Why the U.S. will continue to outpace China

China is in a big bind now, with its energy-thirsty economy needing massive crude oil imports. They must import nearly all of their energy needs via tankers in the waters of their neighbors, starting in the Strait of Hormuz, then skirting India’s defense shield and a gauntlet of straits in East Asia.

“China is horrifically dependent upon the ports of others,” says geopolitical author Peter Zeihan in “Disunited Nations” (2020).

China also hugely overspent on its “Belt and Road Initiative” and “Made in China 2025,” goosing its GDP higher based on debt, erecting empty buildings, and making empty promises.

Much of China’s “growth” is built on erecting “ghost cities,” where nobody lives or works, and much of China’s private investing focuses on buying these empty shells, as “One fourth of all urban housing in the country are unoccupied investment properties,” according to Zeihan.

Here’s a short summary of U.S. advantages over China:

• The U.S. population and family formation are growing, while China’s population is shrinking.
• The U.S. is food and energy independent. China has four times more people and is neither.
• The U.S. has 20,650 miles of navigable internal waterways vs. just 1,950 miles for China.
• The U.S. assimilates immigrants, while China persecutes its Uighur and Tibetan minorities.
• China has less farmland per person than Saudi Arabia, according to Peter Zeihan in his book. America’s crop cornucopia.
• The U.S. has two friendly neighbors and two ocean borders. China has 20 hostile neighbors.

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China is echoing Japan’s downfall

Since 2012, China has abused America’s generosity in providing the U.S. Navy to enforce safe shipments of energy and global trade from China to America, but China is totally reliant on energy imports from the Middle East (54% of total), Russia (20%), the Americas (14%), and Africa (9%), among others.

The biggest threat facing China is its habit (once enforced, now voluntary) of having only one child (or none) and then using abortions to raise the odds of a child being male.

China is now reaping a severe penalty from that policy – 50-some million more males than females, along with precious few younger workers to help pay for the growing army of Chinese elderly.

China also often “reverse engineered” famous-named computers, colas, fast food, or cameras and fooled some naifs into buying these shoddier products.

Since Xi Jinping took over in 2012, product piracy has become more organized and ubiquitous, with little claw-back by the U.S. or major corporations against this theft.

These flaws in China – their “feet of clay,” akin to Japan’s insular economy of the 1980s – could be the reason forChina to soon fail, as Japan did before.

Back in the late 1980s, Japanese investors often paid double what a property was worth, either in Hawaii or California, or for Van Gogh paintings or corporate stocks they lusted after.

Sure enough, the Tokyo Nikkei index hit its all-time high on the last day of the 1980s, December 31, 1989, and it took over 34 years (until 2024) to eclipse this high, longer than it took our Dow to recover from 1929.

Now, China is on the road to a Japan-style collapse, with the lowest GDP growth rate in East Asia.

To the question “Who will dominate the 21st Century: China or America?”

The answer is now coming clear.

The advantages of America over China indicate the 21st century will likely belong to America, not China.

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