How is it that so many organizations and publications, all churning out the same doom and gloom narrative, managed to get it wrong? You will rarely hear from these same outlets that the United States will barely grow at all this year – perhaps a bit over 1%, if that. Yet, the US economy is always treated in reporting with great optimism, even claiming that the US is growing faster than China. Why so? Because predictions and punditry around China’s economy are laden with ideological and political bias and aim not to reaffirm facts but to push the grander narrative that China’s system “must” and “will” fail concurrently.

In the world we live in now, the fear of China’s success permeates this psychology even further, ingraining the idea that China’s continued success is a vindication of its own model and ideology above that advocated by the West. Western ideology, after all, derived from Christianity, has a sense of “destiny” to it, the belief that it is the one “truthful” way and that all other belief systems are inherently false and doomed to fail. This concept is what spurred Francis Fukuyama’s infamous “End of History” thesis, and even today he continues to believe that Western liberal capitalism will win in the end.Such mindsets help us understand why, despite having become a laughingstock in some circles for publishing a book in 2001 predicting the collapse of China in 2011, Gordon Chang somehow maintains mainstream media credibility. There is a pressing belief in, a hope for, and a demand to propagate the narrative of Chinese failure, insomuch that every single development or setback the country faces is depicted as being fundamentally fatal to its success. As a result, the strict zero-Covid controls on China’s economy were depicted as being the death knell for its growth and development, even to the point that China would never succeed in overtaking the US.