The End of China’s Rise

M. Beckley, Foreign Affairs

China’s multidecade ascent was aided by strong tailwinds that have now become headwinds. China’s government is concealing a serious economic slowdown and sliding back into brittle totalitarianism. The country is suffering severe resource scarcity ...

Welcome to the age of 'peak China.' .. Once-rising powers frequently become aggressive when their fortunes fade and their enemies multiply. China is tracing an arc that often ends in tragedy: a dizzying rise followed by the specter of a hard fall...

[CH] enjoyed a mostly safe geopolitical environment and friendly relations with the United States. For most of its modern history, China’s vulnerable location at the hinge of Eurasia and the Pacific had condemned it to conflict and hardship...

China is running out of resources. Half of its rivers have disappeared, and pollution has left 60 percent of its groundwater—by the government’s own admission—“unfit for human contact.” Breakneck development has made it the world’s largest net energy importer...

As China has become more assertive and authoritarian, the world has become less conducive to Chinese growth. Beijing has faced thousands of new trade barriers since the 2008 financial crisis. Most of the world’s largest economies are walling off their telecommunications networks from Chinese influence. Australia, India, Japan, and other countries are looking to cut China out of their supply chains...

The indications of [.. recent] unproductive growth are ubiquitous. China has more than 50 ghost cities—urban centers with highways and houses but not people. Almost two-thirds of China’s infrastructure projects will never recoup the costs of their construction. The result, unsurprisingly, is out-of-control debt...

Eurasia has often been a deathtrap for aspiring hegemons: there are too many nearby enemies that can make common cause with offshore superpowers. For almost 40 years, a rising China avoided strategic encirclement by downplaying its global ambitions and maintaining friendly relations with the United States. But that period is over..

China is a risen power, not a rising one: it has acquired formidable geopolitical capabilities, but its best days are behind it.