RE: China’s Economy Is Not Crashing, It’s Worse Than That
I'm a amateur Sinologist, student of geopolitics, and by absolutely no means an economist of any degree, but the biggest danger I see is not a global economic slowdown. It's "what will the Chinese Communist Party, who has built their entire legitimacy off of the claim that they saved the country's economy, do to keep the Chinese population's attention off of their failure to do this?"
By way of an answer I would point to the sense of Jingoistic hypernationalism they have been drumming up over the past decade or so, and the Xi administration's unmasked bellicosity.
If the Party decides their new claim to legitimacy will be "we are the ones keeping China superior to those 'lesser laowai nations,' as the Han, Ming and Qing Dynasties did, then they will not hesitate to return to the aggression that characterized Imperial China for millennia. Indeed, Xi's recurring catch phrase, most often translated as the "Chinese Dream of the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation," would be more accurately translated as "Han Dream of the Return to Supremacy of the Chinese Race."
Weak economies launch major wars. History bears this out.
Xi is spreading his own ideology with Maoist tactics. China is looking at a new Dictator. All this construction was preparation. It's a game of infrastructure, manufacturing, and fiat. China has been winning for some time, but they've been threatened by Trump's reversal. All countries could probably be considered failing empires.. and we know what happens right before.. It's only a matter of time before war breaks out. The only way forward is to bankrupt them, divide, and conquer through soft power and trade war. If we can accomplish that we might not even have to go to war.
That statement is mildly sensationalized, but only mildly. Given the inherent frailty of China's entire economy (yeah I just said that), all we have to do is make them stumble once or twice and the series of crises that they have been waiting to address one-by-one in a planned order will all hit them at once, and we can just let China's history of "coast gets rich, interior gets poor, interior gets jealous, coast gets headaches" repeat itself for the umpteenth time.
The only weapon China has that is worrisome is deception; specifically, in an age where power comes not from a nation's military but their ability to rally other nations to their side, they don't have to beat us in battle or economics if they can make the world THINK they have beaten us in one or the other. I have done an article about that recently, but I have another one pending that is a bit more specific to psychological warfare.
Yeah maybe I do get a bit sensational, but I tend to think a few years ahead. It's inevitable that when a world power is challenged, war breaks out. China's growth rate was on the path to overtaking the US in about 20 years, and the US would never give up its unipolar status without a fight. China would more than likely prepare for that, and preemptively strike with deceptive espionage and cyberwarfare, since those are its strong suits. I agree with you wholeheartedly on psychological warfare. That's their best weapon, and it's time we ramped up ours. When the Chinese say they are "stunned" and "shocked" that Trump would ever think to call them out, I laugh. Because it's so easy for America to become the good guy. We have people in our government that have allowed them to perpetrate their soft power game without pushback. This battle starts internally, but if we conquer ourselves, they have no chance. I also totally agree with what you said about China's economy - their debt system is ridiculous.