The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The Fire Hose of Chaos: Xi's Power Chokehold

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

Xi Jinping continues to push China closer and closer to that scary edge they've been staring at for quite some time. So, what will the fall of China look like?Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/the-fire-hose-of-chaos-xis-power-chokehold

Hey all, Peter Zion here, coming to you from the Kepler track, where I found some ferns. I've taken a question from the Patreon page. Specifically, I talk about the end of the Chinese system, and how do I think that will manifest? Well, two things to keep in mind. Number one, we've been here before. Every Chinese dynasty that you have read about in history has gone through a period of imperial collapse that led to a collapse of central authority and eventually widespread dislocation. economic breakdown and even famine throughout the country,

often leading to rises of warlordism. One of the reasons why the Chinese population is generally so placid in the face of authority is they realize that if central authority does fall, they're kind of screwed. The northern part of China, specifically around the Yellow River, requires a lot of really fancy waterworks to keep the river from breaking out of its banks. 3,000 years of management means that there's so much silt that the floor of the river is actually above. the surrounding floodplain, so the whole thing has been canalized. And if something happens where you have a flood or one of the levees breaks, the river then flows down into where everyone

lives. So keeping that all organized has required a fairly strong state throughout history. And there's just this understanding among the population that you need a degree of organization to prevent chaos. Because once that breaks and the food supply breaks, depopulation, starvation, warlordism, gets pretty nasty. So what we should be looking for, is we are in one of these periods where the Chinese system is over-centralized. Because the geography of China is so large and because it is so diverse, you basically swing back and forth between these two extremes. You either have an emperor, or in this case a chairman,

who hyper-concentrates power to his person and then hands-down edicts to try to regularize things across the entire space. And in doing so, eventually generates discontent and issues orders that become further and further from local realities and eventually further from reality as they fall into occult of personality. We're definitely in that stage right now. Or things spin apart,

and the regions take as much authority as they can, and even the regions start to break down, and you get warlordsism. So what we're probably looking at is a collapse of the former leading to some version of the latter, but it's going to be a lot different from the past couple of dozen

of civilizational collapses the Chinese have experienced because we have a couple different things going on right now. First of all, for the first time, China is industrialized. So all of the things that go with industrialization, electricity, heating, regular food production that allows the population to double from what it would be in a pre-industrial state. You know, you take those away in a civilizational collapse scenario and you have a population collapse on top of everything else that would be going on because of the food supply and because of a breakdown in central control. Second, you've got demographics.

One of the many, many, many unintended side effects of industrialization is eventually people move into efficiency apartments and stop having kids. Well, in China, that happened 40 years ago. And so we now have about as many people over age 50 as under age 50. So when the system does break, the population doesn't really have the option of going back to farming the land because they're old. And so the cities would empty as people try to go out and grow food for themselves. But the mortality rate of, say, rice farming is her. horrendous because you're basically mucking around in shit water all day. You do have those things going on at the same time.

You're looking at a horrendous population decline. In the cases in the past, you probably had an adjustment somewhere between 10 and 30%. This time around, even if nothing goes wrong, if it's just the demographic decline, we're looking at least a 50% decline this century. And if you break down central control, it'll be far, far more than that. So I would say, you know, look for certain things, but we're already seeing them. We're seeing Xi fall into such a tight cult of personality that no one can convince him of anything. No one can communicate with him at all. And even the bureaucracy that supports him

has started to not self-censor. They did that 20 years ago. They've started to stop collecting information on topics that might prove awkward at the top. So Xi may be the most powerful leader in Chinese history, but he has now become one of the least informed and most disconnected from reality. and we're seeing catastrophic decisions being made at the national level day after day after day. So things to look for, we are in the thick of it. And my forecast that this can't run for another 10 years probably needs to be shortened, but the black box that is China is pretty black these days, and I don't have enough good information in order to give you an updated time frame.

Bottom line, if you've got something in China you care about, it's time to get it out, whatever that happens to be.