News/Commentary

China’s ‘inevitable collapse’ makes it a ‘far, far scarier’ enemy: Ben Shapiro

August 14, 2023 | | Print Article

Conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro warned that “despite what you’re being told,” China is facing an ‘inevitable collapse,” making the “real story” of the communist nation “far, far scarier” than we realize.

In the second episode of “Facts,” Shapiro’s new YouTube show, the conservative political commentator details China’s “five serious problems” and states, “The only question is when, and how much damage they’ll do before the Chinese regime implodes.”

(Video: YouTube)

“China, you’ve been told, is a rising power,” Shapiro begins. “Soon, you’ve been told, they’ll surpass the United States as the center of a new world order. Their annual gross domestic product averaged 9% growth from 1989 to 2022; their standing military has 2 million active personnel; their tentacles reach into Africa, the Middle East, and South America.”

“The real story of China is far, far scarier,” he argues, “because China is a power in a state of inevitable collapse.”

First among the nation’s problems is its aging population.

“China is currently, according to geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan, the fastest-aging society in all of human history,” Shapiro reveals.

“[T]he vast bulk of the population is now over the age of 30,” he explains. “There is no supporting demographic base to pay all the bills. This is why Zeihan says China now has a ‘completely terminal demography.'”

Chinese birthrates have declined due to the regime’s “evil one-child policy” that resulted in “three to four percent more boys than girls being born thanks to sex-selective abortion and infanticide; families literally killing off female babies in the womb or afterward.”

The policy “prevented 400 million births,” Shapiro says. “China’s population has already peaked — it’s now dropping. The question is as the population ages in a heavily Marxist system, who is going to pay the bills?”

China also suffers from a lack of innovation.

“China has no innovation, thanks to its state-controlled mercantilist schemes,” Shapiro states. “Right now, the entire Chinese economy is reliant on producing things at scale, undercutting foreign markets, and stealing technology. As the young working population declines, producing things at scale becomes a lot more difficult. Cheap labor goes away.”

Shapiro continues:

It turns out when you nationalize all innovation, you kill it. The solution is to rob everyone else of their IP and then try to recreate it. Some reports suggest that Chinese IP theft costs the United States up to $600 billion per year. This is an unsustainable growth model. It always leaves Chinese IP well behind Western IP. They’re stealing somebody else’s technology and then they’re trying to reengineer it. This is particularly true when it comes to microchips, where China manufactures a lot of basic microchips, but has actually been cut off from the world’s markets for sophisticated microchips.

 

And all of that has led to a lot of national debt.

“China’s growth has been disproportionately funded by debt. The country’s debt to GDP ratio is at least 159%, that is 60% higher than the global rate, according to the S&P Global Ratings,” Shapiro reports. “The nation’s total stock of corporate, household, and government debt is now over 300% of GDP. It comprises 15% of all debt globally, according to the Institute of International Finance.”

“The best visible example of China’s economic hollowness is its ghost cities,” he says. “Literally cities that are just empty. China is chock filled with these so-called ‘ghost cities,’ they include, apparently, up to 65 million empty units of housing.”

“[P]oliticians borrowed insane amounts of money for make-work projects, with the government then encouraging people to put their retirement money into buying empty shells of apartments, assuring them the prices would continue to rise,” he explains. “This has generated a looming real estate catastrophe.”

And then there are China’s “military problems.”

While China might look like a “powerful military country,” Shapiro says, “the Chinese military isn’t up to snuff.”

“China relies on older, less sophisticated chips, according to the RAND Corporation. The United States has worked to control import of chips into China, which means that their Chinese tech is just not as good as American military tech,” he explains. “The United States has even prevented Chinese companies from receiving software updates, spare parts, or technological input from Americans.”

“What’s more,” he continues, “China doesn’t yet have the capacity to project deep water power. They have a lot of boats in their Navy, and their Navy is effective in coastal zones, but they have no capacity to project power beyond those zones.”

And that puts Tawain in danger.

“Because 92% of all sophisticated microchips are produced in Taiwan,” he notes, “we could see China attempt to blockade the island with the threat of destroying TSMC, Taiwan’s microchip manufacturing company.”

“Underlying all of these other problems is the biggest one of all,” Shapiro states. “China is a one-party dictatorship.”

“While fools like Thomas Friedman of The New York Times write that ‘China’s one-party autocracy can impose the important policies needed to move a society forward’ the reality is the reverse: because the dictatorship is the be-all-end-all, it can’t allow the freedom and innovation necessary to grow the country and fix its problem,” he says. “Instead, dictator Xi Jinping, in an attempt to enshrine his own power, has doubled down, seeking more economic control, more autarky, greater militarism, more carbon-based fossil fuels to push manufacturing growth.”

All of this means, according to Shapiro, “China is in very serious trouble.”

“Does this mean that China is going to break apart into a million policies? No,” he states. “But it means that the current regime is on shaky footing. And that means they are likely to get very aggressive in the near term, in an attempt to shore up their foundation. Because if they don’t, that collapse is going to happen sooner rather than later.”

Meanwhile, according to Jen Easterly, the director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, America’s critical infrastructure is facing the threat of potentially devastating cyberattacks at the hands of Chinese hackers.

Easterly spoke at Las Vegas’s Def Con hacker conference on Saturday, NBC News reported, and stated, “I hope that people are taking seriously a pretty stark warning about the potential for China to use their very formidable capabilities in the event of a conflict in the Taiwan straits to go after our critical infrastructure.”

Such a destructive strike would mark an escalation in China’s cyber activity. The nation is known for espionage and data theft, but not for harming systems.

But that isn’t to suggest they aren’t capable of pulling it off, according to the national intelligence director’s office.

In its Annual Threat Assessment, published in February, the office stated, “China almost certainly is capable of launching cyber attacks that could disrupt critical infrastructure services within the United States, including against oil and gas pipelines, and rail systems.”

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Melissa Fine
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