This is no time for outmoded assumptions about China

 Michael Beckley and Hal Brands of the American Enterprise Institute, writing in Foreign Affairs, offer a view, well substantiated, it seems to me, of China's role on the world stage going forward that runs counter  to common assumptions. The piece is entitled "The End of China's Rise." 

True, China has been on the move on many fronts recently, but . . . 

. . . if Beijing looks to be in a hurry, that’s because its rise is almost over. China’s multidecade ascent was aided by strong tailwinds that have now become headwinds. China’s government is concealing a serious economic slowdown and sliding back into brittle totalitarianism. The country is suffering severe resource scarcity and faces the worst peacetime demographic collapse in history. Not least, China is losing access to the welcoming world that enabled its advance.

Welcome to the age of “peak China.” Beijing is a strong revisionist power that wants to remake the world, but its time to do so is already running out. This realization should not inspire complacency in Washington—just the opposite. Once-rising powers frequently become aggressive when their fortunes fade and their enemies multiply. China is tracing an arc that often ends in tragedy: a dizzying rise followed by the specter of a hard fall.

The authors review China's history since the First Opium War of 1839, how it went from being exploited and humiliated to coming together under Communist rule, to self-imposed isolation, to opening up, beginning with the Nixon-Kissinger outreach, to the age of accessible markets and exchange of technology, to having an abundance of working-age citizens. The world kind of forgot the foundations of the regime as Western companies set up plants and joint ventures there and China sent students to America's most prestigious business schools. 

It would be follow to proceed on the assumption that that is still the state of affairs, though:

But once-in-an-epoch bonanzas don’t last forever. For the past decade, advantages that once helped the country soar have become liabilities dragging it down.

For starters, China is running out of resources. Half of its rivers have disappeared, and pollution has left 60 percent of its groundwater—by the government’s own admission—“unfit for human contact.” Breakneck development has made it the world’s largest net energy importer. Food security is deteriorating: China has destroyed 40 percent of its farmland through overuse and become the world’s largest importer of agricultural products. Partly owing to resource scarcity, growth is becoming very expensive: China must invest three times as much capital to generate growth as it did in the early years of this century, an increase far greater than one might expect as any economy matures.

China is also running out of people, thanks to the legacy of the one-child policy. Between 2020 and 2035, China will lose roughly 70 million working-age adults and gain 130 million senior citizens. That’s a France-sized population of consumers, taxpayers, and workers gone—and a Japan-sized population of pensioners added—in 15 years. From 2035 to 2050, China will lose an additional 105 million workers and gain another 64 million seniors. The economic consequences will be dire. Current projections suggest that age-related spending must triple by 2050, from ten percent to 30 percent of GDP. For perspective, all of China’s government spending currently totals about 30 percent of GDP.

Dealing with these problems will be especially difficult because China is now ruled by a dictator who consistently sacrifices economic efficiency for political power. Private firms generate most of the country’s wealth, yet under President Xi Jinping, private firms are starved of capital. Instead, inefficient state-owned enterprises receive 80 percent of government loans and subsidies. China’s boom was spearheaded by local entreprures of eneurs, but Xi’s anticorruption campaign has scared local leaders from engaging in economic experimentation. His government has essentially outlawed negative economic news, making smart reforms nearly impossible, while a wave of politically driven regulations has squelched innovation.

As China has become more assertive and authoritarian, the world has become less conducive to Chinese growth. Beijing has faced thousands of new trade barriers since the 2008 financial crisis. Most of the world’s largest economies are walling off their telecommunications networks from Chinese influence. Australia, India, Japan, and other countries are looking to cut China out of their supply chains.

China is now dealing with a major economic slowdown. It is home to 50 gleaming metropolises, complete with high-rises and multi-lane expressways that lack the essential component to make them viable: residents. The Communist Party is returning to its Maoist roots. Due to China's expansionist gestures of recent years, its neighbors, from Japan to the Philippines to Indonesia to Vietnam, are becoming increasingly united in seeing the need to stand up to it.

China's leaders see a window closing:

China today checks many worrying boxes. Slowing growth? Check. Strategically encircled? Check. Brutal authoritarian regime with few sources of organic legitimacy? Check. Historical axe to grind and revanchist ambitions? Check and check. In fact, China is already engaging in the practices—the relentless military buildup, the search for spheres of influence in Asia and beyond, the effort to control critical technologies and resources—to be expected from a country in its position. If there is a formula for aggression by a peaking power, China exhibits the key elements.

Many observers believe China is throwing its weight around today because it is so confident in its continued ascent. Xi certainly appears to think that COVID-19 and political instability in the United States have created new possibilities to advance. But the more likely—and much scarier—possibility is that China’s leaders are determined to move fast because they are running out of time. What happens when a country that wants to reorder the world concludes it might not be able to do so peacefully? Both history and China’s current behavior suggest the answer is: Nothing good.

As the world becomes more aware of the monstrous reality of this regime  and China becomes more blatant about the above-mentioned expansionist aims, it behooves us to adjust our perception of its posture accordingly. 

The status quo of the early twenty-first century was fleeting. It's a new era.