese food supply….
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  157. Zeihan’s prediction has always been that China would collapse by 2030. He has been calling for that date for over a dozen years now. The year is set by the retirement of the “4” in China’s “4-2-1” population structure. The “4” just started to retire in the last few months, and they will all be retired by 2030.
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  158. Zeihan has always put China’s expiration date at 2030. Could be earlier if they shoot themselves in the face, but 2030 is a hard deadline. 2030 is based on their retirement crisis and has been locked in since back in 1970 when the last of the Chinese Boomers were born without constraint by CCP family planning restrictions. Japan has had a lot of advantages that China lacks. First, Japan’s birth rate didn’t collapse as fast. With natural progression, you simply don’t get a collapse in the birth rate as sudden as the instantaneous imposition of draconian authoritarian family planning restrictions. Second, Japan has been able to partially offset its decline in working age population by increasing the workforce participation rate. At Japan’s peak, it was normal for women to leave the workforce upon getting married. In the last couple of decades, Japan has made major strides in getting more work out of its female half of the population. Japan’s peak was stunted by its women not working, but the underutilized spare capacity has helped to greatly cushion Japan’s fall. China doesn’t have that spare capacity, because Chinese women already work. Third, when Japan was thriving, Japanese workers received big pension payouts upon retirement. In essence, instead of taking the full salary that they were entitled to, Japanese workers kept part of their money with their employers which then got returned to them as their pension at retirement. It’s easy to see how worker savings that are left in the hands of, say, Toyota can be turned into automated systems that can allow Toyota to survive with a retirement crisis driven decline in the size of the workforce. In contrast, Chinese workers savings are mostly tied up in the form of real estate. There is no good way to turn condos into industrial robots. Fourth, Japan is waaay ahead of China in robotics. Almost 50% of the value-added in the global robotics industry comes from Japan. China provides less than 1%. (Germany is #2 at 10%, then there’s a bunch of countries that includes the US, Korea, Taiwan, the Netherlands, Italy, etc. at around 2%.) Fifth, Japan’s decades of stagnation came during a period of global peace, low inflation, and low capital costs. Japan was never cut off from tech or sanctioned. China is facing the opposite. There is no chance for China to do as well as Japan has.
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  159. He predicts global mass famine and famine-driven violence. Likely billions dead. It will be especially bad in China. A lot of desperate countries are going to grasp at any straw to stave off death, and China has the longest, most at-risk trade lifelines on the planet, so the shortfalls will fall hardest on China. He pointedly tries to avoid predicting what China’s outcome will be. Could become a giant North Korea. Could split up permanently like how the fall of the Roman Empire eventually led to the formation of a bunch of new countries.
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  160. The West gifted China with the chance to rise. China’s response was militarized artificial islands in other countries’ EEZs, wolf warrior diplomacy, the brutal crackdown on Hong Kong, and a subversive approach to covid. If China can’t even be trusted to cooperate in the face of a deadly pandemic, why the hell would anyone trust China on anything? China’s normal is what it calls the Century of Humiliation. China happens to have among the world’s worst access to the resources needed to support an industrialized economy. Screw ‘em. Let the Indians, Japanese, Indonesians, etc. do what they’ve been wanting to do and cut China off. China can fall back into its normal abyss as the least industrialized and most preyed upon part of the world.
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  161. This is about globe-spanning geopolitical forces. China is just one part. Obviously a very large part, but still just one part. The result is going to leave China with many failed and near-failed states astride its critical supply lifelines. China happens to have the longest and most at-risk trade lifelines on the planet. That ensures that China is going to fall farther and take longer to ever stand up again than anyone else.
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  162.  @icet6665  Consider oil. Who has to go further, past more countries, and through more geographic chokepoints than China? No one. And it’s the same in most industrial commodities— food, fertilizer, mineral ores, etc. How many military bases does China have along its oil trade lifeline? One base off the route in Djibouti. The tyranny of distance will gut China’s ability to protect its oil import flow. And again, it’s the same for most industrial commodities.
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  163. 2030. Zeihan’s prediction has always been “by 2030.” That’s the year he has specified in his speaking engagements for at least the last dozen years and in each of his four books, the earliest of which was published in 2014.
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  164.  @bjernkavertte1586  The 2030 date is mostly based on demographics. Both China’s and the rest of the world’s. The demographic conditions between now and 2030 have basically been locked in stone based on decisions that were made decades ago. Instead of a prediction like a weather forecast, this is more like a prediction of when the next full moon will occur.
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  165.  @bjernkavertte1586  China is lacking in current 10-year-olds who will enter the working age population (ages 15 to 64) in 2028. The people who made the decisions on the current number of ten year olds are the people who were of childbearing age eleven years ago (10 years and nine months ago to be more precise). It is too late to produce any more current ten year olds. The best case number of Chinese 15-year-olds in 2028 is basically set in stone. The chances of deviation from what is expected are small, and they are all to the downside.
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  166.  @bjernkavertte1586  “Wait and see” results in countless unnecessary deaths. I hope as many people as possible will take action to save themselves and their loved ones from the horror that is about to hit China. Xi Jinping’s daughter is living in the US. If life outside of China is the right choice for Xi’s only offspring, then chances are high that life outside of China is the right choice for everyone.
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  167.  @bjernkavertte1586  A year or so ago, a House of Representatives member of the Congressional -Executive Commission on China accidentally leaked the fact that Xi’s daughter was moving to Boston from NYC where she had been living and working since graduating from Harvard. The surprise and dismay that the other Commissioners responded with upon being asked to verify the initial report lends credence to the accuracy of the reporting. I wonder if Xi’s daughter has a green card? Or if she has applied for US citizenship?
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  168. 2030. Zeihan has been saying that China will collapse into mass famine and civil unrest by 2030. He is predicting that hundreds of millions of Chinese will die prematurely as China loses access to imports of energy, food, and fertilizer. After decades of pollution and urban sprawl, China’s carrying capacity without imported energy, food, and fertilizer is probably below 400 million people. And big population corrections invariably overshoot the mark. Zeihan has been consistent in specifying a deadline of 2030 for the start of the collapse since at least his first book which was published in 2014. Note that that book recently rose to prominence because of its prediction that Russia would invade Ukraine by 2022.
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  169. Zeihan has always put China’s “dead by” date at 2030. It’s based on the Chinese retirement crisis. By 2030, almost all of the “4s” from China’s “4-2-1” demographic structure will be retired. With each Chinese Boomer that retires, the risk ratchets up that China’s bubbles in real estate and finance will go into full meltdown. From there, China’s economy is so big that China’s meltdown is almost certain to drag the global system down with it. Part of the certainty there is because resilience of the global system has also been eroded by the weaknesses in the advanced democracies. When the global system breaks, everyone will suffer, but no one will suffer worse or for longer than the Chinese, because China happens to have the longest and most at-risk logistical lifelines on the planet. When the global system breaks, China will be the poorest, least industrialized country on the planet. A country of subsistence farmers. Powered by human toil, fertilized with human feces. Since the carrying capacity of China’s land under subsistence agriculture is probably only about half of the current population, that means massive famine and likely civilizational collapse. And this sort of population reset never settles easily at the new carrying capacity. A reset like this almost always overshoots….
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  170. China’s cowardice in the face of its real estate and finance bubbles has ensured that they are going to face a triple threat— real estate, debt, and demographics all at the same time. Any one of those problems would have carried a risk of systemic collapse. All three at the same time? China is dead man walking.
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  171. Irrelevant. Mostly, anyway. China’s collapse is going to be just one part of a global fall back.
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  172. But this time actually is different. In all of human history, we have never had a demographic bubble anything like this pop before.
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  173. He has done that several times over the years. He doesn’t own the rights to his presentations when he is hired to speak or give an interview, so you need to look for those talks on other channels, not his own. He has always seen California and the rest of the US West Coast as some of the parts of the US that will do the worst in the coming era. Those predictions certainly seem to have been accurate, too.
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  174. Unlike China, the rest of the world dealt with their housing bubble popping 15 years ago. And no one else inflicted a One Child Policy on themselves, so no one is facing anywhere near as bad of a demographic crisis as China. We’ll see who has the biggest debt problem. No one really knows what the condition of China’s Local Government Financing Vehicles is….
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  175. It’s how he can best save lives…. To do anything else would be a moral failing. To any mainland Chinese: Get out while you can. Please.
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  176. Jiayou?
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  177. The railway links are rinky dink compared to seaborne trade. The amount that it is physically possible to transport via those rail links is minuscule compared to the amount that is currently transported by ship. Probably a factor of several hundred times, maybe more than 1000x. Good luck with a reduction in your imports of raw materials of between 99% and 99.9%. Ships are simply THAT much more efficient. More than 98% of ton-miles of all international trade is conducted via ship. If it can go by ship, it does. And there are a lot of overland routes around the globe that are much, much, much more promising than crossing Siberia or the other geographic land barriers that led to China choosing to call itself the “Middle Kingdom.” Think about how many thousands of containers you can get onto a single giant ship. Now think about how many more moving parts there are to wear out when you try to transport those containers by train (or truck). Then factor in the cost of maintaining track (or roadway) vs the ocean being maintenance free. A China sustained by rail from Russia is a China that is not sustained at all. “Well, the good news is that we were able to maintain 1% of the patient’s blood circulation….” But hey, the leaders of the CCP might be OK with that. Just need enough to keep the top few thousand CCP members living in luxury, amiright? We don’t actually care about the host (China), it’s all about keeping the parasite (CCP) alive.
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  178.  @EndTheFeds  Fundamental limitation is fundamental.
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  179. China probably peaked a couple of years before that. Since then, the GDP numbers have been false growth created via unproductive deficit spending. In addition, in a selfish bid to consolidate his hold on power, Xi Jinping chose to pander to the masses and squander China’s geopolitical standing. China’s economic and geopolitical foundations have been swapped out for paper mache. But on the plus side, Xi’s popularity is high, and that’s far more important, right?
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  180. That still doesn’t solve the problem. They would also need to figure out a way to accomplish that on a global scale. Or near global scale, anyway. And their efforts to boost their own birth rate have been resounding failures so far. And it’s way too late anyway. Would have needed to do it 20 years ago.
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  181.  @loveisneverasin9092 US factory construction has skyrocketed to levels not seen since WW2, and the curve only points up with no indications of bending back towards the baseline. That is undoubted a major part of why imports from China are down by 20% over the last year. China used to be the US’s #1 trade partner, but now they have fallen to #3, behind Mexico and Canada. If you agglomerate the EU bloc, they’re #1, pushing China to #4. If you do the same with ASEAN, they’re now ahead of China too.
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  182. China has inflated giant, intertwined bubbles in demographics, real estate, and finance. China’s position is incredibly precarious. In addition, global stability, especially the global energy market, has also become incredibly precarious. Another giant house of cards. China is a giant house of cards in the middle of a globe-spanning house of cards. Worse, those houses of cards have a “doomed by” date. That date is 2030. By 2030, the “4” from China’s “4-2-1” demographic structure will almost all be retired. China’s retirement crisis is certain to bring the giant, interwoven houses of cards tumbling down. As the country with the longest, most threatened supply lifelines in the world, China is destined to suffer more than any other country in the coming desperate scramble to acquire the resources needed to survive.
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  183. The BRI has failed. Waste of resources. The borrower countries will never be able to repay those loans. There were good reasons why the free market didn’t want to touch those projects for so many years. China and the CCP bureaucrats involved need to admit their failure and suffer the consequences of their actions. Stringing things along is only making everything worse.
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  184.  @wilhelmreinhardt4643  Ok.
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  185. Two big ones: 1. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. 2. Shale oil made the US oil self sufficient in 2019. He predicted both and put it in writing in his book from 2014. Also in that book: his prediction that China would collapse by 2030. He has missed on a bunch of predictions on the course of the war in Ukraine, but that’s small potatoes. In the big picture, those details don’t really matter. The territory that Russia has captured doesn’t come anywhere close to offsetting the impact of Finland and Sweden joining NATO. In terms of chess, the territory that Russia has captured is like a pawn away from the action off to the side of the board while Finland and Sweden are a knight and a bishop right near Russia’s king. In the competition that matters, Russia vs the West, Russia has already lost. It’s a matter of playing it out. If that takes a few more or a few less moves than Zeihan predicts… shrug.
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  186. In part, you are correct. 30 years ago is probably the latest that repealing the One China Policy could have averted China’s coming “4-2-1” retirement disaster.
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  187. Watch out for the financial bubble. It’s tangled up with the rest. You need to be able to get by if the banks freeze depositors’ funds or if the value of the yuan falls by 80% or more.
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  188. By 2030. The timing of Zeihan’s prediction has always been based on the timing of the retirement of the “4” in China’s “4-2-1” demographic structure.
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  189. China’s official numbers undoubtedly heavily err on whichever side makes China look better. Even high level CCP officials acknowledge this fact publicly. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that although China overall is definitely much weaker than the official numbers, the cancerous CCP is definitely much stronger than official numbers indicate. The corrupt CCP has certainly squirreled away far more hidden assets than most observers are assuming. So when the inevitable breakdown happens, regular Chinese will suffer more than anyone predicts while the regime will cling to power far more tenaciously than anyone predicts. Very, very likely that we end up with the China-as-a-giant-version-of-North-Korea outcome. China is on a path that results in never ending tragedy. The worst Chinese win while the good and innocent Chinese lose, forever.
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  190. The fact that Xi’s daughter lives in the USA says that Xi disagrees. Why do you suppose the CCP feels the need to hide that fact from the people of China?
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  191. Unusually good harvests (with record low payouts on crop insurance) for the globe as a whole prevented major problems. Even with that, we had some significant food price increases. How long can we continue to be lucky?
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  192. Mass famine. Hundreds of millions dead of starvation and hunger-driven violence. The end of the Chinese civilization with the permanent rise of a slew of new nations/cultures in its place (akin to the end of the Roman Empire and eventual replacement with modern Italy, Greece, France, etc.) is a strong possibility but not a certainty.
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  193. China has way more debt than the US. It’s just not as obvious because the Chinese system is so much less transparent. Sum up national government, local government, and local government financing vehicle debt, and China’s debt is undoubtedly much higher than the USA’s. Banking sector debt is higher in China. Just in the last few years, Chinese household debt surpassed the US, too. And then there’s the implied debt of the Chinese real estate sector. The CCP has been promising that Chinese real estate prices will never go down. If the CCP is going to keep that promise, it’s going to cost many tens of trillions of dollars. Way more debt in the Chinese system. That debt means that China’s ability to provide essential services like education, running water, police and fire services, etc. is far more precarious than most recognize.
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  194. Once humanity figured out industrialization, China’s “normal place” has been what the Chinese call the “Century of Humiliation.” China just happens to have the world’s worst access to oil, iron ore, potash, etc. In an industrialized world, China’s destiny is to be the least industrialized and therefore to be prey.
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  195. Peak bubble is just-before-collapse bubble.
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  196.  @amunt3r  China’s automotive industry is likely another bubble. The Chinese government pumps tons of debt-derived capital into the industry, and those companies use that money to pump out vehicles. But the thing is that the profit margin on each sale is currently razor thin, maybe even negative. At some point, those companies need to transition to making real profits. Otherwise, when the capital dries up, those companies will collapse along with the rest of China’s giant house of cards. Automation isn’t a one-off. You need a constant cash flow to retool your robots with every new product or tweak to an existing product line. With, say, Toyota, that cost is covered from the earnings from the sale of each unit. Currently, Chinese manufacturers cover that cost using debt-derived government support. That’s not sustainable. It’s another bubble. When the cash flow stops, that’s just another bubble that will pop. And there is no doubt that the bubbles are going to pop. China’s retirement crisis, the retirement of the “4” in China’s “4-2-1” population structure, puts a cap on how long the bubbles can possibly survive. That cap is 2030. By 2030, the majority of China’s “4” generation will have retired.
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  197. At a negative real interest rate. They give us $1.00, and a year later we give them $0.98 (when inflation is taken into account). It’s definitely weird, but the weirdness isn’t on the US end of things. That’s especially true when they are supposedly growing at 5%+ per year. If they’re actually growing like that, shouldn’t they have much better opportunities available to them than lending it out to the US government at a negative rate of return?
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  198. Zeihan’s prediction is that it will happen by 2030. He has had that year pegged for over a decade.
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  199. Zeihan has always said that it would happen by 2030. The timing of his forecast has always been based on the timing of the global retirement crisis. China is the biggest contributor to that crisis with the retirement of the “4” from their “4-2-1” demographic structure. By 2030, almost all of the “4” generation will be retired.
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  200. Biden’s big legislative accomplishments are all very “America First.” Lots of requirements and incentives to prioritize Made-in-the-USA and made-within-NAFTA components and equipment. In addition, the Biden Trade Office has greatly increased its enforcement activities. Tons of positions that were left empty through the Trump Administration have been filled. That’s lots of trade lawyers hired and bringing cases against companies/countries that have been getting away with failing to live up to the requirements of trade deals. Trump talked big, but his execution sucked. In particular, Trump’s trade war was a predictable disaster. We knew for certain that his moves would trigger automatic WTO penalties. For f’s sake, US trade lawyers authored the majority of those provisions. Giant “L” for the USA. But, hey, it was good for Trump politically since most voters never look beneath the surface, and that’s all that matters, right? Trump’s only significant legislative accomplishment, the Tax Cut and Jobs Act, was also a disaster as measured by an “America First” yardstick. The most important provision in TCJA was the slashing of the capital gains tax for stocks. But about 40% of US stocks are owned by foreigners, so the TCJA was a giant boon to wealthy foreigners. Run up the US deficit and the national debt to put money into foreigners’ pockets? Anyone who believes in “America First” should be horrified.
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  201. This guy’s prediction has always been “by 2030.” He’s been consistent on that expiration date for well over a decade. I don’t know who the other guy is, but his false predictions don’t provide protection from good predictions, so why bring him up?
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  202. The CCP damned the country of China. The only way China could have survived is if it had allied itself with the US. Nothing less than the combined allied Chinese and advanced democracy militaries ever had a chance of maintaining the level of global peace, security, and freedom of navigation of the last 75+ years. China is utterly dependent on that level of global stability. China has been doomed ever since the CCP chose the path of undermining the US instead of the path of allying with the US.
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  203. Many countries are going to collapse. The USA will not be one of them. Many countries that lie along China’s critical supply lifelines will face collapse, and they can be expected to grab what they can instead of going quietly into the night. That dynamic will ensure that China falls fastest and hardest.
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  204. Self reliance isn’t possible anymore. It is a well understood phenomenon that traditional agriculture transfers fertility to the edges of cities and towns. Crops contain some of the nutrients from the soil, some of those crops are transported to cities and towns to feed the urbanized population, those people’s poop gets spread on nearby fields. Net effect = gradual transfer of soil fertility to the land on the edges of the cities and towns. China’s long history = that gradual transfer happening for longer in China than just about anywhere else. But where have the edges of China’s cities and towns been for most of the last few thousand years? Where are the edges today? China’s most fertile land has been paved over. Soil is a living thing. Pave it over, and it dies. The nutrients are converted into inorganic forms and are lost forever. China’s remaining farmland is incredibly infertile. To grow the crops it does, China uses 5x-8x as much fertilizer and 7x-12x as much pesticide per hectare as the US. Those agricultural inputs are mostly imported. Self reliance is not possible for China. Can’t even come anywhere close to being able to feed itself.
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  205.  @Bomer-Bomer  That’s not self reliant. And they can’t access those locations in bulk without the help of the West. Without the West’s “interference,” it seems pretty likely that countries like Japan and India would make it extremely difficult for China to access those locations in bulk. Probably many more countries than just Japan and India will take their pound of flesh, but those two seem like a likely start.
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  206. Not even close. China is dependent on energy, fertilizers, pesticides, food, minerals, etc. from an ocean or more away. No country has a worse combination of dependency on maritime trade and length/risk associated with those maritime trade lifelines.
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  207. GDP growth higher than any since the 1980s, low unemployment not matched since the 1960s and not beaten since the 1950s, factory construction not beaten since WW2. The overwhelming majority get hit with the resulting higher inflation (new factories aren’t cheap, and companies pass the cost on to consumers) before they or someone they know gets one of the high paying jobs in one of the new factories, so there’s lots of discontent in the opening year or two of such a boom. Once the new factories are completed and hiring takes off, people’s outlook brightens.
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  208. @@jtran7272 Check his books. The first one was published in 2014. Also, several of his presentations are on YouTube, and some of them predate his first book by several years. His hypothesis is that the world is transitioning to a very different sort of existence, and the two big landmarks along the way that he stuck his neck out for are (1) a Russian invasion of Ukraine by 2022 and (2) the collapse of China by 2030. (1) came true exactly as he predicted. (2) is looking more and more prescient.
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  209. @@jtran7272 He has always put the expiration date at 2030. Could happen sooner, but definitely by 2030. The levels of capital flight and outward emigration by PRC high net worth individuals says that the PRC insiders believe this, too. Where is Xi Jinping’s daughter living these days? A few years ago, she was living and working in New York, if I remember correctly.
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  210. @@jtran7272 Debt. If you run up your credit cards, you can disguise the fact that you lost your job for a while. Same thing with an economy— run up enough debt, and you can make your economy seem healthy for a while. Have you been following what has been happening with Evergrande, Country Garden, and the financial position of China’s local governments?
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  211. Um, that’s exactly what you expect in the lead up to a collapse. If China were truly experiencing healthy world-leading growth, they would be sucking in capital. The fact that Chinese insiders are instead trying to get their money out of China and into land, resources, loans for projects that are located outside of China is an ominous sign. Rats fleeing a sinking ship.
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  212. The breakdown of global order is going to hurt every country, but the pain will not be evenly distributed. China will suffer the most from loss of access to energy, fertilizer, food, metal ores etc. The US will suffer least because it is self sufficient in energy, food, fertilizer, and most other resources. The US also has the military power and military base network needed to fill any gaps. Japan and Korea would be even more screwed than China, but they have the advantage of being trusted to operate out of the US’s global network of military bases as jumping off points to go get what they need.
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  213. He predicts that China’s collapse will be accompanied by even more draconian capital controls than are already in place. So winning bets on China’s collapse won’t be able to cash out. You’re likely be stuck holding a big pile of chips that you can’t turn into anything real. If anyone can figure out a way around the capital controls, more power to them, but he recommends a safer play of betting on the positive outlook in other locations/sectors. Maybe one of the big institutional investors will find an angle, but the regular man on the street should just stay away from anything China.
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  214. What people fail to recognize is that China is not facing a bunch of big problems. China is facing a single gigantic, multifaceted problem. People talk about China’s debt, housing market, and retirement problems like they’re separate things. They’re not. They’re all tightly intertwined with each other. For example, 70% of China’s wealth is tied up in residential real estate. What is the #1 reason that people save money for? To pay for retirement. So when their Boomers retire over the next few years, it is a certainty that they will try to sell off some of their real estate to pay for things like food and medical care. That massive surge in selling due to the massive surge in retirements will be a massive surge in downward pressure on real estate prices. But the Chinese people are completely convinced that the CCP will never allow real estate prices to fall. The CCP has fed into that perception, so there is an implicit, unwritten guarantee there that will trigger massive political blowback if it is broken. Preventing real estate prices from falling would be an absolutely gargantuan task. We would be talking about pumping something like $50 trillion into the sector. That’s “trillion” with a “t.” The only way they could scrape up that kind of cash is via massive amounts of debt. Their problems with debt, real estate, and retirements are all intimately intertwined. They have combined into an absolutely massive problem that is far worse than the sum of its parts. The timer on this bomb is set by their demographics, the retirement timeline of their Boomers. That timer was locked in back when the last of their Boomers was born more than five decades ago. That timer hits zero by 2030. China is dead man walking. Oh, and then there’s the whole “global freedom of navigation is unraveling” thing. That will ensure that they will never have a chance to rise again.
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  215. Walmart will have the opportunity to pivot to alternative suppliers. China will have no opportunities.
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  216. Yes, that is what he is predicting. Wide scale collapse that spans the globe. China’s problems with demographics, debt, and asset bubbles are especially bad, but they are nowhere close to unique. Those problems are going to collapse the global system that we know and set off a global scramble for resources. China happens to have the world’s longest, most precarious supply lifelines, so China is going to come out worse than anyone else in that scramble. Zeihan is predicting that China’s especially bad bubbles in demographics, real estate, and finance mean that China will fall especially hard in the beginning. The result will be the destruction of the current global system and the triggering of a feeding frenzy that will strip any remaining flesh from China’s bones for the foreseeable future. In contrast, some countries are going to come through the upcoming globe-spanning collapse relatively unscathed. At the top of the list of such countries is the US. The US doesn’t have enormous bubbles and is self sufficient in food and energy. Further, the combination of the US military with the US’s 800+ military bases ensures that the US won’t face any truly crippling shortages even during the coming scramble. The US will have to deal with a few years of very high inflation in specific manufactured products from fubared supply chains as large swathes of the world collapse, but Americans will never suffer from a serious lack of any basic necessities. Zeihan is predicting that billions around the world are going to die awful deaths of famine and war with a disproportionate number of those deaths being concentrated in China. The US is not going to come out of this totally unscathed, but compared to the effects of mass famine or civil war, deaths from supply chain problems in specific medicines or electronic devices will be almost inconsequential.
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  217. US debt-to-GDP ratio has improved by 10% over the last 12 months, and the US is currently paying a NEGATIVE real interest rate on its debt. Foreigners are paying the US for the privilege of lending money to the US government. US factory construction has doubled over the last 12 months and is now at rates not seen since WW2. Imports from China are down by 20% over the last 12 months. The US now trades with each of the EU, Mexico, Canada, and ASEAN more than it trades with China. In an industrialized world, China’s natural state is what we saw during the so-called Century of Humiliation. US power and the US creation of the rules based international order gifted China with a reprieve, but China’s abuse of that order has convinced the US to stop giving China undeserved gifts. Back to Centuries of Humiliation for China. China happens to have basically the world’s worst access to the resources that a country needs to be industrialized. The US created order gifted China with the same access as everyone else. That is ending. Being cut off from advanced microchips is just the start. Before long, China will be cut off from SWIFT and global finance. Eventually, China will be cut off from freedom of navigation. For Centuries. Of Humiliation. Except there’s nothing to be humiliated about. That’s just the way the universe is. China is going to return to its natural state as an economic backwater, the country that mothers all around the globe tell their small children, “Eat your vegetables. There are starving kids in China who would love to have them.”
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  218. They give us $1.00 today. A year later, we give them $0.98, and both sides call it settled. The US government is paying a NEGATIVE real interest rate these days. Foreigners are paying us for the privilege of lending us money. Who’s the sucker here?
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  219. The retirement crisis has barely started, and the bubbles in real estate and finance haven’t popped. Those things are all interconnected, and the retirements are completely inevitable, so the whole house of cards is destined to come crashing down in the next few years.
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  220. Since at least the early 2010s, Zeihan has been saying that China would collapse by 2030. He has always referenced the retirement of the “4” from China’s “4-2-1” population structure as being the backstop that ensures the death of China. The first of China’s born-in-the-aftermath-of-the-Great-Chinese-Famine Boomers turned 60 over the last several months.
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  221.  @shermanpeabody6102  Potash, natural gas, and oil are the raw materials for making 2/3rds of the NPK fertilizer trio as well as every type of pesticide. China imports those inputs from more than an ocean away. To grow the food it does, China currently uses 5x as much N and K fertilizer and 7x as much pesticide per hectare as the US does. China will cease to be the world’s largest producer of agricultural commodities if those imports get cut off.
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  222.  @ashepherd7922  The US is the world’s #2 manufacturing power by value-added. These days, the US doesn’t manufacture many products; instead, the US produces manufacturing methods. For the overwhelming majority of manufacturing processes around the world today, it is hyper skilled American engineers who figured out every single tiny detail. Then, once a given process was perfected, it was dropped into whichever location made the most sense for logistics reasons. The US is very, very good at the challenge you are imagining lashing out with. That’s exactly what the US manufacturing sector does. In contrast, China has zero ability to protect its supply lifelines. Those Chinese factories that you are trumpeting will all be shut down for lack of the necessary raw materials. It should also be pointed out that the US has overwhelming market power. Americans won’t start dying from lack of medications until the entire rest of the world’s medicine cabinet has been stripped bare. For any given medication, you’ll be killing off a lot of people from the global south before you do more than inconvenience an American.
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  223. Homelessness in cities like San Francisco and LA is a symptom of China’s impending collapse. Wealthy, connected Chinese are rats fleeing the sinking Chinese ship. Problem is, there are tens of millions of those rats, they only know how to invest in residential real estate, and they only have familiarity with a handful of cities outside of China. When tens of millions of desperate, price insensitive buyers suddenly descend on a group of cities with a total population on par with the number of desperate Chinese buyers, it blows the real estate markets in those cities completely out of whack. Thus, homelessness. Caused by Chinese weakness. Not a sign of American decline.
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  224. His misses have been on things like overestimating Russian military prowess and underestimating the cohesiveness of the advanced democracies. So even his misses are bad news for the world’s autocracies.
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  225. Lots of instabilities all around the globe, and any one of them could bring the global system crashing down. If/when that happens, much of the world will burn down to the ground. As the country with the longest, most at-risk logistical lifelines, China will burn more completely than anyone else. In contrast, the US is self sufficient in most things and is the least globally integrated economy of any non-failed state. The US will be singed, but it won’t burn anywhere near as much as other countries. And in the aftermath, the US will thrive, because most of the competition will have been scoured away.
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  226. Which is why when China falls, it will be for the long haul. China is dependent on the US-led global rules based order. China’s fall is going to take that system down. Will the US decide to set it back up again? It won’t happen while the US is as weak as it is now, and the US will be even weaker in the wake of a Chinese collapse that breaks the US-led global system. After China collapses, China will stay down. Possibly for decades, maybe even centuries. China will need to wait decades until the US recovers its position of dominance and decides to go out into the world and fight to re-establish the global rules based order. (Or until someone displaces the US, establishes dominance, and decides to create a new order. But that’s probably centuries away. Not easy to displace the US when it has 800+ overseas military bases, and no one else has more than a handful.)
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  227. He has been very consistent in saying that China’s collapse will come by 2030. He’s been saying that for more than a decade, possibly for more than two decades. The timing has always been set by the retirement of the “4” in China’s “4-2-1” population structure.
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  228. Lol @ the wumaos pushing the anti-Biden propaganda. It’s not a Trump or Biden or Republican or Democrat thing. China has chosen to burn its bridges with the American people, along with the people of the rest of the advanced world. China has chosen to expose itself via militarized artificial islands in other countries’ EEZs, wolf warrior diplomacy, the brutal crackdown on Hong Kong, and its uncooperative response to covid. In just about every country with any ability to affect events in East Asia, the ordinary people now overwhelmingly see China as the enemy.
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  229. It’s been the same prediction for well over a decade and counting. He has always said that China will collapse by 2030.
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  230.  @loveisneverasin9092  Zeihan predicts that the coming era’s kings of the East will be India and Japan. India will own the Indian Ocean and will manage traffic there. Traffic such as tankers to import oil from the Middle East, for example. Similarly, Japan will thrive as the gatekeeper between Asia and the New World. The US has been the force that has prevented India and Japan from doing that for the last several decades, but the US is going to switch its position. India and Japan will be turned loose with just a bit of guidance from the US. Instead of freedom of navigation for all the way the US did it, India and Japan will be encouraged to only grant freedom of navigation to democracies that respect human rights.
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  231. Check his long form presentations to see the data. Plenty of them on YouTube. You want one of the ones where he brings his PowerPoints. China is allergic to immigration. Immigration into China is as paltry compared to immigration into Japan as Japan’s is compared to that of the US. Does anyone actually believe that the CCP is going to be OK with increasing the number of foreigners by the massive amount required to make a dent in their problem?
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  232. The problem with Trump’s protectionism is that it was incredibly poorly done. Tariffs were/are a red herring. Trump’s focus on them was a move down a dead end alley. Ffs, US trade lawyers wrote the vast majority of the WTO regulations. Nonpartisan career federal government bureaucrats knew that Trump’s moves on tariffs were going to backfire spectacularly due to automatic, pre-programmed WTO responses, but Team Trump chose to ignore the warnings, and the result was exactly as crappy as expected. Biden’s combined use of sanctions and targeted domestic subsidies is far more effective. Competence. It matters.
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  233. Zeihan has always pegged China’s “dead by” date at 2030. He has been very consistent on that date, because it is based on the retirement of the “4”s from China’s “4-2-1” population structure. The oldest of China’s post-Great Chinese Famine “4”s just started to hit retirement age. By 2030, almost all of them will be retired. The claim that Zeihan predicted that China would collapse in the 2010s is false. Comes from either incompetence or deliberate obfuscation. In the course of presentations given in the 2010s, Zeihan did literally say the words, “China won’t survive the decade.” But if you actually investigate the context of those words, you inevitably find that they come in the midst of a discussion of his predictions for the 2020s. And again, he has been 100% consistent about the reasoning behind his prediction. That reasoning points to 2030.
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  234. Yup. This is what Zeihan is predicting. Globe-spanning collapse. China is the biggest cause, but China definitely isn’t the only cause. Likewise, China is going to suffer more than anyone else, but the suffering definitely isn’t going to be contained to China. Zeihan is predicting two billion people around the world dying of famine or famine-driven violence.
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  235. Hunter Biden might be dirty, but Joe Biden has been investigated and exonerated. Punish Hunter for what he has done and ban him from ever holding public office. Joe is innocent and has been a faithful public servant who has been a positive contributor to the American experience. Donald Trump has decent instincts, but he has proven to be incapable of following through. He surrounds himself with sycophantic incompetents. Everyone agrees that Joe Biden is too old, but there’s no doubt in my mind that the hundreds of people who make up Team Biden are collectively much, much, much more competent and cohesive than the hundreds who constituted and would constitute Team Trump.
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  236.  @lucios_7266 In the Q&A after a recent presentation, Zeihan said that there was a lot of uncertainty, but the most likely outcome is around 700 million Chinese dead by famine and famine-driven violence; the splitting off of the edge regions to voluntarily become de facto colonies of nearby countries that have access to food and energy; and likely the end of the Chinese Empire, similar to how the Roman Empire disappeared and was replaced by the multiple countries and ethnicities of that region today. My guess is that one of the biggest unknowns is the timing and level of success of the splitting off of the Chinese edge regions. The edge regions are the most food insecure, so the timing and success of their secession will greatly affect the death toll.
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  237.  @lucios_7266  He said “more than half” dead. That works out to around 700 million. Ethnicity is a social construct. The Vietnamese definitely don’t see themselves as Han. In the past, the ancestors of today’s Cantonese speakers definitely didn’t see themselves as Han. Ditto for the ancestors of today’s speakers of just about every dialect and regional accent in China. If/when China fractures, new social construct ethnicities are certain to emerge. Many of the new ones will have big influences from old, long suppressed social construct ethnicities.
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  238.  @lucios_7266  FYI, the edge regions that are likely to split off include the territories that run along the coast and then adjacent to SE Asia from Shanghai to Guangdong and around to Tibet.
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