One of the very first Western expatriates to settle in China and acculturate into their rather unique society offers a very interesting perspective on the realities of modern China, and on why he thinks that the true Golden Age of China is more or less over at this point:

If you know a few things about China’s economy and culture, this is not surprising.

The first thing that you need to know about China is that you cannot trust ANYTHING about the statistics that come out of the country.

All governments lie. All statistical research bureaus lie. Every single person on Earth lies about something, at some level. Not for nothing did Mark Twain once write that there are three kinds of untruths – lies, damned lies, and statistics.

The Chinese government and culture take such untruths to truly epic levels.

The government would have you believe that the economy of China is going to overtake the West any day now. By some measures it is apparently already bigger in terms of raw GDP – and once you strip out the massive welfare transfers that the US government makes from one set of citizens to another every year, the Chinese economy probably does look a lot bigger than it really is.

The problem is that even the Chinese government’s own leadership admits – or rather, used to be able to admit – that its own statistics are garbage. And that is partly because of China’s authoritarian top-down model of governance, which gives officials in the cities and provinces lots of incentives to disguise the real numbers in order to make themselves look better.

I remember sitting in a conference in Singapore about 15 years ago where prominent MIT economist Dr. Lester Thurow and a panel of regional experts were talking about the various Asian economies. The issue of China’s economic output came up during the panel discussion, and Dr. Thurow pointed out that the Chinese have a serious tendency to over-report their own output. A Chinese economist in the panel piped up and said, basically, yes, that’s true, but officials in some of the provinces also have a tendency to under-report output, in order to avoid central government confiscation of wealth in the form of taxes and redistributions.

The basic point was clear: you cannot trust Chinese statistics. At all.

(That, by the way, was the same former MIT dean Lester Thurow who once said something along the lines of how the US economy’s engine had stalled, back when President BAMF got elected in 1980 on a platform of regulatory reforms, tax cuts, and growth. And the same Lester Thurow who was spectacularly wrong in claiming that Japan’s economy would surpass America’s. And the same Lester Thurow who once claimed that it was “a vulgar mistake to think that most people in Eastern Europe are miserable”. Let’s just say that his powers of prediction ain’t so hot.)

The problem is even worse when it comes to China’s birth rate. Now, we all know that China has – or had – a one-child policy. The name of that policy is a bit misleading; in recent times it was adjusted a bit to allow couples to have another child if the first is a girl. But the effect, supposedly, is that China’s overall fertility rate is the lowest in the entire world – 1.05 per woman, according to their own government. (See what I wrote above about Chinese government statistics – you cannot trust them.)

But the reality is that in the far provinces, which are difficult for Beijing to really administer efficiently, the birth rate is almost certainly higher than this – and sex-selective abortion and female infanticide has definitely screwed up China’s population ratio to the point where it is, in all probability, beyond repair. There are some parts of China where there are over 140 men per 100 women; basically, a huge sector of the Chinese male population will likely never get a chance to have sex, find girlfriends, get married, or have children.

Add to this the fact that the Chinese economy is built on debt to a degree that is truly crazy by even American standards, and you have a lot of serious problems threatening to bring down the oldest civilisation in the world.

China’s problems are numerous and well known. The government is corrupt and hugely inefficient. The population demographics are all out of whack. The workforce is rapidly aging. The economy is much more fragile than anyone realises – and Beijing’s responses to the God-Emperor’s tariff wars shows just how worried the Chinese leadership really is, though if you are watching the Western (((media))) you would not know this at all.

The second major problem that China faces is cultural.

Chinese society is changing at a rate never seen before in human history. They went from a repressive absolute monarchy in the early 1900s, to a military dictatorship after 1911 that rapidly Westernised at least the bigger cities, to Japanese occupation and exploitation in the 1930s, to full-blown barking-at-the-moon-lunacy Communism and collectivisation from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, to market-based reforms in the 1980s, to a post-Communist authoritarian society in the 1990s, to an extremely robust state-led closed capitalism today.

That many changes in just 100 years are enough to induce severe whiplash injuries in any society – never mind one as ancient as China’s.

Chinese culture is deeply resilient – but it does have its breaking points. And some of those fault lines are showing up even now.

The younger generation of Chinese people has never known what Communism was like. It has only ever known authoritarian one-party rule and only understands a heavy-handed government – but also knows material wealth and consumption on a level that their ancestors never had.

That is changing Chinese society very quickly. Chinese women, in particular, are becoming just as over-educated, independent, difficult, and prickly as their Western sisters are – in fact they are considerably worse in some ways. There is a reason why the Chinese are unhappy about the phenomenon of “leftover women” – sheng nu – in the big cities. I’ve written about this before; it’s not just a problem for China, but for any culture and country that has prioritised women’s education and empowerment over population growth and demographic stability.

Add to this the fact that China’s younger generation is materialistic, consumer-driven, increasingly obese, and not quite as interested in preserving their own culture as their forbears, and you know what will happen next. We are seeing the results already in the West. The outcome is always inevitable: a degenerate, dying culture that loses all interest in anything beyond superficial nonsense.

The central government in Beijing recognises this, and in typically top-down fashion has decided to impose a “social credit” system to enforce good behaviour and morality:

You cannot really blame the Chinese government too much for this, though. As PJW points out, they are merely taking what Silicon Valley and Big Tech already do in a far more centralised fashion, and pushing it to its logical conclusion.

China has a lot going for it. The culture is far, far older than the West’s. The Chinese regard democracy as a quaint Western absurdity, a nonsense notion that is a 100-year aberration in history and is basically as nothing compared to their glorious 5,000-year legacy. They regard Western supremacy and power as a similar 500-year anomaly, and are waiting until it is their time once more.

But they also have a huge number of problems that they are going to have a very difficult time overcoming – if they manage to do so at all. And their attempts to fix the problems that they themselves have inflicted, will be instructive for the rest of us.