The recent (so far “successful”) visit of Her Imperial Highness the Worshipful Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress Assembled, third in succession to His Magnamity and Omnipotent Mightness Joseph R Biden, to China has again propelled the Middle Kingdom into the forefront of the news and the opinion media.

As has the deployment, complete with live fire exercises, of many of the 900 ships of the awesome and fear-inducing People’s Liberation Army Navy, in the Taiwan Straits and areas of the South China Sea. Surely Americans (to say nothing of Koreans, Taiwanese, Japanese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Indonesian, and Australians) are quivering like jelly in their diapers. With 1.4 BILLION people, rapidly becoming the world’s biggest economy, led by the magnificent vision of their beloved and supreme leader, China must be recognized as the premier culture, nation, and people on the planet. And indeed, in our entire solar system.

Sorry, but if you believe that line of guff from the mainstream and alter-naive [sic] media, you have been fed a line. If you believe that China is a financial and economic juggernaut destined to pass the U.S. in total output and eventually rule the world, it’s time to put those ideas aside.

None of that is true. First, China and its Communist regime and empire and worldwide reach are in very serious trouble. Many people think that the system – indeed, the entire nation – cannot last to the end of this decade. Some wonder if it can make it to the end of next year (2023).

First, as Jim Rickards and others have pointed out, China is entering the greatest demographic collapse in the history of the world since Noah’s Flood, worse than the scattering of the nations from Babel, the Justinian Plague and collapse of the sixth century, Black Death of the fourteenth century and the Spanish Flu of 1918. China’s current official population is about 1.4 billion, but that number will decline to perhaps 800 million by the year 2090. That’s a loss of 600 million people. [This is in line with Peter Ziehan’s report of 100 million overcount and the potential starvation (and accompanying “unrest”) that might mean China collapses by 2029 – or even 2023!]

Just that would bring the empire to its knees. That demographic collapse is far worse than what Russia, the European Union, or even Japan is going through. Not just the number of workers is going to vanish like ice in the summer sun, but their productivity will also drop like a stone.

But there is more. Much more.

China’s environment is trashed; its rivers are poisoned. Its food production is crashing (even as the sources of imports of food are seeing declining production). While it imprisons millions of its subjects in their own apartments and barracks in its major cities, it’s pursuing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Tibet and Xinjiang. The bizarre revival of Communism of Xi Jinping is rapidly destroying every trace of capitalism might have emerged in the decades since Deng Xiaoping’s reorientation of the Chinese economy in 1979 – and even the “state capitalism” is fallng apart, dissolved by corruption, micromanagement, confidence artists, and a medical tyranny as the frosting on the poisoned cake. Amazing, isn’t it, that so many “experts” continue to tout how China is increasingly “capitalist,” eh? IF you believe the “economic experts” of the West.

Jim Rickards and the gurus at Agora are quick to point out the “large number of more conventional but still potent detriments to growth.” Start with the real estate debacle. For decades, China has powered “economic growth” with investment in commercial and residential real estate. (Including “government investment” which is as crazy as the American federal government version. Better known as pork.) Chinese investors have very few options in foreign markets and alternative asset classes. What do they have? Gold, artificially high-yield bank deposits (really unsecured loans to property developers), Chinese stocks (bubble, anyone?), and real estate.

Three of those four (all but gold) are in a state of collapse. Real estate developers have stolen down payments on housing while defaulting on the projects. The bank “wealth management products” were mostly in real estate and have the same problems – failed projects and fraud: theft. (Again, this could be considered a tiny sliver of “real capitalism” – not just government employees and bosses have been stealing everything not nailed down: private “entrepreneurs” are now in the game. The stock bubble is popping, too. Add China’s failed “Zero Covid” policy (destroying not just economic growth, but the economy itself, to an impossible goal. How can an easily-transmittable disease like COVID be controlled by locking down large cities and trapping people indoors. On what seems to be a random basis? For how long? Even in a land long-used to no freedom, this rapidly becomes intolerable to the people.

All this leads to the conclusion that China desperately needs a massive confrontation with Taiwan and the West, to attempt to distract and paper over the yawning cracks in economy, society, and government. A confrontation which the Biden regime and the “Progressive” movement in the States seems willing to push. Why? Whether that is actual combat or just means short of actual shooting is hard to say. The demographics as presented by Peter Ziehan seem to show the urgency of that need for unity and possibly expansion and parasitism on a truly incredible scale, just as much as many claim is the case for Russia.

Which is why China is so dangerous right now. What risks are they willing to take? When sinking one or two American carriers guarantees the certainly of having not just their oil and gas supply, but their fertilizer and food supply cut off in the Indian and South Pacific Oceans? Do (as some think) the Chinese leadership have a Gotterdammerung mentality?

Slavery ultimately ends. Let us pray it ends in China with a whimper and not a bang.