Published June 7, 2024
China’s rapid rise is slowing down, and incumbent global powers that have dominated political, military, and economic spheres for decades are scrambling to respond.
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SOURCE: www.thediplomat.com
RELATED: Biden’s Right: China’s Economy Is Indeed ‘On the Brink’ | Opinion
Xi Jinping boards the aircraft carrier Shandong and reviews the guard of honor at a naval port in Sanya, Hainan Province, on December 17, 2019. On April 24, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command chief John Aquilino warned China intends to be capable of invading Taiwan by 2027.© Li Gang/Xinhua via Getty Images
Published June 8, 2024
President Joe Biden said in his May 28 Time interview that China’s “got an economy that’s on the brink.”
He’s right.
And we should care because Xi Jinping may try to solve his economic problems by starting another war.
At first glance, Biden’s gloomy assessment looks wrong. The official National Bureau of Statistics reported that China’s gross domestic product beat expectations by a wide margin, growing 5 percent in the first calendar quarter of this year compared to the same period last year. That’s a slight improvement of the robust 5 percent growth for all of last year.
But neither of these reports makes sense. As Anne Stevenson-Yang of J Capital Research told me this week, “I feel the numbers just don’t mean anything anymore.”
There is now a large gap between reported results and what we can observe. The widely followed Rhodium Group believes the economy grew about 1.5 percent last year. That’s in the ballpark of the “now close to 2 percent a year” that Biden reportedly told a group of Democratic Party donors in Park City, Utah last August.
