Broken record

Long predicted, the 'China collapse' has failed to arrive as it is built on fundamentally flawed assumptions

In July, President Donald Trump of the United States mentioned Gordon Chang by name and dismissed his long record of predictions about China's imminent collapse as "always so negative", adding "it's like the world is falling down". Trump's rebuke is significant partly because it reflects growing skepticism toward a cottage industry predicting China's inevitable failure, and partly because profiting from extreme anti-China rhetoric ought to stop.

In his 2001 bestseller The Coming Collapse of China, Chang, a US lawyer and conservative columnist, confidently argued that China's accession to the World Trade Organization would expose the fundamental weakness of its economic system. State-owned enterprises would fail under international competition. State banks, burdened with enormous non-performing loans, would implode. Corruption would undermine political legitimacy. Rural unrest would explode into nationwide instability. History, of course, proved him wrong.

Chang is just one episode in a broader "China collapse" drama. For more than three decades, one prediction — or perhaps more accurately, one persistent anticipation — has remained consistent in Western commentary on China that the country was, is and always will be on the verge of collapse, in one form or another.

The rationale underpinning this forecast has changed from time to time. In the early 1990s, the prediction was that China's centrally planned economy would not survive the pressures of market reforms. Later came warnings of an economic "hard landing", followed by warnings that the banking system would implode under mountains of bad debt. Then came the property bubble, demographic decline, mounting local government debt, and more recently, technological containment and geopolitical decoupling. Each time, a new narrative emerged to suggest why China's rise would finally end.

Yet one thing has remained constant: The collapse has never come.

A chronology of Western newspapers, magazines, think tanks and financial institutions from 1990 to the present reveals an extraordinary recurrent pattern. Almost every few years a new wave of headlines proclaims that China stands on the brink of economic crisis, financial meltdown or political disintegration. Influential Western media outlets such as The Economist, Forbes, Fortune, Business Insider, CNBC and The National Interest have, to varying degrees, repeatedly sounded the alarm on China's impending downfall.

Viewed in isolation, each of these forecasts might be viewed as an error of judgment. Collectively, however, they reveal something far more significant. The "China collapse" thesis has hardened into a self-perpetuating intellectual paradigm. Failed predictions are not treated as falsifying evidence against the paradigm. Instead, a new explanation is produced to preserve the original conclusion. When one crisis fails to bring down China, another is quickly identified as the real trigger of the inevitable collapse.

To be sure, China has certainly encountered formidable challenges over the past three decades. None of these difficulties should be ignored. But neither have they produced political or economic collapse. Instead, China has developed to be the world's second-largest economy, largest goods-trading nation, largest manufacturing power and one of the leading technological powers across high-tech fields ranging from electric vehicles to new energy technologies, advanced telecommunications and artificial intelligence.

What makes the "China collapse" narrative intellectually interesting is not that one prediction proved wrong. Forecasting can be fallible, and economists and policymakers often make mistakes. The remarkable feature is that the repeated failures have not weakened faith in the underlying thesis. Instead, the collapse narrative continually reinvents itself. The explanatory mechanisms change, while the conclusion remains the same.

The failure of the "China collapse" thesis cannot be explained simply by the inaccuracy of the predictions. The deeper problem is that Western analysis consistently underestimates the resilience of China's political-economic system and its capacity for institutional adaptation, policy adjustment, resource reallocation and structural transformation. The Chinese political-economic system has demonstrated a distinctive capacity for long-term strategic adjustment, enabling it to absorb contradictions and emerging crisis tendencies without allowing them to become mutually reinforcing systemic crises.

The persistence of the "China collapse" thesis reflects what might be called a broader Western "China syndrome" — a deeply rooted expectation that China's political and economic system ultimately cannot succeed because it departs from the historical trajectory that many Western observers regard as universal.

Such thinking becomes self-perpetuating: The Chinese success story is believed to be temporary; every setback is seized as proof that the foretold collapse is finally approaching. A theory constructed in this way cannot easily be disproved because every contradiction simply generates another explanation.

The trajectory of the "China collapse" thesis tells us less about China's future than about the persistence of certain assumptions within Western strategic thinking. After 30 years of repeatedly postponed predictions, the problem may no longer lie primarily in China, but in a belief system that repeatedly mistakes its ideological expectations for analysis.

The key issue, therefore, is not simply China's rise, but the fact that its success does not conform to established Western ideological and theoretical paradigms, such as "modernization theory", "middle class theory" and "democratic peace theory". China's success has demonstrated that an alternative model of development is not only possible but viable. It is the empirical evidence of this that lies at the heart of the West's growing unease.

"China collapse" forecasters would do well to take a page out of Francis Fukuyama's book. Best known for his "end of history" thesis, Fukuyama acknowledged in June in an interview with Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that China's continued success has challenged some of his earlier predictions. When he admitted that China's State capacity and economic performance had complicated his "end of history" thesis, he was engaging in intellectual rethinking. He admitted that while he still holds liberal democracy as an ideal, he underestimated the resilience of China's State-led developmental model, particularly its ability to combine strong central governance with market dynamism.

The author is a Yunshan leading scholar and the director of the European Research Center, Guangdong Institute for International Strategies at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, and an adjunct professor of international relations at Aalborg University in Denmark.

The author contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

Contact the editor at editor@chinawatch.cn.