China’s economy is beset by excessive debt accumulation and other maladies, but the main factor inhibiting economic potential is not a systemic debt crisis—a concern to be sure—but the abandonment of reformist policies. Xi Jinping, the Chinese ruler, has turned his back on Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening up” program that is credited with sparking Chinese growth for almost four decades. Instead, Xi for a half decade has been reinstituting the Stalinist state model that Mao Zedong embraced in the early 1950s. ...
China, as a result, is moving from authoritarianism back to totalitarianism, readopting a model that brought the People’s Republic to the brink of economic failure twice, once during the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s and early 1960s and again during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the mid-1960s to mid-1970s. China’s economy cannot be expected to do well in an increasingly intolerant political atmosphere, as the country’s own history suggests.
You never saw on this blog the type of China panic that assumed China would surpass America as the top economic power. I've seen the same talk about the USSR, Japan, and Germany only to watch them fall away.
As for China? Maybe 2050 will see China surpass America. But by then, 2100 isn't far off and things could be very different.
On the bright side, allowing distance to obscure the problems of others while closeness allows us to see our own (and make some up) problems has the effect of spurring us to action.
American dominance isn't something I assume will last forever. But I suspect we are in another "American century."
UPDATE: How Xi is killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
