Yet the phenomenon far pre-dates that. Rooted in Cold war liberal exceptionalism, or the “end of history” thesis, the potential demise or decline of China has long been touted as an inevitability, and is best depicted and now often parodied through Gordon Chang’s 2001 book “the coming collapse of China”, but despite him being personally proven wrong, continues to be a persistent theme for newspapers who out of political bias, dismiss China’s prospects routinely, most notably of late being the Financial Times, who in recent weeks has produced an insufferable amount of negative stories relentlessly cheerleading China’s perceived economic woes over covid.
Whilst of course the reality is true that China has suffered amidst an outbreak of the omicron variant that led to a strict lockdown in Shanghai, predictably the situation has been targeted relentlessly by the western mainstream to ferment pessimism on the economy as a whole. In making this criticism, various outlets have drawn a deliberate contrast to policies in the west, many of who have abandoned covid restrictions altogether, arguing that the west’s model is superior despite the large number of deaths they continue to occur (with the US surpassing 1 million) and that their economic outlook is apparently better for it than China’s. Zero covid is bad, letting covid spread untamed is brilliant.
But these arguments have not aged well at all, particularly because they have been based on short-termism (as has the west’s approach as a whole) and by May, things are looking ominous for western countries. The cheerleading of western economic recovery from covid has been remarkably short lived as global uncertainties have changed for the worse and multiple nations head for renewed recessions. Last week, US GDP unexpectedly declined by 1.4%. Then as the US federal reserve has been forced to tighten monetary policy to reel in inflation, US stock markets have crashed. Across the Atlantic, a similar inflation crisis has forced the Bank of England to raise interest rates up to the highest in 13 years, explicitly telling the public a recession is looming. This coincides with surging energy prices stemming from the conflict in Ukraine. The money supply is being crunched.