> Read enough and you'll be convinced of the imminent collapse of China any day now.

Those arguments always sound like straw men though: they are designed because they are easy to tear down. China is...weird. You can't really take anything at face value, good or bad. And I say that having lived there for 9 years. E.g. sometimes a ghost mall or district is one waiting to be populated, otherwise times it's just waiting to be torn down (either way positive GDP is generated).

Western economists have been predicting the collapse of China soon for the last 30 years.

Exactly. I should've added (wrongly) after "convinced" in my original reply. :)

They'll be wrong until the moment they're right. The USSR looked similarly durable in the 1980s, and the few voices saying it was rotten at the core and on the verge of collapse were waved off.

And then all of a sudden it collapsed.

I had first hand reports from the field in the 1980's that the soviet union was falling apart socially and economically. Friend was a Russian studies major, spent two years in the soviet union. Another friend also spent six months there. And one of the board members of my old old company was in the oil and gas business and traveled to Russian a lot.