NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE T he most salutary and enduring effect Donald Trump’s presidency had on Washington was that it put the entire town into a new attitude of realism about China. While Trump conducted a phony trade war with China — one that he concluded by begging Chairman Xi to buy more soybeans from swing states — the rest of D.C. started noticing how belligerent China was on the world stage, with its “wolf warrior” diplomacy. Legislators started to put the screws to China and its multinational corporate partners for their participation in the oppression of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region. The Biden administration kept many of the remaining anti-Chinese tariffs and then set about trying to cut China off from even participating in the future development of advanced microprocessors. Elbridge Colby became a fixture across much of Washington for his book, The Strategy of Denial, which outlined the seriousness of China’s military buildup and the limited resources the U.S. had to meet a potential threat in the Pacific theater. His book was respected if not exactly heeded, as the U.S. then recommitted itself to being the lead actor in European security.

And we should be preparing for a conflict with China. Chairman Xi has made it quite clear that he intends to prepare the People’s Liberation Army to take Taiwan within the coming decade and has extended his rule in China with rhetoric matching his political destiny to this irredentist goal. Analysts disagree about the consequences, but such a move would at least be an occasion for a half-dozen Pacific nations to reassess their economic and security ties to the United States. That would jeopardize the U.S. standing as the global hegemon, possibly weaken the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and have a dramatic effect on living standards in the U.S. Preparing for China’s rise is just the basic due diligence of a power like the United States.

But I’ve started wondering, are we prepared for the consequences of China’s collapse? China’s vaunted Belt and Road Initiative — basically its vision of what global commerce would look like underneath its reign — is already stalled and possibly failing. China recently admitted that it is on the dark side of the population mountain, that its population is shrinking, a consequence of its decades-long one-child policy and fertility rates that continue to plunge despite government encouragement to do what comes naturally. In the three years between 2019 and 2022, China’s workforce declined from 774 million people to 733 million. In just three years, it lost a Germany-sized workforce.

No wonder China has started to delay the publication of key economic figures like its GDP. It’s very difficult to manage economic growth when your country is losing workers at a pace that in other eras would suggest the country is undergoing and losing a nuclear war. Now China is afraid to release even its youth unemployment figures, as if anything could be more embarrassing than those published by Italy, Greece, or Portugal.

We also have to remember that China’s growth is coupled to a political party and ideology that is profoundly unattractive to the rest of the world. The United States might occasionally champion strange and outré progressive ideals about sex and gender where they are not wanted. But the Chinese Communist Party is dedicated to a system of universal surveillance, political unfreedom, and Han Chinese racial supremacy that is not only repulsive but basically inaccessible to the rest of the world.

China’s sudden belligerence, the centralization of control around one man in the CCP, and its military buildup may be signs that the peaceful rise is nearing an end because China’s fall has already begun. Chinese history is basically a repeated story of a nation that gathers itself from poverty, rises to nearly dominate all of Eurasia, and then inexplicably falls over as it succumbs to internal dissolution, leading it to be dominated by foreign powers again.

Is the United States ready for those consequences? Who’s going to buy all our soybeans? The U.S. exports about $153 billion to China and imports $536 billion. What if both numbers start crashing? Who is going to make our stuff? We got the tiniest glimpse of what a calamity it can be for supply chains when China shuts down a province during a pandemic. It makes everything more expensive and delivered late. What happens when entire provinces are at war with each other for decreasing resources? More distressing: Who is going to buy our debt? What happens when all that U.S. investment in Chinese development comes a cropper? What happens if, lacking the final backstop of secure patronage of China, North Korea’s regime falls apart and threatens to send a human wave of 25 million refugees that utterly swamps our depopulating East Asian ally, South Korea?

I hope everyone who got serious about Chinese power in the last five years is also ready to study up on what Chinese chaos and dissolution can do.