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. Indeed, it will be lucky if it escapes the fate of countries like Brazil and South Africa that have also fallen into this economic trap.

The bottom line is that while China’s rise has been meteoric and strategically consequential, it is not destined to continue. China has already peaked and is destined to falter — and to do so long before displacing the US as the world’s leading power. This week, the most recent census shows China’s population growing at its slowest pace in decades. The question that should keep US strategic thinkers up at night is how America should deal with a China that is beginning to sense that the brass ring of global primacy is fated to recede from its grasp. Ominously, the world’s experience with similar faltering contenders — Germany in 1914 and Japan in 1941 — suggests that when a dominant power assumes it is confronting a rising power when actually it is confronting a faltering contender, catastrophic war can ensue.