A grand summit in Beijing is a natural time to assess the state of the US-China competition, the dynamics of great power conflict, the balance of forces in this new Cold — or maybe just Cool? — War.
It’s also a good time to revisit my own predictions. Six years ago, in the early days of the coronavirus, I argued that rather than a “Chinese century” we might be looking at a “Chinese decade,” a window when China’s power would hit a peak and the American position would be maximally endangered — but with a more favorable balance awaiting the United States in the later part of the century, if we could get through the Chinese maximum unscathed.
One part of that analysis was simply wrong. I was writing at a moment when the U.S. response to the pandemic seemed much more shambolic than Beijing’s efficient containment strategy, and I assumed that there could be a kind of COVID dividend for China from that difference. In hindsight, America’s stumbling approach actually proved more effective than China’s in the long run, because the People’s Republic eventually found itself in a permanent lockdown trap that yielded all kinds of social and economic damage.
But in other ways, the 2020s have proceeded somewhat as I expected. The American imperium has been hard pressed on every front, and our leadership — slumping and senescent in the last presidency, obnoxious and bullying in this one — has gifted China a reputation for relative stability, notwithstanding Xi Jinping’s own aggressive and repressive moves.
There is a lot of talk about rebuilding American manufacturing, and the Trump era has seen a partial decoupling of the US and China, a clear shift away from the “Chimerica” model that defined the 2010s. But the decoupling is taking place in the shadow of a profound Chinese industrial advantage and continuing Chinese scientific and technological success. We can debate what it means that China lags just behind Silicon Valley in the artificial intelligence race, but our edge in frontier models doesn’t feel like a definite hard-power advantage as long as China is radically outpacing us in building machine tools, robots, ships and drones.
Six months ago, I was telling myself an optimistic story about the national security balance, where the US maintained an edge in battlefield experience — with our support for Ukraine against Russia and our interventions in Iran and Venezuela serving as a testing ground for new weapons and AI-enabled tactics. But watching the US military stockpile collapse under the pressure of a regional war against Iran this year should make everyone skeptical that our advantages are adequate for a sustained conflict in East Asia. Fighting Iran to a stalemate seems like the kind of thing that happens just before you fight the Chinese and lose.
So the world of the 2020s does seem to have gone China’s way in very important respects. To the extent that comparisons to the actual Cold War are relevant, China is a more powerful material competitor than the Soviet Union ever managed to become, and our so-far-unsuccessful Iranian gamble has left the American hard-power position looking as parlous as it’s ever been.
But what about the world of the 2040s or 2060s? Six years ago, I wrote that China’s growth rate might be slowing, making it less likely to achieve either the living standards of its East Asian neighbours or eclipse the US as the world’s largest economy. Since then, the Chinese attempt to lock in a broad economic sphere of influence through its Belt and Road Initiative has hit repeated setbacks. And as it turned out, 2021 was the point of greatest nominal-GDP convergence with the US, and since then the US has grown faster while China has struggled with its COVID hangover and various internal problems — raising the possibility that there will never be a moment when the Chinese economy is the biggest in the world.
Or maybe we should call it a likelihood rather than a possibility, since it’s incredibly difficult to generate high rates of growth under conditions of rapid population ageing — and the other great trend of the last six years is that China’s demographic situation now looks much, much worse.
The end of the one-child policy in 2016 was intended to boost birth rates. Instead, the Chinese fertility rate has been crashing, hitting an average of 1.0 births per woman’s lifetime in 2025, half the replacement level; it was the country’s fourth consecutive year of population decline. The grim social trends that attract justified attention in the US seem to have advanced much more rapidly in China. A new paper on attitudes among Chinese young people finds that 32% of those ages 18 to 24 reported “no desire for children,” up from 5% in 2012.
These patterns make a striking counterpoint to the evidence of increasing Chinese confidence, even arrogance and hubris, about the inevitability of American decline. Just how confident can Chinese people really be in their culture’s future if the rising generation is so disinclined to reproduce? Just how confident should China’s leaders be that they can outlast the US if their population could be cut in half over the next few generations?
Chinese hubris, in this sense, might be the best guarantor of world peace, ensuring that Beijing will wait and wait to test its power against ours, wait and wait to claim Taiwan ... and find, in waiting, that its best chance has passed it by.
But presumably Xi and his circle can see all the trends that I’ve just described. And if they don’t have perfect confidence in technological revolution, if they aren’t self-deceived about the prospects for American collapse, then I would expect them to have a plan for potential confrontation very, very soon.
The New York Times