After the election my very first thought was that this is the start of the Chinese century, since America has voted to step down.
Seems to be playing out.
Seems to be playing out.
They have drowned their municipalities in debt cumulatively equivalent to the US federal and state debt as a percentage of GDP. Localities aren’t allowed to tax but are responsible for local services and industry. Local governments borrowed heavily to hit GDP growth targets and compete with each other for investment and talent.
There is now a backwards migration of the working class back to rural towns from the cities because the incentives China gives is towards technologies that only benefit their already upper-middle class workers. About 500 million Chinese live in rural areas and over 20% of their workforce toils in the fields. That’s not changing anytime soon. Youth unemployment has been 15-20+ percent for some time.
State banks backed Evergrande’s with cheap credit and govt guarantees.
Local officials were promoted for hitting GDP growth targets - see above how they put localities deep in debt by speculating on real estate.
The CCP gave households social credit for moving to cities and buying real estate.
The CCP is not protecting consumers in the aftermath. They won’t let consumers out of mortgages for unfinished condos because they don’t want the crisis to worsen - effectively bailing out developers.
Not sure where you came up with the idea that China is acting in the interest of its citizens rather than the state. That’s not a fundamental characteristic of an autocratic socialist state.
They’ve paid for it now. They’re deep in a recession with signs it may be a 1990’s style Japanification.
What happened was these companies went into massive debt building buildings based on the belief that real estate prices would increase forever infinitely.
The Chinese govt popped the bubble.
These real estate companies went bankrupt, many of them took payments from retail for apartments that weren't built.
They arrested the CEO's and upper management, siezed and sold their assets.
But the people did get bailed out by the government, all the little folk who bought apartments were refunded or had the construction project finished by the government.
Moreover China’s govt was the cause of this by setting gdp growth quotas to get promoted, see all my other comments regarding this.
You’re just repeating propaganda and interestingly the other commenter responding to me has said the exact opposite, but also has said that China’s response was “morally superior”
For Building projects that were canceled the little people got full refunds
For Building projects that were resumed with the govt footing the money for their completion. People who bought apartments did not have their mortages canceled, they were forced to pay their mortages and will be receiving their apartments when completed.
So yes the little people did get bailed out. The government is footing to continue the housing projects while maintaining the terms of the mortages.
In the US, we saw all the people who could no longer pay their mortages because of interest rates skyrocketing lose everything.
We saw Federal marshalls marching into homes, and throwing crying people out, we saw crying people who have paid hundreds of thousands being thrown out into the street. In the US real estate crash, if you took a ninja loan and the housing crash happened, the banks suddenly demanded higher interest rates and you couldn't pay your house was foreclosed and all equity wiped.
These are all confirmed facts
In the US many little people lost their equity and were thrown out of their homes, many lost hundreds of thousands of dollars as they defaulted on loans and had their property siezed.
In China none of the little people lost anything
The buildings that were canceled the little people got full refunds The buildings that were continued thanks to cash infusions by the government the little people will get their homes when it is finished.
The only person spreading propaganda is you.
This statement for example is a complete disinformation because you did not acknowledge that the chinese govt gave cash infusions to these stalled projects, and mortage payers will get their apartments
>Nope they didn’t. They refuse to let citizens cancel the mortgages even though developers haven’t delivered condos for years and they haven’t bailed out the little folk.
They thought we were crashing, rushed the cockpit, and pushed forward as hard as they could on the stick. Forward is up, right?
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/digital/the-flight-93-ele...
Take AI for instance. The US grid is struggling to keep up with demand, while Chinese one has a lot of headway [1]. Usually, this could be solved by an increase in spending lasting a few years which would make the debt tick up, but that would've been an absolutely fine use of debt since it buys some shiny new infra that will pay dividends for the next 20ish years.
Now? Not possible. The US is already drowning in debt and the usual buyers are not showing up to buy it because of the Iran fiasco. With oil so expensive everyone was using their USD reserves to buy oil, not debt. Which mades interest rates go up considerably, and for a country with already ~130% of debt/gdp ratio these are terrible news.
So, I don't think there will be a great power race. Europe is fucked by both high debt, and lack of innovation. Russia is struggling already to finance a war of conquest they started. China is the only one that can run if it comes down to it (unless of course the numbers coming out of China are mega bogus, but for that I don't know enough to have an opinion).
[1] https://fortune.com/2025/08/14/data-centers-china-grid-us-in...
I mean when the US replaced the Brits as Hegemon a large part of the world wasnt nervous about it.
I think it's difficult, if you're a millenial/zoomer/whatever we're calling these things, to understand just how much of the world genuinely liked and respected and wanted america involved in their local affairs.
America obviously wasn't perfect and many, many more people than trump were involved with squandering all of this goodwill, but we still had some left over before he showed up.
I would assume majority of US middle class' savings are in the real estate or securities. Why would hyperinflation kill these?
Spoken like somebody who has no idea what they are talking about.
Apart from the large share of fundamental science which Europe has always been bigger in and better at (I mean, there's a huge tunnel in Texas to show that Americans at some point understood this and tried to compete), Europe is funding the military tools of the next generation in Ukraine.
Americans used to be excellent executors, then China took that role. What's left?
What practical machinery and infrastructure has the US innovated in that time frame?
California has added roughly 17GW of grid-scale batteries in the last five years. Modern GPU (NVIDIA). Modern electric car (Tesla). Reusable Rockets (SpaceX).
I agree that the US has an "Only Elon-led companies can get things done outside of computers" problem.
https://jacobin.com/2026/03/us-europe-comparative-productivi...
Don't get me wrong, I rather lose the superpower race but enjoy my privacy and work benefits that folks in the US dream of. But the topic was superpower competition and I don't see the EU going anywhere in that front.
We are fragmented, among the top 4 EU economies 2 are struggling with debt (France & Italy), Germany economy is stagnating and the amount of bureaucracy hinders any attempt at innovation, ... .
Fragmentation isn't really there in science and development, fragmented financing (basically the main point I'll cede) is being worked on, and markets will always have to deal with European diversity; we're not all going to speak English tomorrow and eat the same, dress the same, etc.
I object. The CCP is much more deeply indebted than the US when taking into account provincial and local governments as well as state-owned enterprises.[0] And of course the US debt is financed in its own currency while Chinese foreign debt is financed in dollars or other currencies.
The problem in the US is regulation. An environmental impact study takes 54 months in the US.[1] The CCP, which has no problem poisoning its people or even launching rockets over inhabited villages, doesn't delay itself at all.[2] I'm glad we don't poison our people or place dangerous industry in places that could harm populated areas, or even perform some prophylactic measures to protect nature, but I'm confident that we could do this in less then a year (less than six months?) and make much faster progress. Even for something like nuclear, the ten years (mostly caused by red tape) are really onerous.
> China is the only one that can run if it comes down to it (unless of course the numbers coming out of China are mega bogus, but for that I don't know enough to have an opinion).
Yes, the common opinion among China watchers is that any number the CCP touches is "mega bogus." They're actually in the midst of something of a financial crisis at the moment because of the high debt.
[0]https://www.statista.com/topics/11662/debt-in-china/
[1]https://www.rff.org/publications/reports/how-long-does-it-ta...
[2]https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/china-keeps-dropping...
I never seen that metric used anywhere else aside China