This is today’s China Update. Tony is a news reader who does an excellent job of tying everything together. But there is something else brewing here that he hasn’t touched yet. Maybe it’s much less likely than my worst case estimate, but hear me out.
China has 21% unemployment among the young.
China has a bias against female children and I recall seeing a figure quoted some years ago indicating there are thirty million men who will never marry. Stated another way, that’s roughly 2,000 World War II sized infantry divisions. This may be a very old number, say turn of the century.
The youngest Chinese military members with any combat experience are 63 this year. They poked Vietnam and pulled back a bloody stump.
Chairman Xi has systematically removed anyone else capable of making decisions, leaving China in a mode of mimicking what worked last year, rather than wisely coping with current conditions.
Like Russia’s cannon meat approach in Ukraine, China can mobilize en masse. Unlike Russia, they may fail badly at first, but they will perform incremental improvements in training and systems, if time allows.
China has more shiftless boys than Taiwan has total population.
This was on NBC yesterday and we were laughing about it, given how far off base it was from Tony’s careful threading of news from serious sources.
But now I wonder … predicting China’s next move has come down to reading Xi’s mind from afar. The bureaucracy telegraph is erratic and delayed.
If the smoldering housing market does burst into flames, does Xi distract with a hasty invasion of Taiwan, counting on sheer numbers to get the job done?
What does Peter Zeihan think? China might swamp Taiwan in a day, but then they would deal with global disapproval for the future. The combination of the U.S., U.K., Japan, and Singapore will … punish this. And by punish that seems to mean industrial collapse in a quarter and famine in a year.
And the last chapter in this video has Peter arriving at similar concerns, albeit via a more nuanced path.
Lots and lots of shiftless young men, some due to demographics, some due to industrial policy. Going to a full on war economy would resolve that, obviously, but I don’t think they can without immediately getting throttled by their global trade partners.
Gandalf’s wisdom, which is Tolkien speaking the wisdom of someone who saw two world wars, is quite apt here.