Letters: China has peaked

China has peaked

Sir: Niall Ferguson makes some good points about the nature of Xi Jinping’s imperial aspirations but misses two important parts of the picture (‘The China model’, 8 May). First, the Chinese Academy of Science predicts that China’s population will peak at 1.4 billion in 2029, drop to 1.36 billion by 2050, and shrink to as few as 1.17 billion people by 2065. They even forecast that China’s population might be reduced by about 50 per cent by the turn of the next century. And second, China’s economic rise is stalling. Rather than being on track to displace the United States as the next economic superpower, China now finds itself ensnared in a classic ‘middle income trap’ — a situation in which rapid growth is followed by a period of stalled growth and failure to achieve the status of high-income country. As a result, China is not fated to become the world’s economic middle kingdom.