Someone oddly "dared" me to talk about China.

Assalamu alaikum warhamdulillahi wa barakatushur. Let's talk about China. It requires no daring whatsoever. Let's start with demographics. China has the fastest aging population in the world ever.

Probably within the next thirty to forty years, the population will be cut in half, meaning that as a pool of consumers, they will be a fraction by that time of what India will be. They'll be roughly on par with Indonesia. As a pool of labor, wages in China have already been going up for the last thirty years, making it less and less attractive for multinational corporations to manufacture in China because the wages are getting too high and not competitive with other countries. Not only are they facing the the fact that their population is aging and thus their workers will be retiring and they don't have enough people to do the work, they don't have enough people to buy their own goods. So even if they wanted to start manufacturing exclusively for domestic consumption, they don't have enough domestic demand for consumption to sustain the kind of growth that they've become used to.

And you can actually forget about growth and development and profit at this point. For China, they need to worry about simple stability. What will inevitably happen with China is that the economy will slow, the growth will slow over the next several years until it starts actually to shrink. Because the population is shrinking, demand is shrinking, manufacturing capacity is shrinking, the economy will shrink. Corporate debt in China is roughly 400% of GDP.

And the way the CCP system works, that debt is never going to get paid. It just has to keep getting funded because the Communist Party of China wants to artificially guarantee maximum employment. But the more they fund this credit to corporations, the less productivity there will be actually, the less economic growth there will be actually, and thus the less revenues there will be to fund the government in order to finance the the credit. The system is in a death spiral. China has already lost billions and billions of dollars in the Belt and Road Initiative projects that have been either delayed, suspended, or outright canceled from Australia to Malaysia to Kazakhstan to Pakistan to Latin America and Africa.

The high interest loans that China gave to those countries for those projects, they have no mechanism for collecting. They're not the IMF. If you don't pay China what you owe them, China can do nothing. China's focus is going to become increasingly internal. It's gonna become more ideological.

It's gonna become more authoritarian. It's gonna become more ethnonationalist, and they're not gonna be thinking so much about, economic prosperity anymore. They're gonna be thinking about domestic control. That's going to drive business out even further, and it's even going to incentivize Chinese businesses who are operating overseas. For example, billionaires who are operating overseas, those billionaires will be more inclined to try as much as possible to decouple themselves from Beijing, and they will be thinking less and less about repatriating their profits back to the mainland and start thinking instead about maybe living permanently in exile in the countries where they do business.

I would say that for the Muslim world and the global South generally, there's maybe a ten to fifteen, maybe twenty year period window of opportunity for us to utilize, financing, investment, loans, and such from China for infrastructure, for development in our own countries. We have this limited window of opportunity, and you should go ahead and make deals with them for those things and make the terms of those agreements as long as possible. Because once the window of opportunity closes, most of that money is gonna get written off. So as much as some people think that China is a menace, it poses an empty threat, and I think that it still can be useful for the Muslim world, for broader Asia, for the global South generally to still utilize China to stave off Western American hegemony.