Net Wealth: Is China an economically declining power?

Net Wealth: Is China an economically declining power?

One of the most believed and told stories is that of a peacefully rising China, a China whose GDP and GDP per capita will soon surpass the US-American GDP. However, experts from the Heritage Foundation , the Committee on the Present Danger: China, including Steve Bannon, Guo Wengui and Kyle Bass are questioning this narrative and draw the opposite picture. Until recently the aging demographic trends, the debt ratio and unstable and intransparent financial system, industrial overproduction, the slow-down of the growth rate, manipulated Chinese statistics were quoted as the real indicators. Some as Indian General Asthana also believes that China´s  Belt and Road Initaitive, the New Silk Road has already failed as crisis outlet and the new book by Jonathan Hillmann “The New Emperor´s New Silkroad” supports part of this view by illustrative analysis of many projects. But now the American Enterprise Institute, a neocon think tank, which renamed itself now as Rethink tank, has a new version of questioning China´s economic rise.

The AEI introduces as the real economic indicator the Net Wealth instead of the Gross Domestic Product, claims that this indicator is already used by the World Bank and that China was not an economic rising power, but a economic declining power, which as crisis outlet becomes more repressive and aggressive- domestically and in foreign affairs. In his video: “Rethink China´s future”Jean Krikpatrick scholar Michael Beckley asks on the AEI website: “Has the Chinese century begun, or is trouble brewing on the horizon? AEI’s Michael Beckley dives into the hard numbers to reveal the challenges China faces in the decades ahead.”. The video is available at:

However, he should have avoided  exaggerated stories that most of the Chinese workers were artificially employed and would nt work, but play video games at the working place.

His conclusion is that a Sino-American storm is brewing and that the USA has to contain China. However, Beckley doesn´t speak of regime change as the AEI was the leading neocon regime change supporter of the Bush jr. era which also hailed the Iraq war 2003,  the Lybia war and the Arab spring. But after the failed democratization experiments in the Greater Middle East, these regime change circles might have become more cautious. Even the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) at its event “What comes after the Communist Party in China?” was not that optimistic. The speakers Robert Kaplan and Steve Kotkin even fear that democratization of China and the toppling of the CP China could even lead to an even more nationalistic and authoritarian China.

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