The seven trends that will define China in the 2020s

This is a summary and a commentary on a very interesting article by Andrew Leung titled "The seven trends that will define China in the 2020s " that was published today 2020-01-04 in the South China Morning Post.





1. China is facing a tectonic collision with the United States but this will not derail it from its path to rejuvenation.

" There seems to be a consensus among the US establishment that a powerful China, if left unchecked, would compromise, if not usurp, American leadership of the liberal world order ".

This perception by the Western establishment will definitely foster much trouble along the years to come. But societies have their own nature that human will is powerless against. The fact is that Western societies have atomized into culturally inept competitors and in the meantime China has grown into a highly cohesive body that will be unbeatable for many years to come.



2. The rate of China’s economic growth is likely to slide into a range of 5 to 6 per cent annually. But the gigantic size of its GDP base will ensure that the mass of its annual GDP growth will continue to contribute the largest chunk of the world's global growth for many many years to come.

" Chinese economic momentum driven by infrastructure, housing and exports is reaching a plateau. Newer growth engines, services and consumption, take longer to mature.
The rest of the world is likely to become more dependent upon China’s economy than vice versa. According to a McKinsey Global Institute report, China’s economy is rebalancing towards domestic consumption. This contributed 76 per cent of China’s GDP growth in 2017 and 2018, while net trade made a negative contribution.
China’s consumer markets are heavily integrated with the world. Across 10 large consumer categories, multinational corporations’ average penetration in China was 40 per cent in 2017, compared with 26 per cent in the US. "

In light of this all accusations against China, of market access denial to foreign corporations, is a vicious lie that has to be put to rest.



3. Is China going to have the ability to leapfrog the “middle-income trap” while safeguarding national security and achieving its centennial goals by 2049 to become a “strong, democratic, civilized, harmonious and modern socialist ecological country ?”.
 Paradoxically the denial of access to US’ advanced technologies is forcing China to accelerate its vertical integration which will help it leapfrog Western technologies and ensure its ability to overcome the “middle-income trap”. It will become common knowledge, a few decades later, that Trump's temper tantrums acted as the definitive instrumental factors of China's successful entry in the club of the richest nations. China should definitely thank Trump and his MAGA.



4.The US aggression in trade has obliged China to rethink its economic strategy. As a consequence its resulting vertical integration is leading to less dependence on value chains in Asia, the European Union and the US. Western aggression, and its denial of access to its technology by China, will blow-back in spectacular fashion and isolate the Western world from the beating heart of world technology, production, ad consumption.



5. China is on track to become the world’s largest consumer market.
Its dynamic e-commerce and e-payment systems, the world’s most advanced technologically and also the largest, is the catalyst that drives domestic consumption in its rural inner provinces that still represent around 50% of its population. When mature the Chinese consumer market is going to dwarf the market of all Western nations added together. This promises some defections from the Western camp. The opportunities from China's market will appear so juicy in the eyes of most European nations that they'll gradually integrate the Eurasian bloc. The US will then find itself utterly isolated and it will have to pay a very high price, for its neo-con hubris and the crimes against humanity that it inflicted right and left, in order to reintegrate the community of nations. Think about that for a moment. We could indeed see Nurenberg style courts, sometimes along the next decades, punishing the surviving US decision makers who participated in the decisions leading to those crimes.



6. China is laying the foundations for a worldwide ecological civilization.

" According to a report published by the Dutch company Elsevier, China should be able to achieve 26 per cent renewable energy by 2030.
A report by Energy Transitions Commission and Rocky Mountain Institute finds that China is well positioned to attain carbon neutrality as a fully developed economy by 2050 ".

China accounts for 150,000 renewable energy patents, about 30 per cent of the world’s total, far ahead of the US (100,000), Japan (75,000) and the EU (75,000). China has the largest high-speed railway network at some 35,000 km long by end of 2019. The country started to invest in a new super-high speed maglev network that will initially run at speeds of 600 km/h (372 miles/hour) which are planned to rise to 1,000 km/h (621 miles/h) sometime by the end of the 20ths of this 21st century. This super-high speed network would then be competitive with air transportation over most of the country.  A revolution that is guaranteed to impact the whole world.



7. While the US is retreating within its borders China is entering, through economic and infrastructural links, in extensive regional and transnational networks:

• internally: the Greater Bay Area, the Yangze river delta, and the hyper-city of Jing-Jin-Ji.

• externally: the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and the Belt and Road.

" According to its National Development and Reform Commission, China’s cumulative trade with belt and road countries surpassed US$7 trillion in 2018, with investment of more than US$30 billion.
A Belt and Road international science alliance was established in 2018, building technology transfer platforms and science parks with Southeast and South Asia, the Middle East, Central Asia, central and eastern Europe ".

I added some commentaries with the summary of these 7 trends by Andrew Leung. But, while he describes real trends that are reshaping "the governance-world", Leung nevertheless omits the elephant in the room. The future shall indeed be rather more complicated than the present. The reshaping of "the governance-world" will come under heavy stress from "the convergence of the multiple side-effects of Modernity". It is indeed no secret for informed minds that this convergence has already been put in motion and that, after gaining some velocity, it will blow up all human attempts to influence the future chain of events. But this is another subject all together.



Those of you who would want to read more about these subjects will find a lot more in my recent 2 books (given as free PDF's) :

1. "Growing disconnect between East and West" published in October 2018
2. "What is going on ?" published in December 2019