My Take | Is China’s greying population a blessing or a curse?

Move over, Gordon Chang, a new “China is doomed” prophet is taking over. After more than two decades of declaring the imminent demise of the country, starting with his 2001 publication of The Coming Collapse of China, it’s time to pass the torch of getting it so embarrassingly and consistently wrong to a younger American generation. In comes Peter Zeihan, the new geopolitical sensation on YouTube.

“We are looking at the end of China as a political entity within a decade or two, and as an economic entity within a decade,” he declared on a podcast of The Jordan Harbinger Show in February.

Ever since the Ukraine war, Zeihan’s views have been much sought after in both social and mainstream media. If Ukraine has made him an online influencer, China is about to turn him into a star.

One of his go-to arguments is China’s demographic deficit, or population time bomb. His forecast may be considered the worst-case scenario.

By contrast, a best-case scenario has been offered by Justin Lin Yifu, dean of Peking University’s Institute of New Structural Economics and a former World Bank chief economist. Speaking at a conference last week, Lin said the country’s ageing population would create a “silver-hair economy” and any drag on economic growth would be offset by rising labour productivity driven by new technologies and going up the production value chain.

If you are confused by the two, well, me too. But I did look up some of their figures, and they explained a lot. Between the two extremes, something far more mundane is most likely the outcome: China will probably remain for a long time one of the world’s biggest economies, but the period of high growth is over; and it probably won’t overtake the American economy on a per capita basis.