Premier Li stressed efforts to stabilise economic growth.
He reiterated China will promote sustained and healthy development of platform economy and special loans will be used to support the platform companies. pic.twitter.com/1Ci9dc4dAO— Cathy Yuan Zhang (@cathyyuanzhang) September 13, 2022
China's mobile phone shipments tumbled by 30.6% in July from a year earlier pic.twitter.com/Go2fPWnZ3s
— Cathy Yuan Zhang (@cathyyuanzhang) September 13, 2022
China’s economy is slowing, its population aging. That could make it dangerous.
Two foreign policy scholars, Hal Brands of Johns Hopkins and Michael Beckley of Tufts, have offered a frightening thesis: China’s leaders know their power is about to diminish, and that will make them more likely to take risks in the short run — to invade Taiwan, for example.
China “is losing confidence that time is on its side,” they write in a recent book, “Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict With China.”
“China will have strong incentives to use force against its neighbors … even at risk of war with the United States,” they warn. The “moment of maximum danger,” they suggest, is this decade: the 2020s.
A chorus of other China scholars have disagreed.First, they note, there’s no evidence that Xi or other leaders believe their power is declining; they continue to predict the rise of China and the decline of the West.
Even if China’s economy slows down, it will be growing — still the second-largest in the world.
“Countries can muddle along with a great deal of poor economic performance and still be a major force in international politics,” noted Aaron L. Friedberg of Princeton, author of “Getting China Wrong.”
Besides, Xi and other Chinese leaders have a strategy for solving their economic challenge, he argued. “They see advances in technology as the key to solving all their problems,” he told me. “That’s how they plan to achieve higher productivity and reasonably high economic growth.”