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We are vulnerable because we are dependent on U.S. political support,” said Alyona Getmanchuk, director of the New Europe Center in Kyiv.

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tate media and ordinary Chinese online have portrayed the presidential campaign as an embarrassing battle between two geriatrics, with one magazine, Caijing, asking, “Why does the American presidential debate look like a quarrel in a wet market?

“Is America one step away from civil war?” read a headline in Komsomolskaya Pravda, the country’s most popular tabloid.

But ordinary Britons have far fewer misgivings. Mr. Trump was so unpopular that his visits had to be planned to avoid huge protests, and polls show Mr. Biden favored by a lopsided margin.

And the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, has vocally encouraged Mr. Trump’s diplomatic engagement with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, saying it stands a better chance of reaching a breakthrough than the more painstaking lower-level talks that Mr. Biden is likely to resume.

In the Middle East, where Mr. Trump’s foreign policy has had the biggest impact, a Democratic victory could leave the autocratic leaders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey with few friends in Washington, said Hisham Melhem, a columnist for the Lebanese newspaper Annahar Al Arabi.

He added: “I don’t want my grandchildren to live in a world dominated by China or Russia.”

Former President Franklin D. Roosevelt loved the prayer so much that in 1945 he had it engraved in the mantel above a stone fireplace in the State Dining Room.

These sentiments about honor and wisdom, shared for over two centuries by our best presidents, are now at the center of this year's presidential contest.

Within a decade, faith in the federal government as a whole dropped 41 points.

Faith in elected leaders rose to 55% in 2002, but by 2015 -- just before Trump took office -- it had dropped again, this time to only 19% of Americans saying they trusted the federal government all or most of the time.

Washington Post cataloging his over 20,000 false or misleading statements.

And a recent Pew poll measuring international sentiments across 13 countries found that the international community was more trusting of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping than of Trump.

Indeed, I believe that the restoration of trust should be the single highest priority of our next president. Everything else will flow from there.

First, our next president should set a new tone in the White House on day one, proclaiming that honesty, dignity and respect for others will be the new marching orders.

Ford proclaimed "that truth is the glue" that holds us all together. He believed it and soon his followers did, too.

Second, our next president needs every department to review and refresh its ethics codes and then require every new political appointee to attend no-nonsense briefings on what is in bounds and what is out of bounds.

Third, our next president needs to review and overhaul those who now serve as inspectors general across the federal landscape.

In writing his magisterial biography of Harry Truman, historian David McCullough concluded that character is the single most important quality a president must have.

So, the question before us is simple: Will the wise and the honest prevail over the next four years? The answer really rests with you, the voters. You are the ultimate stewards of our democracy.

American lawmakers may be distracted under a Trump presidency by hot-button issues at home such as health care and immigration.

and even closed the Chinese consulate in Houston, Texas

nearly four years of Trump and a coronavirus pandemic that he blames on China have left Beijing anxious about a second term.

Trump's gone from calling leader Xi Jinping a "friend" to putting sanctions on senior Communist Party officials and the country's biggest technology firms.

Others see an opportunity for China to hunker down and build its resilience as the U.S. rolls out trade sanctions on Chinese tech firms.

Zou says Chinese decision makers hope for stability under a potential Biden administration. But he warns that no matter who wins November 3, policymakers in Beijing expect the U.S. to continue to be tough on Chinese trade and pursue further economic restrictions on technology firms.

China has been restrained in its relations with the U.S. the last few months, with the exception of ratcheting up tensions with Taiwan, as it waits to see who wins the election.

On Thursday, China's Communist Party Central Committee concluded its 5th Plenum, a gathering of some 300 top Party officials during which the country's economic plans for the next five years are decided.

aims to build resilience into China's high tech sectors and wean the country's economy away from foreign trade.

That, and a successfully contained coronavirus epidemic, means Beijing feels confident it can prepare for whoever wins the U.S. presidential race

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, was the most trusted leader, with a 76% confidence rating among the six leaders presented as options

Emmanuel Macron (64%) and Boris Johnson (48%) were also on the list.

The public in each of the 13 countries were united in seeing the US as having the worst response to the coronavirus. A median of 15% thought the Trump administration had done a good job

Its highest score was in Spain, where 20% thought it had handled the crisis well. The 13,000 adults polled gave far higher ratings to the performance of their own countries, the World Health Organization, the EU and, in most cases, China.

The results are likely to be welcomed by the WHO in particular, as it is the target of a campaign by Trump and his administration to blame it for the pandemic. A median of 64% assessed the organisation was doing a good job in dealing with the outbreak.

The most important part of an effective response is to finally, at long last, forge a genuinely bipartisan effort to save our democracy, rejecting the vicious partisanship that has disabled and destabilized government for too long. If we cannot find common ground now, on this core issue at the very heart of our endangered system, we never will.

I propose that Congress creates a new mechanism to help accomplish this purpose. It should create a supremely high-level bipartisan and nonpartisan commission to oversee the election. This commission would not circumvent existing electoral reporting systems or those that tabulate, evaluate or certify the results. But it would monitor those mechanisms and confirm for the public that the laws and regulations governing them have been scrupulously and expeditiously followed — or that violations have been exposed and dealt with — without political prejudice and without regard to political interests of either party.

If we fail to take every conceivable effort to ensure the integrity of our election, the winners will not be Donald Trump or Joe Biden, Republicans or Democrats. The only winners will be Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Ali Khamenei. No one who supports a healthy democracy could want that.

I think a lot of Chinese people feel more secure from the cameras, there’s been a lot of propaganda out there saying the cameras are here for your safety. There is this extremely positive, almost Utopian take on technology in China, and a lot of the stuff that I think, our knee-jerk response from the United States would be to be worried about, they kind of embrace as a vision of the future. .

The main reasons WeChat is a concern if you were the United States government is number one, it’s become a major vector of the spread of Chinese propaganda and censorship, and because it’s a social network that is anchored by a vast majority of users in China who are censored and who are receptive to all this propaganda, even if you’re overseas using WeChat and not censored in the same way, what you get is mostly content shared from people who are living in a censored environment, so it basically stays a censored environment. I call that a super filter bubble; the idea is that there are multiple filter bubbles contending in a website like Facebook, but with WeChat, because it’s so dominated by government controls, you get one really big mega pro-China filter bubble that then is spread all over the the world over the app, even if people outside of China don’t face the same censorship. So that’s one thing.

The second is the surveillance is immense and anybody who creates an account in China brings the surveillance with them overseas

And most people, frankly, using WeChat overseas probably created the accounts in China, and even when they don’t create the account in China, when national security priorities hit a certain level, I think they’re probably going to use it to monitor people anyway. I’ve run into a number of people who have had run-ins with the Chinese Internet Police either in China, but some of them outside of China, in their day-to-day life using WeChat, and then they return home and it becomes apparent that the Internet Police were watching them the whole time, and they get a visit and the police have a discussion with them about what their activities have been

So it’s also a major way that the Chinese government is able to spy on and monitor people overseas and then unsurprisingly, because of that, it’s used as a way for the Chinese intel services to harass people overseas. . . .

WeChat is particularly suited to this in part because every single person who uses WeChat within China has it linked to their real identity. And then because everybody on WeChat has linked to their real identity, you can map their relationship networks and lean on them that way.

It also has a bunch of tools that the Chinese police use, for instance key words, where you can set an alarm so that if you were to say “Tiananmen”, they could set an alarm so that anytime you say that they get a warning about that, and then they go look at what you’ve written. So there’s all these tools that are uniquely created for Chinese state surveillance that are within the app that they can also use, so there’s a bunch of ways that the app is just better.

It’s also one of the very few unblocked communication tools that goes between the two countries. So for all these reasons it’s a very, very big deal. For the Chinese government, it’s an important tool of social control, and it’s been a way that they’ve been able to take the social controls that exist within China and expand them to the diaspora community in some pretty unnerving ways.

“America and Britain’s poor responses to Covid-19 can be traced partly to post-cold war self-congratulation — the belief that neither had much to learn from the rest of the world,” wrote Edward Luce of the Financial Times. “In a few short months a microbe has exposed the underside to Anglo-American hubris.”

that hubris is no small thing — it’s in many ways at the heart of the ideological project that sculpted the post-World War II international order, the “Anglo-Saxon” principles of laissez-faire liberal democracy that seemed irrevocably ascendant until not so long ago.

“Half a millennium of potted history tells Anglo-Americans they are destined always to be on the winning side,” Luce added. “It blinds both to how the rest of the world increasingly views them, which is with sadness and growing mockery.”

instead of setting the terms of a hemispheric “Pax Americana,” they find themselves adjusting to new realities forged elsewhere.

In the age of the coronavirus, Asia’s dramas have become global ones. A deadly standoff between Indian and Chinese forces in the Himalayas heralded the advent of a new 21st-century fault line separating two nuclear powers. The existential threats facing free societies in Hong Kong and Taiwan have galvanized support throughout the West. The ponderous deliberations in Europe about its political future now cannot be made without an eye to the Far East.

Chinese officials insist that such rivalry is unnecessary. “The world should not be viewed in binary thinking, and differences in systems should not lead to a zero-sum game,” Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in a speech Thursday, seeking to tamp down tensions with Washington. “China will not, and cannot, be another U.S.”

In an unfortunate paradox, the phenomenal rise of China may have created the very conditions for the demise of the Asian century,” wrote the Indian commentator C. Raja Mohan. “That China has become far more powerful than all of its Asian neighbors has meant Beijing no longer sees the need to evoke Asian unity. As it seeks to surpass the United States and emerge as the top dog in the world, it is no surprise that Beijing’s imagination has turned to the construction of a Chinese century.”

or me, the most damning indicator is that the rest of the world no longer thinks that the United States is the world’s leading economic power. Despite Trump’s claims about building the greatest economy in history, and despite a two-year trade war, a plurality of respondents believe that China is now the world’s most powerful economy:

The United States has encountered antipathy like this in the past, such as during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In 2003, the antipathy toward the United States was because it was perceived as a bully. In 2020, it was because the United States was perceived as incompetent at responding to the pandemic and withdrawing from the rest of the world.

The most striking finding to me, however, was the American public’s declining faith and growing worry about the United States itself. This came through in two poll findings

The first asked Americans about what they viewed as critical threats. In this century, the hardy perennials on this list were usually terrorism, threats to American jobs and illegal narcotics.

What was striking about this year’s top threats is how many of them are internal. The top three were covid-19 (cited by 67 percent of respondents), domestic violent extremism (57 percent) and political polarization (55 percent). Of the traditional foreign threats, only the rise of China (also 55 percent) came close.

The second poll finding asked Americans whether “the United States has a unique character that makes it the greatest country in the world.” In 2017, 63 percent of respondents said yes

Only 54 percent of respondents said yes in 2020, a record low in this century.

So, to sum up: After Donald Trump’s first term, global respect for the United States has plummeted. A plurality of respondents no longer think that the United States is the world’s leading economic power. Americans are showing waning faith in American exceptionalism and believe the country’s biggest threats are internal.

The central government wants Hong Kong to be run by “patriots,” Mr. Xia said, and will not let the Hong Kong government rewrite the territory’s laws, as previously expected, but will do so itself.

When Britain returned Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, the territory was promised a high degree of autonomy, in addition to the preservation of its capitalist economic system and the rule of law.

But in the decades since, many among the city’s 7.5 million residents have grown wary of Beijing’s encroachment on their freedoms and unfulfilled promises of universal suffrage.

Collectively, those efforts are transforming Hong Kong’s freewheeling, often messy partial democracy into a political system more closely resembling mainland China’s authoritarian system, which demands almost total obedience.

Mr. Lau, a former senior Hong Kong official, said the Chinese legislature, the National People’s Congress, would probably move to create a high-level group of government officials with the legal authority to investigate every candidate for public office and determine whether each candidate is genuinely loyal to Beijing

China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, raised the issue in late January with Mrs. Lam, telling her that having patriots govern Hong Kong was the only way to ensure the city’s long-term stability.

“You cannot say, ‘I’m patriotic but I don’t respect the fact that it is the Chinese Communist Party which leads the country,’” Erick Tsang, Hong Kong’s secretary for constitutional and mainland affairs, said at a news conference.

“I can only say people worry about that — for example, whether criticism of Communist Party or the political system in China would be regarded as not patriotic, then they have this kind of self-censorship,” said Ivan Choy, a senior lecturer in government and public administration at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

“It’s just in connection with these two major and important matters,” Mr. Chow said. “I still believe that, going forward, we still have a role to play.”

they are men like my late father and his friends, who understood that a man’s word is his bond and that a handshake means something. They are men who still believe in a day’s work for a day’s wages. They feel that you should never thank another man when he hands you a paycheck that you earned.

courage, honesty, respect, an economy of words, a bit of modesty, and a willingness to take responsibility are all virtues prized by the self-identified class of hard-working men, the stand-up guys, among whom I was raised.

yet, many of these same men expect none of those characteristics from Trump, who is a vain, cowardly, lying, vulgar, jabbering blowhard

As the writer Windsor Mann has noted, Trump behaves in ways that many working-class men would ridicule: “He wears bronzer, loves gold and gossip, is obsessed with his physical appearance, whines constantly, can't control his emotions, watches daytime television, enjoys parades and interior decorating, and used to sell perfume.”

To reduce all of this to sexual inadequacy, however, is too facile. It cannot explain why millions of men look the other way when Trump acts in ways they would typically find shameful. Nor is arguing that Trump is a bad person and therefore that the people who support him are either brainwashed or also bad people helpful. He is, and some of them are. But that doesn’t explain why men who would normally ostracize someone like Trump continue to embrace him.

one must first grasp how deeply they are betraying their own definition of masculinity by looking more closely at the flaws they should, in principle, find revolting.

This is related to one of Trump’s most noticeable problems, which is that he can never stop talking.

the fact of the matter is that Trump is an obvious coward. He has two particular phobias: powerful men and intelligent women.

Whenever he is in the company of Russian President Vladimir Putin, to take the most cringe-inducing example, he visibly cowers.

he is eager to criticize China, until he is asked about Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Is Trump honorable? This is a man who routinely refused to pay working people their due wages, and then lawyered them into the ground when they objected to being exploited. Trump is a rich downtown bully, the sort most working men usually hate.

In the end, Trump will continue to act like a little boy, and his base, the voters who will stay with him to the end, will excuse him. When a grown man brags about being brave, it is unmanly and distasteful; when a little boy pulls out a cardboard sword and ties a towel around his neck like a cape, it’s endearing. When a rich and powerful old man whines about how unfairly he is being treated, we scowl and judge; when a little boy snuffles in his tears and says that he was bullied—treated worse than Abraham Lincoln, even—we comfort.

Women clearly scare Trump. You don’t have to take my word for it. “Donald doesn’t like strong women,” Senator Ted Cruz said back in 2016

Trump never seems more fearful and insecure than when women question him

Does Trump accept responsibility and look out for his team? Not in the least. In this category, he exhibits one of the most unmanly of behaviors: He’s a blamer.

Stern’s observation opens the door to a better explanation of why—despite all of his whiny complaints, his pouty demeanor, and his mean-girl tweets—Trump’s working-class voters forgive him.

Trump’s lack of masculinity is about maturity. He is not manly because he is not a man. He is a boy.

Trump is a hero to a culture in which so many men are already trapped in perpetual adolescence.

especially for men who feel like life might have passed them by, whose fondest memories are rooted somewhere in their own personal Wonder Years from elementary school until high-school graduation, Trump is a walking permission slip to shrug off the responsibilities of manhood.

so many of the men who support Trump have morphed into childish caricatures of themselves. They, too, are little boys, playing at being tough but crying about their victimization at the hands of liberal elites if they are subjected to criticism of any kind.

Trump’s base of support among working-class white women. (Those numbers are now declining.) But perhaps these women, too, regard Trump as just one more difficult and mischievous man-child in their lives to be accommodated and forgiven.

The best example of women giving him a pass was after the Access Hollywood tape came to light in the fall of 2016.

Female Trump supporters were interviewed on national television and—in a tragic admission about the state of American families—seemed confused about why Trump would be considered any worse than the men around them.

Is Trump a man who respects women?

Donald Trump is unmanly because he has never chosen to become a man. He has weathered few trials that create an adult of any kind. He is, instead, working-class America’s dysfunctional son, and his supporters, male and female alike, have become the worried parent explaining what a good boy he is to terrorized teachers even while he continues to set fires in the hallway right outside.

Howard Stern, of all people, said it best: “The oddity in all of this is the people Trump despises most, love him the most. The people who are voting for Trump for the most part … He’d be disgusted by them.” The tragedy is that they are not disgusted by him in return.

It comes four days after Wang sidestepped questions from CNN on when China would congratulate the US President-elect on his win

Chinese state-run media has so far been cautious in its handling of Biden's win in comparison to its increasingly strident tone towards the Trump administration, amid an ongoing deterioration in bilateral relations.

China is one of the last major nations to offer its congratulations to President-elect Biden and his team on their win

"We will handle the issue of the statement (of congratulations) in accordance with international practice," Wang said

In 2016, Chinese President Xi Jinping offered his congratulations to then-President-elect Trump just one day after he had been declared the winner.

In an editorial on Thursday, state-run newspaper China Daily said that the "eagerness of foreign leaders" to congratulate Biden showed they wanted to "turn their backs on the current administration and its divisive policies."

"China is always ready to work with the US to manage their differences. Whoever is in the White House should look at the regional situation objectively," the editorial said.

Global Times described Biden as an "old friend" of China's

"China must become a country the US cannot suppress or destabilize, and make it that cooperation with China is the best option for the US to realize its national interests. 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In War and Peace and War (2006), his most accessible book, he likens himself to Hari Seldon, the “maverick mathematician” of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, who can foretell the rise and fall of empires. In those 10,000 years’ worth of data, Turchin believes he has found iron laws that dictate the fates of human societies.

The fate of our own society, he says, is not going to be pretty, at least in the near term. “It’s too late,”

The problems are deep and structural—not the type that the tedious process of demo­cratic change can fix in time to forestall mayhem.

Turchin likens America to a huge ship headed directly for an iceberg: “If you have a discussion among the crew about which way to turn, you will not turn in time, and you hit the iceberg directly.” The past 10 years or so have been discussion. That sickening crunch you now hear—steel twisting, rivets popping—­­is the sound of the ship hitting the iceberg.

Of the three factors driving social violence, Turchin stresses most heavily “elite overproduction”—­the tendency of a society’s ruling classes to grow faster than the number of positions for their members to fill.

Don’t we want everyone to be rich and educated? The problems begin when money and Harvard degrees become like royal titles in Saudi Arabia. If lots of people have them, but only some have real power, the ones who don’t have power eventually turn on the ones who do.

“You have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will convert to counter-elites,” Turchin said.

Elite jobs do not multiply as fast as elites do. There are still only 100 Senate seats, but more people than ever have enough money or degrees to think they should be running the country

Turchin noted that a person can be part of an ideological elite rather than an economic one.

Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners. If commoners’ living standards slip—not relative to the elites, but relative to what they had before—they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start oiling the axles of their tumbrels

Commoners’ lives grow worse, and the few who try to pull themselves onto the elite lifeboat are pushed back into the water by those already aboard.

The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency. At some point rising in­security becomes expensive. The elites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies—and when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people.

Eventually the state exhausts all short-term solutions, and what was heretofore a coherent civilization disintegrates.

“I gave up because I solved the problem.” Turchin published one final monograph, Complex Population Dynamics: A Theoretical / Empirical Synthesis (2003), then broke the news to his UConn colleagues that he would be saying a permanent sayonara to the field

“Does population ecology have general laws?” Turchin asked. Most ecologists said no: Populations have their own dynamics, and each situation is different.

All sciences go through this transition to mathematization,” Turchin told me. “When I had my midlife crisis, I was looking for a subject where I could help with this transition to a mathematized science. There was only one left, and that was history.”

After its long adolescence of collecting and cataloging, ecology had enough data to describe these universal laws—and to stop pretending that every species had its own idiosyncrasies. “Ecologists know these laws and should call them laws,” he said.

The laws Turchin applied to ecology—and his insistence on calling them laws—­generated respectful controversy at the time. Now they are cited in textbooks.

Having left ecology, Turchin began similar research that attempted to formulate general laws for a different animal species: human beings.

Turchin suggested that “there are several very general law-like propositions” that could be applied to ecology.

If the historians weren’t going to usher in a mathematical revolution themselves, he would storm their departments and do it for them.

“There is a longstanding debate among scientists and philosophers as to whether history has general laws,” he and a co-author wrote in Secular Cycles (2009). “A basic premise of our study is that historical societies can be studied with the same methods physicists and biologists used to study natural systems.”

he likened historians reluctant to build general principles to his colleagues in biology “who care most for the private life of warblers.” “Let history continue to focus on the particular,” he wrote. Cliodynamics would be a new science

To seed the journal’s research, Turchin masterminded a digital archive of historical and archaeological data.

The coding of its records requires finesse, he told me, because (for example) the method of determining the size of the elite-aspirant class of medieval France might differ from the measure of the same class in the present-day United States. (For medieval France, a proxy is the membership in its noble class, which became glutted with second and third sons who had no castles or manors to rule over. One American proxy, Turchin says, is the number of lawyers.)

Historians of religion have long pondered the relationship between the rise of complex civilization and the belief in gods—especially “moralizing gods,” the kind who scold you for sinning. Last year, Turchin and a dozen co-authors mined the database (“records from 414 societies that span the past 10,000 years from 30 regions around the world, using 51 measures of social complexity and 4 measures of supernatural enforcement of morality”) to answer the question conclusively. They found that complex societies are more likely to have moralizing gods, but the gods tend to start their scolding after the societies get complex, not before

One of Turchin’s most unwelcome conclusions is that complex societies arise through war. The effect of war is to reward communities that organize themselves to fight and survive, and it tends to wipe out ones that are simple and small-scale

the data are clear: Darwinian processes select for complex socie­ties because they kill off simpler ones.

Certain aspects of this cyclical view require relearning portions of American history, with special attention paid to the numbers of elites. The industrialization of the North, starting in the mid-19th century, Turchin says, made huge numbers of people rich. The elite herd was culled during the Civil War, which killed off or impoverished the southern slaveholding class, and during Reconstruction, when America experienced a wave of assassinations of Republican politicians.

“There is a very close correlation between adopting democratic institutions and having to fight a war for survival.”

Also unwelcome: the conclusion that civil unrest might soon be upon us, and might reach the point of shattering the country. In 2012, Turchin published an analysis of political violence in the United States, again starting with a database. He classified 1,590 incidents—riots, lynchings, any political event that killed at least one person—from 1780 to 2010. Some periods were placid and others bloody, with peaks of brutality in 1870, 1920, and 1970, a 50-year cycle.

In 2010, when Nature surveyed scientists about their predictions for the coming decade, most took the survey as an invitation to self-promote and rhapsodize, dreamily, about coming advances in their fields. Turchin retorted with his prophecy of doom and said that nothing short of fundamental change would stop another violent turn.

It wasn’t until the Progressive reforms of the 1920s, and later the New Deal, that elite overproduction actually slowed, at least for a time.

This oscillation between violence and peace, with elite over­production as the first horseman of the recurring American apocalypse, inspired Turchin’s 2020 prediction

The notion that democracy finds its strength in its essential goodness and moral improvement over its rival systems is likewise fanciful. Instead, democratic societies flourish because they have a memory of being nearly obliterated by an external enemy. They avoided extinction only through collective action, and the memory of that collective action makes democratic politics easier to conduct in the present,

Some sound like ideas that might have come from Senator Elizabeth Warren—tax the elites until there are fewer of them

others, such as a call to reduce immigration to keep wages high for American workers, resemble Trumpian protectionism.

He opposes credential-­oriented higher education, for example, which he says is a way of mass-producing elites without also mass-­producing elite jobs for them to occupy. Architects of such policies, he told me, are “creating surplus elites, and some become counter-elites.” A smarter approach would be to keep the elite numbers small, and the real wages of the general population on a constant rise.

We need to stop the runaway process of elite overproduction, but I don’t know what will work to do that, and nobody else does. Do you increase taxation? Raise the minimum wage? Universal basic income?” He conceded that each of these possibilities would have unpredictable effects

practice “adaptive management,” changing and modulating your approach as you go.

Eventually, Turchin hopes, our understanding of historical dynamics will mature to the point that no government will make policy without reflecting on whether it is hurtling toward a mathematically pre­ordained disaster.

He says he could imagine an Asimovian agency that keeps tabs on leading indicators and advises accordingly. It would be like the Federal Reserve, but instead of monitoring inflation and controlling monetary supply, it would be tasked with averting total civilizational collapse.

Since at least the 19th century, the discipline has embraced the idea that history is irreducibly complex, and by now most historians believe that the diversity of human activity will foil any attempt to come up with general laws, especially predictive ones.

The idea that one thing causes another, and that the causal pattern can tell you about sequences of events in another place or century, is foreign territory.

Turchin counters that he has heard claims of irreducible complexity before, and that steady application of the scientific method has succeeded in managing that complexity.

One social scientist who can speak to Turchin in his own mathematical argot is Dingxin Zhao, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago who is—incredibly—­also a former mathematical ecologist.

in a way I am sympathetic to Turchin. If you come to social science from natural sciences, you have a powerful way of looking at the world. But you may also make big mistakes.”

Turchin is nonetheless filling a historiographical niche left empty by academic historians with allergies not just to science but to a wide-angle view of the past.

humans are much wilier social creatures, Zhao said. A woodpecker will eat a termite, but it “will not explain that he is doing so because it is his divine right.” Humans pull ideological power moves like this all the time, Zhao said, and to understand “the decisions of a Donald Trump, or a Xi Jinping,” a natural scientist has to incorporate the myriad complexities of human strategy, emotion, and belief. “I made that change,” Zhao told me, “and Peter Turchin has not.”

Zhao said that human beings are just much more complicated than bugs.

He places himself in a Russian tradition prone to thinking sweeping, Tolstoyan thoughts about the path of history. By comparison, American historians mostly look like micro-historians.

Rather than bending toward progress, the arc in his view bends all the way back on itself, in a never-­ending loop of boom and bust. This puts him at odds with American historians, many of whom harbor an unspoken faith that liberal democracy is the end state of all history.

Writing history in this sweeping, cyclical way is easier if you are trained outside the field. “If you look at who is doing these megahistories, more often than not, it’s not actual historians,”

The genre’s most famous book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), beheld 13,000 years of human history in a single volume. Its author, Jared Diamond, spent the first half of his career as one of the world’s foremost experts on the physiology of the gall­bladder.

Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist who studies how children acquire parts of speech, has written a megahistory about the decline of violence across thousands of years, and about human flourishing since the Enlightenment

Most historians I asked about these men—and for some reason megahistory is nearly always a male pursuit—used terms like laughingstock and patently tendentious to describe them.

Pinker retorts that historians are resentful of the attention “disciplinary carpet­baggers” like himself have received for applying scientific methods to the humanities and coming up with conclusions that had eluded the old methods.

“Given the noisiness of human behavior and the prevalence of cognitive biases, it’s easy to delude oneself about a historical period or trend by picking whichever event suits one’s narrative,” he says. The only answer is to use large data sets.

“There’s no reason that traditional history and data science can’t merge into a cooperative enterprise,” Pinker wrote. “Knowing stuff is hard; we need to use every available tool.”

Turchin’s conclusions are only as good as his databases, she told me, and any database that tries to code something as complex as who constitutes a society’s elites—then tries to make like-to-like comparisons across millennia and oceans—will meet with skepticism from traditional historians

Turchin’s data are also limited to big-­picture characteristics observed over 10,000 years, or about 200 lifetimes. By scientific standards, a sample size of 200 is small, even if it is all humanity has.

Privately, some historians have told me they consider the tools he uses powerful, if a little crude. Clio­dynamics is now on a long list of methods that arrived on the scene promising to revolutionize history. Many were fads, but some survived that stage to take their rightful place in an expanding historiographical tool kit

Turchin’s methods have already shown their power. Cliodynamics offers scientific hypotheses, and human history will give us more and more opportunities to check its predictions—­revealing whether Peter Turchin is a Hari Seldon or a mere Nostradamus.

But the policy has also, increasingly, made China an outlier. The rest of the world is reopening, including New Zealand and Australia, which also once embraced zero tolerance. China is now the only country still chasing full eradication of the virus.

Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has repeatedly pointed to the country’s success in containment as proof of the superiority of its governance model

China may find itself increasingly isolated, diplomatically and economically, at a time when global public opinion is hardening against it.

the Chinese Communist Party’s very hold on power seemed to hinge on its ability to control the virus. Its initial attempts to cover up the outbreak in Wuhan gave rise to a stunning outpouring of public anger. Images of overwhelmed hospitals and patients begging for help flooded the Chinese internet.

China’s strict lockdowns and mass testing campaigns, once criticized as heavy handed, became models for other countries.

When Zhang Wenhong, a prominent infectious disease expert from Shanghai, suggested this summer that China learn to live with the virus, he was attacked viciously online as a lackey of foreigners. A former Chinese health minister called such a mindset reckless.

Australia, which was home to the world’s longest lockdown, is scrapping quarantine requirements for vaccinated residents returning from overseas. New Zealand formally abandoned its quest for zero this month. Singapore is offering quarantine-free travel to vaccinated tourists from Germany, the United States, France and several other countries

There are also more practical reasons for China’s hesitation. Medical resources are highly concentrated in big cities, and more remote areas could quickly be overwhelmed by an uptick in cases, said Zhang Jun, an urban studies scholar at the City University of Hong Kong.

In addition, though China has achieved a relatively high full inoculation rate, at 75 percent of its population, questions have emerged about the efficacy of its homegrown vaccines.

And, at least for now, the elimination strategy appears to enjoy public support. While residents in locked-down areas have complained about seemingly arbitrary or overly harsh restrictions on social media, travel is relatively unconstrained in areas without cases. Wealthy consumers have poured money into luxury goods and fancy cars since they’re not spending on trips abroad.

“We thought they were out of their minds. We told them it would be an absolutely devastating approach to deal with the pandemic,” one US official told the authors

Johnson and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, backed Trump’s call for an in-person G7 summit at Camp David in the summer, which the US president saw as a way to show leadership and demonstrate that things were getting back to normal.

But the plan was torpedoed by Angela Merkel’s decision not to attend. According to Aftershocks, the refusal was only partly motivated by the German chancellor’s concern about the health risks of an in-person summit. She also thought her mere presence would be counterproductive to reaching agreement because of Trump’s viscerally hostile reaction to her.

Merkel told Trump of her decision not to come Camp David on 28 May and he reacted furiously, yelling and then hanging up on her. The president then announced the summit would be canceled and called into question the G7’s relevance, using the occasion to repeat his earlier calls for Russia to be readmitted.

“​​With the Europeans now fully estranged from the United States, for all practical purposes the G7 ceased to exist,” Wright and Kahl argue. “As Covid-19 swept through every part of the world in 2020, it would be every nation for itself.”

The world that emerges from the pandemic will be shaped by an adversarial rivalry that is not just about each side’s relative power, but has become an existential competition as each side strives to demonstrate the superiority of its system of government.

Starting with the Winter Olympics in February and culminating with the 20th Communist Party congress later in the year, China will stage a series of tightly choreographed events designed to project the competence, clout and all-round superiority of party rule, and formalise Mr Xi’s position at its helm beyond the ten-year tenure that has hitherto been the norm.

As the year goes on, the near certainty that, health permitting, Mr Trump will be the Republican presidential candidate in 2024 means America’s political debate will be overshadowed by fears of the biggest constitutional crisis since the civil war.

If the theatre of politics makes Western democracy look dysfunctional relative to Chinese autocracy, 2022 may offer a different verdict on which system delivers the most competent economic management. From tech companies to post-pandemic reopening, China and America are taking starkly divergent approaches to similar challenges

America and the rest of the West will move into a living-with-covid mindset. The disease will not disappear, but become endemic. Booster jabs will become the norm, remaining travel restrictions will be relaxed and lockdowns will become a thing of the past

China, by contrast, will stick with a zero-covid policy throughout 2022. Having terrified its citizens about the disease and touted its toughness as a mark of superiority, China’s government cannot easily change course. The country will remain walled off from the rest of the world with long quarantines and sharply restricted travel.

In both of these cases, China’s draconian approach will eventually cause economic damage.

All this will complicate China’s already challenging macroeconomic environment. China-watchers have worried for years about the consequences of unwinding the country’s enormous property boom and the jaw-dropping levels of debt that accompanied it. The crisis at Evergrande, a huge developer, suggests that this tricky transition is at last under way. It will dominate 2022 as other property-related firms fail. Add to that structural challenges, from a shrinking workforce to a rapidly growing number of old-age dependents, and the economic pressures are considerable. Annual GDP growth could fall to 5%

With covid-19 behind it, its fiscal tightening mostly complete and (assuming some version of Mr Biden’s bill is passed) with a long-overdue effort to improve infrastructure under way, America’s economy could grow smartly, even as its politics frays. GDP growth of 4%, not far off China’s, is plausible.

in theory the two sides could make progress in plenty of areas, such as devising a sensible deal on trade and technology to replace the tariffs of the Trump era; agreeing on a common approach to cyber-security, nuclear non-proliferation or the militarisation of space; or finding ways to accelerate the clean-energy transition in the wake of the COP26 climate meeting in Glasgow.

The good news is that a military confrontation seems unlikely in 2022. The overriding need to preserve stability in the run-up to the party congress will discourage China from adventurism or excessive sabre-rattling, whether around Taiwan or in the South China Sea. The bad news is that the Thucydides Trap will not have gone away.

There appeared to be no immediate breakthroughs to ease tensions on the Ukraine question, as the U.S. emphasized a need for diplomacy and de-escalation, and issued stern threats to Russia on the consequences of an invasion.

the United States and our European allies would respond with strong economic measures,

At the White House, Sullivan said, “It was a useful meeting,” allowing Biden to lay out in candid terms where the US stands.

A top U.S. envoy, Victoria Nuland, said a Russian invasion of Ukraine also would jeopardize a controversial pipeline between Russia and Germany.

Putin’s foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov dismissed the sanctions threat during a conference call with reporters.

He described the presidents’ video conference as “candid and businesslike,” adding that they also exchanged occasional jokes.

Biden said the U.S. would also “provide additional defensive material to the Ukrainians … and we would fortify our NATO allies on the eastern flank with additional capabilities in response to such an escalation.”

Ukrainian officials charged Russia had further escalated the smoldering crisis by sending tanks and snipers to war-torn eastern Ukraine to “provoke return fire” and lay a pretext for a potential invasion.

The Russian leader also proposed to lift all mutual restrictions on diplomatic missions and help normalize other aspects of bilateral relations, the Kremlin said. Sullivan said the leaders would direct their staffs to continue negotiations on that.

The leader-to-leader conversation — Biden speaking from the White House Situation Room, Putin from his residence in Sochi —was one of the most important of Biden’s presidency and came at a perilous time. U.S. intelligence officials have determined that Russia has massed 70,000 troops near the Ukraine border and has made preparations for a possible invasion early next year.

Politically in Washington, Republicans are framing this moment as a key test of Biden’s leadership on the global stage. Biden vowed as a candidate to reassert American leadership after President Donald Trump’s emphasis on an “America first” foreign policy.

But Republicans say he’s been ineffective in slowing Iran’s march toward becoming a nuclear power and has done too little to counter autocratic leaders including China’s Xi Jinping and Putin.“

Putin apparently sees the current situation as a moment to readjust the power dynamic of the U.S.-Russia relationship, analysts agree.

Beyond Ukraine, there are plenty of other thorny issues on the table, including cyberattacks and human rights. Before the call, Kremlin spokesman Peskov said U.S.-Russian relations are overall in “a rather dire state.”

“Russia has never planned to attack anyone,” Peskov said. He characterized the Biden-Putin call as a “working conversation during a very difficult period,” when “escalation of tensions in Europe is off the scale, extraordinary.”

The government has also recently emphasized its dedication to women’s employment rights, especially as it urges women to have more children amid a looming demographic crisis.

Pickup artistry — a practice that arrived in China from the United States — commonly refers to the use of manipulative techniques, including gaslighting, to demean women and lure them into having sex. It became a booming industry in China, with thousands of companies and websites promising to teach techniques, and it has been widely condemned by both the government and social media users.

Women have also been increasingly pushed out of the workplace and into traditional gender roles since China’s leader, Xi Jinping, assumed power. Some fear that the campaign to encourage childbirth could turn coercive.

The gesture, at least, is extensive. As revised, the law would offer the most comprehensive legal definition yet of sexual harassment, to include behaviors such as sending unwanted sexually explicit images or pressuring someone into a relationship in exchange for benefits. It also instructs schools and employers to introduce anti-harassment training and channels for complaints.

The law would also codify women’s right to ask for compensation for housework during divorce proceedings — following the first-of-its-kind decision by a Chinese divorce court last year to award a woman more than $7,700 for her labor during her marriage.

When Peng Shuai, a star tennis player, recently said on social media that a top Chinese leader had pressured her into sex, she was censored within minutes, and many worry that she is under surveillance.

“The priority should be on bottom-up enforcement, where you empower individuals who have been harassed to use the law to protect their rights,” he said.

It is rare for victims of harassment to go to court. An analysis by Mr. Longarino and others found that 93 percent of sexual harassment cases decided in China between 2018 and 2020 were brought not by the alleged victim but by the alleged harasser, claiming defamation or wrongful termination. Women who have made public harassment claims have been forced to pay those they accused.

Nonlegal complaints can bring heavy consequences, too. In December, Alibaba, the e-commerce giant, fired a woman who had accused a superior of raping her. The company said that she had “spread falsehoods,” even though it had earlier fired the man she accused.

Even when women do sue their harassers, they face steep hurdles. Perhaps the most high-profile #MeToo case to go to court was brought by Zhou Xiaoxuan, a former intern at China’s state broadcaster, who asserted that Zhu Jun, a star anchor, had forcibly kissed and groped her. But the case faced years of delays. In September, a court dismissed the claim and said she had not provided enough evidence, though Ms. Zhou said the judges had rejected her efforts to introduce more.

several male bloggers with large followings on the social media platform Weibo denounced the provisions against degrading or harassing women online, saying they would give “radical” feminists too much power to silence their critics.

A woman in southern Guangdong Province who asked to use only her last name, Han, out of fears for her safety, said that she had endured years of physical and emotional abuse by her ex-husband. Even though she managed to secure a divorce last year, he continues to stalk and threaten her, she said. She obtained a restraining order, viewed by The New York Times, that cited chat logs and recordings.

If the law is revised, she continued, the police will be forced to recognize that she has a right to seek their help.

The message is not that we should expect to bow to every misdeed or atrocity. It is that the “good guys” — granted the impossibility that we can ever reach global consensus about who these are — cannot and should not intervene militarily whenever they see bad stuff happen.

I am just completing a book on the Cuban Missile Crisis. One of its most important lessons is that while Kennedy played a masterly diplomatic hand, it is most unlikely that America’s will could have prevailed — the Soviet nuclear weapons withdrawn from Cuba — without the underpinning threat of American force.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and even his most hawkish generals knew that America possessed an overwhelming superiority, both of conventional weapons in the Caribbean region and nuclear missiles capable of destroying the Soviet Union. US superiority of the latter was on the order of 17 to 1. And thanks to the intelligence officer Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who slipped his nation’s secrets to the West, the Americans knew that the Soviets recognized their own weakness.

Moreover, the will and solidarity of the US and its allies to confront the Soviets remained strong in the Cold War. American presidents often found themselves having to restrain the eagerness not only of the military brass, but also of some ordinary citizens, to go head to head with “the Russkies.”

The bipolar Cold War planet has been replaced by a multipolar one, in which a tenuous American superiority persists, but is no longer unchallengeable.

If you think this represents appeasement, watch the new Netflix movie “Munich: The Edge of War,” which stars Jeremy Irons as Neville Chamberlain.

A well-briefed military friend of mine believes that the Chinese are not yet quite ready for a showdown over Taiwan, but he thinks they will seek one within a few years, confident of a local victory.

Biden deserves more sympathy than he is currently receiving for his vacillation on Ukraine. The old, moth-eaten allegation of appeasement is being levelled by his foes both at home and abroad. Yet the US cannot be expected to face down Putin alone, far less to go to war with him.

Today we live in an entirely different strategic environment

Thus, the likelihood is that if Putin attacks Ukraine, he can secure the territory he wants without suffering serious military consequences, beyond whatever losses the courageous Ukrainians can inflict on Russian forces.

The real challenge for the West is to summon the will to punish Putin and his friends in the language they understand best — that of money. Economic sanctions against Russia as a country are right, but not remotely sufficient. The only meaningful weapon is an assault upon the fortunes and lifestyles of the Kremlin’s gangster clique, held and invested around the world.

As for the US, the only party to the confrontation that matters, it seems absolutely right to do everything possible to deter Putin, and to punish him if he goes ahead with his cold-blooded plan to kill thousands of people, to score a victory that shores up his unpopular domestic polity. But one should not resort to threats, nor offer promises to the Ukrainians, that there is no intention of fulfilling.

Most of America’s European “allies” — the quotation marks are emphatic — are too fearful that the Kremlin will cut off their gas supplies to provide Washington with meaningful backing. Europe’s attitude to serious foreign policy and security issues is frankly decadent.

by cutting his 1938 deal with Hitler, he bought vital time for Britain to re-arm before the war that he recognized was coming.

Harris makes a good additional point, that Hitler thought himself cheated out of a military assault on Czechoslovakia that he wanted, and expected to get. In other words, appeasement was clever.

As a historian, I do not go all the way with Harris about this. He seems right that Britain could not realistically have fought in 1938.

I still think that Chamberlain was a weak, foolish old man who shrank from unwelcome realities.

His worst contribution to history is that Munich gave appeasement — which some of us would call a recognition of realities — a bad name. My hero among historical and strategic gurus, the Oxford professor Michael Howard, often said, “If you are dealing with foreign leaders less monstrous than was Hitler, appeasement can be a very sensible policy.”

We must reluctantly acknowledge that both Russia’s Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping can commit acts of aggression in their own backyards that we are unable to prevent, and which are not worth a general war.

Together with—and perhaps because of—its economic malaise, the country is living through a political earthquake. Germany’s wealth, its exemplary parliamentary democracy, and its big efforts to confront its Nazi history are no longer keeping nativist parties at bay.

Outside the EU, “made in Germany” goods struggle to find new clients. Exports to China have been roughly flat since mid-2015 and may even start to drop, as President Xi Jinping has made clear that he wants to make his country less dependent on European industry

The Federal Republic is the only big Euro member whose economy has not yet fully recovered to pre-pandemic levels. In fact, German GDP has roughly stagnated since 2019. And German manufacturing is the main problem: Industrial output lags pre-pandemic levels by some 5 percent.

The reason Germany ceased to be Europe’s growth engine has less to do with Russian energy than with changing circumstances in the export markets where the country’s industrial champions once flourished

In the 2000s, former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder slashed unemployment benefits and created a low-wage sector to help German exporters increase their market shares across Europe. Since then, many other European countries, including France and Italy, have made reforms to cut labor costs themselves, and Germany faces tougher competition in its biggest export market and has been running a trade deficit in goods with other EU members since 2020.

We are living through the end of German exceptionalism. The country’s economy is fragile, and the rise of the AfD makes its politics as unpredictable as those of Austria or Italy. In short, Germany is joining the European mainstream. And that means that trouble is ahead.

German car exports to China were down 24 percent in the first three months of 2023 compared with the same period in 2022

The U.S. is Germany’s second-largest market after the EU, accounting for 8.9 percent of its exports, but to top off Germany’s troubles, Washington is becoming more protectionist under Joe Biden.

The obvious solution is for Germany to spend more. Greater investment could raise productivity in a country where the railways have the worst delays among major European countries and cellphone and internet connectivity are underfunded

Investment could boost demand, and liberalizing policies could rebalance the economy toward services.

But a dogma of balanced budgets and debt avoidance remains deeply anchored among German politicians and voters.

Now Germany, whose effort to confront its Nazi history seemed to inoculate its politicians from having to deal with a large far-right party, is also falling prey to populism and nationalism.

ore and more governments across Europe are led by right-wing parties: in Italy, Sweden, Finland, and soon possibly Spain. In all of these countries, the center-right no longer has qualms about working with the far-right.

the penny has not yet dropped. Germany’s political elite hasn’t been moved to take the risky step of running up debts and liberalizing at the same time. But until it does, the country’s economy will likely lag European growth. And if the economy ceases to serve as a source of national pride, political forces may thrive by brandishing more nativist concepts of German identity.

The AfD’s rise to 20 percent in the polls—twice what it commanded in the 2021 parliamentary elections—has many causes. The party’s bastion is the formerly Communist east, where authoritarian attitudes and resentment of traditional parties feed off of feelings of having been the losers in Germany’s reunification

But something broader is going on. For Germans, the hallmark of good government is “Ruhe und Ordnung,” calm and order. The three parties in Scholz’s ruling coalition—the center-left SPD, the Greens, and the pro-business FDP—squabble over everything

The party has also benefited from a backlash against Germany’s progressive agenda on climate and migration

Despite the country’s reputation abroad as a climate champion, in a poll of seven European countries, Germans were the least willing among Europeans to switch to electric cars, cut meat consumption, or spend out of their own pockets to renovate their houses to save the climate.

As for migration, racist views are ingrained in Germany’s formerly Communist east

But the AfD has also been able to mobilize an anti-immigration electorate in big, rich, formerly West German states, such as Bavaria, the land of Siemens and Weisswurst, and Baden-Württemberg

the CDU will need to decide whether it will continue marginalizing the far-right or start working with it instead. The AfD is leading the polls in Thuringia and polling a strong second in Saxony

ermany is joining the European mainstream, with its political class struggling to counter rising far-right support and an economy that is no longer best-in-class. The two things that made postwar Germany unique in Europe are no more

the rise of the AfD is pushing Berlin to become an unreliable partner in Europe. The CDU was once the champion of Schengen, the EU’s policy to allow for passport-less travel across the continent. The party’s leader, Merz, clearly concerned about covering his right flank, has now called for reintroducing passport checks at Germany’s borders with other EU members, such as Czechia, in order to turn away migrants.

As the AfD criticizes the “reckless” spending of the Scholz government, the FDP and the chancellor are doubling down on spending cuts. Germany is becoming less willing to spend for itself and the EU.

The AfD may one day accede to national government, but it cannot do so on its own. To work in a coalition, the party will almost certainly have to compromise on its most radical policy propositions, such as closing the U.S. military base in Ramstein. But even with the AfD merely exerting pressure on German politics, the EU must sooner or later face an adjustment—to a future in which Germany is no longer an economic and political anchor so much as a source of instability.

China’s drop was much much bigger; the Japan of the 80s was never the export machine people believed it to be. Both countries turned to investment in real estate and infrastructure as a replacement growth driver — although again, China did this much more than Japan did. Essentially, China did all the the things we typically think of Japan as having done 25 years earlier, but much more than Japan actually did them.

Yes, for those who were wondering, this does look a little bit like what happened to Japan in the 1990s

Already the country is not growing much faster than the G7, and as the ongoing real estate bust weighs on the economy, even that small difference may now be gone. The country’s surging auto industry is a bright spot, but won’t be big enough to rescue the economy from the evaporation of its primary growth driver.

Even if it manages to climb up to 40%, that’s still a fairly disappointing result — South Korea is at 71% and Japan at 65%

a re-acceleration would require a massive burst of productivity growth, which just seems unlikely.

That means China’s catch-up growth only took it to 30% of U.S. per capita GDP (PPP)

There’s one main argument that people make for a quick Chinese decline: rapid aging. But while I don’t want to wave this away, I don’t think it’s going to be as big a deal as many believe

This is another example of China’s peak being both awe-inspiring and strangely disappointing at the same time.

Now that China has hit its peak, will it decline? And if so, how much and how fast?

it seems likely that China’s growth will now slow to developed-country levels, or slightly higher, without much prospect for a sustained re-acceleration

when people contemplate Chinese decline, they’re not asking whether its economy will shrink; they’re asking whether its relative economic dominance and geopolitical importance will decrease.

If we just casually pattern-match on history, the answer would probably be “not for a long time”. Most powerful countries seem to peak and then plateau. Britain ruled the waves for a century.

U.S. relative power and economic dominance peaked in the 1950s, but it didn’t really start declining until the 2000s

Japan and Germany had their military power smashed in WW2, but remained economic heavyweights for many decades afterwards.

When the Roman Empire declined, it got a lot poorer. But in the modern economy, countries that decline in relative terms, and in geopolitical power, often get richer

he total fertility rate has been low since even before the one-child policy was implemented, but recently it has taken a nose-dive. Two years ago, the UN put it at 1.16, which is 40% lower than the U.S. and 22% lower than Europe

The country’s total population only started shrinking this year, but its young population started falling sharply 20 years ago, due to the echo of low fertility in the 80s. The most common age for a Chinese person is now about 50 years old, with another peak at 35:

The first reason is that power is relative, and China’s rivals have demographic issues of their own. The U.S., Europe, India and Japan all have higher fertility than China, but still below replacement level

demographics aren’t actually going to force Chinese power or wealth into rapid decline over the next few decades.

third of all, evidence suggests that population aging is really more of a persistent drag than a crisis or disaster.

Second, demographics won’t take away China’s biggest economic advantage, which is clustering and agglomeration effects. Asia is the world’s electronics manufacturing hub. It’s also by far the most populous region in the world, giving it the biggest potential market size

China will act as a key hub for that region, in terms of trade, supply chains, investment, and so on. China is shrinking, but Asia is not

As a result, there are suddenly many fewer Chinese people able to bear children, which is why the actual number of births in China has fallen by almost half since 2016:

we’d find that every percentage point of the senior population share that China gains relative to other countries might reduce its relative economic performance by about 1.15%. That’s not a huge number.

Now, if we look at the research, we find some estimates that are much larger than this — for example, Ozimek et al. (2018) look at specific industries and specific U.S. states, and find an effect on productivity that’s three times as large as the total effect on growth that I just eyeballed above. Maestas et al. (2022) look at U.S. states, and also find a larger effect. But Acemoglu and Restrepo (2017) look across countries and find no effect at all.

On top of that, there are plenty of things a country can do to mitigate the effects of aging. One is automation. China is automating at breakneck speed,

A second is having old people work longer; China, which now has higher life expectancy than the U.S., is well-positioned to do this.

Finally, aging will prompt China to do something it really needs to do anyway: build a world class health care system

this would help rectify the internal imbalances that Michael Pettis always talks about, shifting output from low-productivity real estate investment toward consumption.

if not aging, the only other big dangers to China are war and climate change.

To realize its full potential, Altasia will need integration — it will need some way to get Japanese and Korean and Taiwanese investment and technology to the vast labor forces of India, Indonesia, and the rest

the most likely outcome is that China sits at or near its current peak of wealth, power and importance through the middle of this century at least.

Altasia has more people and arguably more technical expertise than China. And it’s the only alternative location for the Asian electronics supercluster.

War was the big mistake that Germany made a century ago, so let’s hope China doesn’t follow in its footsteps.

The story of whether and how that complex web of investment, tech transfer, and trade develops will be the next great story of globalization.

But I think the very complexity of Altasia will lead to its own sort of adventure and excitement.

for Western companies looking for new markets, Altasia will potentially be more exciting than China ever was. The Chinese market delivered riches to some, but the government banned some products (especially internet services) and stole the technology used to make others. Ultimately, China’s billion consumers turned out to be a mirage for many. The economies and societies of Altasia, in comparison, are much more open to foreign products.