Blog Roll: China

 

May 19, 2026 China wants A.I. to Flourish but not at the expense of Jobs.

May 13, 2026 Xi Jinping, China’s leader, told President Trump that if the Taiwan issue were handled poorly, it could lead to a clash with the United States. Later, at a state dinner, they emphasized cooperation.How China Is Building Its Next Outpost at Sea - The New York Times

April 21, 2026 China has been quietly and quickly building an island in disputed waters off of the coast of Vietnam over the last few months.

Since 2009 under the Obama administration, US Foreign policy has shifted toward Asia, sometimes called the Asia-Pivot. Google AI:

Over time, according to ChatGPT:

All the R-code for my East-Asia Pacific (EAP) models are published here. Here are some of the Blog postings I have done using these models:

• Scaling Back Authoritarianism in China What if "Constructive Stability" meant slightly reducing growth rates?
• China's Long Malthusian Crisis After Mao's Death A Malthusian Controller and an Unemployment-Globalization controller have dominated the development of China during the Long 20th Century.
• Six Futures for China: One Scary Geopolitical linkage with Russia is scary!
• What If the World System was Dominated By China? The result would be stable growth (Huh)?
• China and the Global South It's not uniformly good or bad!
• A New Axis of Evil China, Russia and India Geopolitical alignment: the result for the World System is collapse!
• Hegemonic Dominance Forecasts If you want unstable unending, unstable exponential growth, China is not the best Hegemon!
• How does the Economy of China Work? The CNL20 State Space model shows the Economy of China driven by Malthusian-Controllers.

For more on the Rule-Based World Order (RBO) see my post here.

Notes

• 2025 ANNUAL REPORT TO CONGRESS Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China
• NY TIMES 2026 Trump Summit Beijing

Wikipedia

• China Military Power Report  an annual report produced by the United States Department of Defense for the United States Congress that provides estimates, forecasts, and analysis of the People's Republic of China (PRC) military and security developments for the previous year.
• Two Child Policy a government-imposed limit of two children allowed per family or the payment of government subsidies only to the first two children.
• Opium Wars two conflicts waged between the Qing dynasty and the Western powers during the mid 19th century.
• Century of Humiliation a Chinese historiographical concept for a period in history beginning with the end of the First Opium War (1839–1842), and terminating in 1943 when major western Allied nations in WWII, advocated by the United States, agreed to revoke all unequal treaties they signed with the Qing government, officially ending the Treaty System along with foreign extraterritoriality, political and trade privileges, making foreign nationals subject to Chinese laws.
• China officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia.
• History of China history of China spans several millennia across a wide geographical area. Each region now considered part of the Chinese world has experienced periods of unity, fracture, prosperity, and strife.
• The Economy of China a developing socialist market economy, incorporating industrial policies and strategic five-year plans.
• East Asia a geocultural region of Asia. It includes China, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan,^[2][3] plus two special administrative regions of China, Hong Kong and Macau.
• Nuclear Weapons of China China's stockpile of nuclear weapons is the world's third-largest, estimated at 620 nuclear warheads as of 2026.
• Nuclear Power in China As of April 2026, 62 nuclear power plants are operational in mainland China, second globally to the United States, which has 94.
• China-US Trade War An economic conflict between China and the United States has been ongoing since January 2018, when U.S. president Donald Trump began imposing tariffs and other trade barriers on China with the aim of forcing it to make changes to what the U.S. has said are longstanding unfair trade practices and intellectual property theft.
• Politics of China In the People's Republic of China, politics functions within a communist state framework based on a system of people's congress under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). 
• Mass Surveillance in China  the network of monitoring systems used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Chinese government to monitor Chinese citizens.
• Socialism with Chinese Characteristics The term was first established by Deng Xiaoping in 1982 and was largely associated with Deng's overall program of adopting elements of market economics as a means to foster growth using foreign direct investment and to increase productivity (especially in the countryside where 80% of China's population lived) while the CCP retained both its formal commitment to achieve communism and its monopoly on political power.
  
  

State Space Models

For more information about how the models are created, see the Boiler Plate.

• CN2000 Growth rates have to be stabilized or unstable growth continues forever.
• CN21 Growth collapses (negative feedback from historical controllers) unless growth rates are stabilized
• EAP BAU The East Asia Pacific region is unstable unless growth rates are reduced.
• CN_LM Model (Late Modern) In this model, that includes Exports, growth rates must also be stabilized particularly in the Export-Employment historical controllers.
• CN1 Model In this model, input from the World System puts the Economy of China into Stable Growth-and-Collapse mode.
• WL20 China 2000 In this model, growth rates and historical unemployment feedback must be stabilized.

More Video

Will Trump make concessions on Taiwan during his State Visit to China? Stay Tuned!

The Frontline video above leads me to the conclusion that China wants to be treated as an equal Geopolitical Super-Power. Rivalry and unfriendly competition with the US seems counter productive. 

China's Long Malthusian Crisis After Mao's Death

 

Thomas Robert Mathus (1766-1834) died 180 years ago but his Essay on A Theory of Population (you can read it here, but few people have) continues to stir strong controversy and continues to be misunderstood. Karl Marx (1818-1883)  considered the assertion that growth would outstrip agricultural production a libel on the Human Race since it was the Capitalist System that would likely fail to produce enough food. Kenneth Boulding (here) was the first to reformulate Malthusian Theory as a General System and point out that it was simply a truism: population growth could not outstrip economic production without creating a crisis. In this post, I will apply a statistical systems model to the Economic growth of China after WWII that clearly identifies the Chinese Malthusian Crisis that lasted from 1975 to 2005 (see the model outputs in the graphic above).

Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio (An Essay on Population, p 4).

Malthus was not a systems theorist. Systems Theory had not been invented when Malthus wrote in 1798.  The quote above is what has made it impossible to reason with Techno-optimists. Malthus was trying to lend some mathematical rigor to his analysis. It made his two equation theory testable and falsifiable. It can easily be proved wrong and is a perfect scientific hypothesis. So why are we still talking about Malthus? Systems theory, invented in the Twentieth Century, allows us to restate the Malthusian theory in a general form that continues to be testable, useful and casually falsifiable. It is useful because conventional Liberal Economic theory has nothing useful to say about population growth. It is simply an exogenous force that a stable economic system can always accommodate. Liberal Economic theory also has nothing useful to say about unemployment, depression and societal collapse--all these problems are important for China (see below).

So, let me just restated Malthusian Theory as a systems model (above) to avoid sterile arguments. As a system, Malthusian Theory agues that the comparison between agricultural production (QA) and population (N) can (it doesn't have to) function as an Error Correcting Controller (ECC) defining the State of the System (S). If (QA-N) is positive the system can continue growing. If (Q-N) < zero the system will start contracting. People living at the subsistence level will start starving while the wealthy can emigrate (EM). Technological change (TECH) can also intervene (e.g., the Green Revolution) to boost agricultural productivity. During a famine (negative shock to QA), however, technological innovations might not necessarily be immediately available or affordable to a society living at subsistence.

What is typically misunderstood about the Malthusian System is that there should be feedback between the state of the system (S), population growth and production. Famines should be a signal that the system cannot support the current population and that something must be done.

So let's return to China. Here is the Measurement Matrix for the CNL20 State Space model:

The first row, CN, describes overall growth and explains 90% of the variance in the indicators (taken from the World Development Indicators--Databank. The second component, CN2 (Malthus2 in the graphic above) describes the Malthusian Controller (0.55Q - 0.30N). It explains an addition 0.06% of the variation. The third component, CN3, describes a global unemployment measure, (0.82LU - 0.50 KOF) where KOF is an Index of Globalization from the Swiss Economic Institute.

The Malthus2 (CN2) component, in the graphic at the beginning of this post, reaches a low point (Q<N) between 1990 and 2000, but the Malthusian Crisis extends from 1975-2005. Major events in Modern China's History (Death of Mao, One Child Policy, Tianamen Square  Protests and Massacre) happened during the Malthusian Crisis. 

You can run the CNL20 BAU model here.