It’s a story Washington tells itself whenever reality grows uncomfortable: China is about to collapse. The People’s Republic of China (PRC), we are assured, is a brittle, illegitimate regime on the brink of popular revolt. Once it falls, a friendly democratic China will emerge—and America’s ruling class won’t have to change anything that they’ve been doing or thinking about since the end of the Cold War.
That means all the elites’ spending—along with all other forms of elite excess—is irrelevant. In their view, China, a country that is both America’s greatest strategic challenger as well as one of its most important trading partners, is going to implode. It’s a house of cards, they say.
It’s all wishful thinking. Could China collapse? Sure. Any regime could collapse. Is the system in China a house of cards? Maybe. But one could—and probably should—argue that the American financial and political order is also a house of cards, cards that are already teetering.
For the last year, the corporate press and their fellow travelers in the Chinese expat community here in the United States have been sharing totally unconfirmed stories about China’s President Xi Jinping having been placed under house arrest. We’ve heard whispers about senior generals in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) revolting. One prominent geopolitical analyst informed me last July that, by the 2025 plenum of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, Xi was going to announce his resignation as part of a secret deal between himself and his rivals (who were set to take power from Xi).
It never happened.
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