1. It's a massive PR campaigns. Things are actually _not_ that great in China, their numbers are completely fake, and it might collapse any time now.
But China manages to make people write the contrary.
Maybe they _are_ paying for all the Youtubers [1] [2] and journalists [3] who explain that US decisions in trade, science, energy, etc... are a huge gift to China.
This is not so impossible: that's basically what the Soviet Union tried to do until the 70s. Lots of people in the 60s were rooting for the USSR, hoping the West would copy them... Maybe the moon landing help deflate that bubble.
And somehow, the shit hit the fan early enough, and demonstrably enough, that it all collapsed.
It does not have to be a conspiracy - maybe if you manage to publish cute numbers that tell a great story, people will repeat the story for you.
And we're so unfamiliar with China in the West, that we would not see through the BS.
2. You see it repeated a lot, because it's real. China is once again the dominant superpower in the world, they're ahead of us in every department and we will soon look like archaic peasants compared to them : basically the rest of the world history. It's just that we witness one of the small bumps where they were not at their best, and we assume it was "normal".
The problem is that China is building so much of the world that we rely on, I honestly can't think of good reasons to think 1 is true, and not 2.
Maybe Taiwan will be their Afghanistan ? (Sadly, it will only take us a couple years to know...)
That being said, I really wonder what's the way "out", if there is any, of dependency on China:
* just chill, accept that we'll never build anything ever, and buy chinese stuff ?
* wait for demography [4] to become a real problem ?
* rebuild a supply chain from the ground-up - curious where you start from. What's the first factory you rebuild ?
* assume that it, too, shall pass, and that at some point China will make one of the blunders that authoritarianism allow ?
I must have triggered the spirits of the algo, because right after commenting I stumbled on this take about how the collapse of China is inevitable, mostly because of demographics [1].
Is linking to some fringe podcasts from Zeihan really that indicative of "everyone" or just the algorithm self-selecting to your preferences? Because one could also link to plenty of channels critiquing the West.
But if we look at MSM CNBC, NYT, CNN, etc, none of them are saying "China is going to collapse", and if anything I'd probably vouch there are more articles praising China than there are ones critiquing it.
1. It's a massive PR campaigns. Things are actually _not_ that great in China, their numbers are completely fake, and it might collapse any time now.
But China manages to make people write the contrary.
Maybe they _are_ paying for all the Youtubers [1] [2] and journalists [3] who explain that US decisions in trade, science, energy, etc... are a huge gift to China.
This is not so impossible: that's basically what the Soviet Union tried to do until the 70s. Lots of people in the 60s were rooting for the USSR, hoping the West would copy them... Maybe the moon landing help deflate that bubble. And somehow, the shit hit the fan early enough, and demonstrably enough, that it all collapsed.
It does not have to be a conspiracy - maybe if you manage to publish cute numbers that tell a great story, people will repeat the story for you.
And we're so unfamiliar with China in the West, that we would not see through the BS.
2. You see it repeated a lot, because it's real. China is once again the dominant superpower in the world, they're ahead of us in every department and we will soon look like archaic peasants compared to them : basically the rest of the world history. It's just that we witness one of the small bumps where they were not at their best, and we assume it was "normal".
The problem is that China is building so much of the world that we rely on, I honestly can't think of good reasons to think 1 is true, and not 2.
Maybe Taiwan will be their Afghanistan ? (Sadly, it will only take us a couple years to know...)
That being said, I really wonder what's the way "out", if there is any, of dependency on China:
* just chill, accept that we'll never build anything ever, and buy chinese stuff ? * wait for demography [4] to become a real problem ? * rebuild a supply chain from the ground-up - curious where you start from. What's the first factory you rebuild ? * assume that it, too, shall pass, and that at some point China will make one of the blunders that authoritarianism allow ?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU8zYS43TRg&pp=0gcJCbIJAYcqI...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tNp2vsxEzk
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/04/world/asia/trump-science-...
[4] https://www.newsweek.com/china-faces-economic-blow-populatio...