The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - What Happens to China After Xi Jinping Dies? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: July 9, 2024

I get a lot of "what if..." and "what happens next..." style questions and most of them suck, but today's question takes us down a fairly interesting rabbit hole - what happens to China if Chairman Xi Jinping dies or steps down? Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/china-after-xi

Hey everybody, Peter Zine here coming to you from Colorado's Lost Wilderness. This is Lost Canyon. A little bit of a bushwhack, but it's been a good day. Anyway, I've started my backpacking season, so we're going to be taking a lot of entries from the Ask Peter files. I'll try to do some current event ones, but, you know, I'm not going to be able to upload every day, so, you know, it is what it is. Anyway, today's entry is what happens to China when Xi Jinping dies. And like, you know, that's a great question. A couple things to keep in mind. Number one, Xi has imprisoned and executed his way into being a cult of personality.

There is no successor. There is no potential successor. There is no up-and-coming cadre of people with talent. He has basically purged the entire system of any of ambition or competence. And so it is just him. And the bureaucracy now is going after things like patents and college dissertations so that no one who is under age 25 can even get into the system in the first place. So it is just Xi, it is Xi alone, and he will ride this system into the ground.

It's so much worse than that sounds because China is not a normal country. So there are different sorts of governing systems, confederal, federal, and unitary. Confederate, your regions have more power than the center, so I think Switzerland or Canada. In a federal system, there's a shared competence among, the national government, the regional governments, the local governments, think Germany or maybe the United States. And then there are unitary systems where the national government basically sets all policy and everyone just has to go along with it. That's Russia. That is France. That is Argentina. Technically, China is federal. But because of the purges and because of the control of the

Communist Party, it has basically become super unitary, where everything that happens in Beijing is the only thing it matters, because Xi has purged all of the regional and local governments of anyone who has any capacity. There's an additional problem here. And that's just the geography of China itself. It is not an easy place to rule. You have a lot of varied geographies that look to different parts of the world, much less different parts of the country, for leadership and economic growth. So, for example, if you're in the series of cities on the southern coast, roughly from Fugian to Guangzhou. You don't have an interior. You don't have access to local agricultural product, and you don't have access to one another. What infrastructure exists in this

area has been built just in the last 30 years, and I don't mean to suggest it's not impressive by any standards. It is. But it's nothing like, say, being in the Midwest or in northern Germany, where the land is flat and infrastructure is easy. And so all these cities have their own individual identities and historically speaking, all of them have gotten the majority of their calories going back 1,500 years from somewhere not on the Asian mainland. Then you got the center section, from Shanghai up to Chung-King, there we go, the Setsuan province. This is kind of the, this is the area of the Yangtze River, this is kind of the Mississippi of China. Think of it as Detroit and Minneapolis and St. Louis and New Orleans and Houston, all in one. Definitely a discrete economic unit with

discrete political and cultural identity. And then you've got the north, the North China plain around the Yellow River. This is an area that is pretty flat. And the problem is it's just, it's been too big, historically speaking, to be all under one power until the industrial era. And so you would generally have warlords trying to take over individual chunks of the territory. And because this is also a flood and a drought prone area, the waterworks were necessary to maintain the population. So when a warlord thought he was going to lose or wanted to He'd go after the waterworks. Anyway, so you get this nationalistic, militaristic north.

You get kind of a corporatist industrialist financial center. And then what has traditionally been a secessionist south. And keeping these all under the same woo-work, under the same governing system is hard. And so you have to basically look at Chinese history from this point of view, and that there's kind of two models. Model number one is each region has as much autonomy

as it can stomach and the whole thing spins apart, and the north in particular falls into civil war. It was a reason while of China's dynasties never last very long. It's hard to hold this all together. Or you overcompensate the other direction and hyper-concentrate authority in Beijing under the emperor, or now under the Communist Party's general secretary, and hold everything as tight as possible. Neither of them last for long, and unfortunately there's nothing in between that works really

well either, kind of a confederal system which is the led to friction and eventually conflict among the various sections. Well, at the moment, we are clearly having a hyper-centralized system. So we have a hyper-centralized system in a geography that is difficult to govern, but now everything's being, all the decisions being made in Beijing. We have a unitary system because the party is eliminated everyone who isn't Xi. And Xi himself is not a spring chicken. I mean, he's not like Biden or Trump old,

but the dude can't be around. for much longer and there's no one in the wings waiting to take over. So when this breaks, you take the most hyper-centralized iteration of China we have ever had and you cut off the head at a time when the country is facing financial overextension and a demographic collapse. So when Xi dies, however that happens, there will not be another government of China. We will be facing state dissolution. And because the demographic situation is so, so bad, it's entirely feasible that we have a collapse in the country's ability to generate any economic activity of note before such time as something can theoretically rise on the other side of this.

So we could, we probably are looking at the end of the Han ethnicity as a player in international affairs because by the time we get to the end of this century, there aren't going to be a lot of them left. So when Xi goes, that's it. The party's over. All right. See you guys from the next Canyon.