China offers a cautionary lesson on what happens when an elite exclusively rules. The Celestial Empire has come crashing down to earth: the latest sign being a $6 trillion stock loss over the last three years. The world’s largest country, the world’s second largest economy, and America’s only superpower adversary is confronted and confounded by serious problems. What is more: These serious problems are ones its own elite created.

China was once the paragon of decisive action. Overpopulated and underdeveloped, backward and bullied, China’s elite perceived its problems and with absolute autonomy took aim. It was not bogged down by the inefficiencies of democracy and dissent. It ruled by fiat and issued forthwith its solutions. Ah, to be China, the rest of the world’s leaders, entangled in their democracies, sighed.

Now the full flowering of the Chinese elite’s imperiousness is blossoming in full view.

For its over-population problem, China’s elite prescribed a one-child policy that ran from 1979 to 2015. It was wildly successful in reducing China’s population by discouraging births and aborting babies (especially girls). Now its consequences have become clear: Today, China faces a demographic crisis of plummeting birthrates, an aging population, a skewed gender balance in the younger population, and a declining workforce, as there are insufficient workers to replace its retiring elderly. As the Committee to Unleash Prosperity points out, China’s population shrank by 2 million in 2023 — double 2022’s loss — and the average births to women of child-bearing age dropped to less than half (1.0) of the 2.10 required to simply maintain the population. One Chinese village is now offering rewards to matchmakers who can make a marriage.

For its backwardness, China’s elite prescribed a host of measures. Adopting a mercantilist mindset, it pursued growth at any cost. Internally, its one-child policy helped reduce the demand on resources. Externally, it aggressively exported and controlled imports. IP rights of foreign competitors were (and still are) ignored and limitations put on foreign investment in China.

China’s economic development has been extremely uneven. There is too little personal consumption (see: one-child policy), while too much investment has flowed into SOEs (state-owned enterprises) and speculative real-estate investment. The abridgement of foreign countries’ rights in trade has brought retaliation. Together, these have triggered decreases in much-needed foreign investment and sell-offs in China’s stock markets.

Of course, the elites were not only focused on economic development when it came to China’s perceived backwardness. There were also recalcitrant groups and individuals who stood in the way of dictated progress. China’s elite does not brook dissent. The treatment of ethnic minorities has been labeled genocide in the Uyghurs’ case, Tibet is a captive, Hong Kong’s promise of “One Country, Two Systems” was broken, individual rights are abridged, and there are political prisoners aplenty.

For being bullied, China’s elite prescribed an aggressive-to-the-point-of-belligerent foreign policy. As a result, China has alienated all around it — including those not in proximity to it. With its massive Belt and Road Initiative, it has made enemies even where it has made investments. The result has been that China is largely a global pariah with only other pariahs — Russia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran — as its only dependable friends.

China’s elite has made the country a global example of what happens in the absence of the checks supplied economically and politically by broader society. Of course, the economically and politically excluded Chinese people are the first and biggest victims of their elite’s unrestrained hubris. But they are hardly alone.

China’s elite has inflicted its policies’ fallout globally — and threatens to do so even more (ask Taiwan, India, or Japan about that). And then there is the question of culpability in COVID — a question not of “if,” only how much: Does it extend all the way back to the virus’s creation and a lab leak (which appears increasingly likely) or just to a coverup, foot-dragging, and lack of cooperation after the discovery?

But China is unique, you say? Hardly. Note well who China’s allies are. Russia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran are themselves exclusively ruled by their own elites. And each country is racked with its own elite-inflicted problems as bad or worse than China’s. All autocratic countries share the same pyramidal structure of rule by an apex that believes it has the sole ability and right to govern.

But it cannot happen here, you say? Just recount into how many blind alleys our comparatively democratically encumbered elite has already led us. They have given us DEI’s transparent racism; they have squandered federal resources on green energy projects that average Americans don’t want, while targeting home appliances that average Americans do use; they are at the forefront of the cancel culture mob mentality; they welcome and urge removing from ballots politicians they find objectionable and refuse to cover speeches made by them; and during the pandemic they favored draconian lockdowns and censoring dissent (even from credible sources with credible facts that later turned out to be right) if these ran counter to its views of what official practice should be.

As the global diversity of today’s examples of exclusionary elites shows, their negative practices will happen anywhere an elite is given an exclusive opportunity to govern. And it will because these elites all share the same fundamentally fatal flaw: a belief that they are smarter than any one of us, and that this in turn makes them smarter than all of us put together.

J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987–2000, served in the Department of Treasury and Office of Management and Budget from 2001–2004, and was director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004–2023.