In what sense was the Evergrande situation caused by geopolitics? I was under the impression causes and effects were wholly domestic.

This post screams agenda. What is "warning shot"? They shot themselves in the foot with a property bubble to anger the US!!??

I'd move on.

The US didn't have anything to do with evergrande afaik, and paying for property before it's built is a bad idea. But China can still try to deal with this by blaming the US for all ills and pushing for war with Taiwan to distract everyone - that works almost every time!

Okay so where is all the media blaming the economic issues on US? I sure haven't seen any on TV.

I don't know that it's happening now, I was making a suggestion that it could happen. If you're having economic troubles in a country, especially in an authoritarian country, blaming the outside world for your troubles can be a smart thing. No one can really argue with you in a dictatorship - if anyone is powerful enough to contest with you, you just kick them out of the ruling party, just like what actually happened in China with Xi removing Hu Jintao in a very public way at the party Congress. Another example is Russia threatening to invade the smaller countries around them if they make treaties with Western countries, and then invading them for being "bad" like in Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, etc.

It "could" happen. On the other hand, it could also not happen. This is pure speculation on your part. Whatever happened to looking at evidence? This isn't the first time China has had economic trouble.

The thing that makes it much more likely than could is it is the official goal of the communist party to unify with Taiwan, and they say they will do it by force if necessary. That makes it a matter of time, waiting for some weakness in Taiwan or the lack of will in the countries supporting them.

If a much more powerful country says that they will take you over by force if you don't surrender, that's a pretty concerning position to be in.

China's goal of unifying with Taiwan also existed the last few times they had economic troubles. Did they went to war with Taiwan do deflect economic trouble back then?

They did not of course. China looks to be playing the long game to me. But China's economic issues are the most severe since they began their incredible time of growth and productivity increases. Best in the world ever as far as I know. But now they have terrible unemployment, so bad they stopped reported stats on that and some other areas, plus the shrinking population long term.

I think up until now, for the last 30 years (?) they were on the upswing and they looked better and better. Now they are strong, but having serious economic challenges, more than past few years. The unneeded infrastructure will start to matter more. I really hope they can keep it together and not start a war. But it's such an incredible temptation for countries in this position. They are close to their maximum power, in 10 years I expect the worker shortage to really start to hurt.

Economic troubles in the late 80s were much more severe than today. You need to look at how things are on the ground instead of sensational western media reports. They've preached a permanent collapse of China every single year for the past 20 years. Go back 10 years and it's the same doom and gloom in the media, you just weren't as flooded by those reports as today.

If anything causes a war with Taiwan, it's all this talk about how they are going to start a war with Taiwan and subsequently sending military support to Taiwan "to defend them". China can accept (and has accepted, for decades) the status quo but not deviations from it. Taiwanese polls say that stunts like Pelosi's visit made the situation more dangerous. This is literally a self-fulfilling prophecy here. Wise leaders from the past came up with the One China Principle as a way to keep the peace, which it has for decades, but the US is rapidly breaking that construct while gaslighting the other party.

I know china was desperately poor in the past, I've heard of people starving. My western media sources also predicted china was ascendant in the world every year for the past 10 years. Like the nyt or the economist. Now they are looking at demographic collapse, economic struggles in China, I'm not sure where it will go in the short term. I'm sure china will figure it out over time.

I'm not sympathetic to this view that by saying the west cares about Taiwan's independence, we are going to cause China to attack Taiwan, since we talk about how China & Taiwan should be free and we'll push too much on the feelings of China or something. That's ridiculous. China keeps threatening to attack Taiwan, I'm not responsible for their actions. I can only help Taiwan, as an american and a believer in the freedom of democracies. China will attack Taiwan or subvert their democracy slowly or just accept them, but I will support the us defending Taiwan's democracy. I know many people from Taiwan, and from China too through work. They are all just people. They should be free to self determine their future and live in peace, all of them.

It's similar to Russia telling former ussr countries they can't make treaties with NATO or they will attack them, then they go and attack the ones that don't make friends with nato. I just can't accept that type of hysterical behavior. I respect the achievements of china, but they don't have the right to invade people because their feelings are threatened or something. The same is true of the us. The us is not a perfect country of course. But I'm generally in favor of democracies being able to survive.

China is not a democracy and is against the democracy of Taiwan surviving. Yeah, I knows there is a complex history about taiwan the island, and the kmt treated the natives in taiwan terribly, and there was the war for China in the 1950s that the kmt lost and chinese communists won and taiwan wasn't a democracy at the start, until recently. Still I want the democracy of taiwan to persist. I don't care about the historical arguments about one china. Let that democratic country survive. I hope one day mainland China becomes free and the people have self-determination. I've known people who escaped the soviet union and married people in my family even back into the 1980s. It can happen again hopefully the people of China can become free and self-determine their own choices about their lives.

Western media has also predicted that China would be crushing everything in the west for the last 10-20 years, from manufacturing to software engineering to military technology. I work as a software engineer, I've worked with people educated in china for 30 years now. They are smart, as brilliant and capable as anyone I meet. I don't underestimate their capabilities.

The treatment of stakeholders have been different inside and outside of China. The assumption based on the experience so far is that inevitably overseas investors, such as US based entities, will lose out more.

Chinese firms have been raising money in overseas markets and has been exporting risk in this way, the issue is how China's government will handle this against the opaque corporate structure behind these financial instruments sold overseas.

> inevitably overseas investors, such as US based entities, will lose out more

As they should. US-based entities speculating in China thinking the CCP had their back falls squarely into play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Well, caveat emptor but you can't exactly dunk on capital inflows consequence free.

A truly developing nation can't, the economic powerhouse of the 21st century has a lot more latitude in this respect. As long as not every single investment in it goes tits up, there won't be any shortage of dumb FOMO money chasing growth.

(Look at the mountains of money piled into straight-up obvious crypto scams, at least China is full of real companies that are doing real business[1], even if sometimes that business goes to shit.)

[1] Like making all the things the world uses. And serving half a billion people living middle-class lifestyles.

There's a lot of corporate scams in China that gets swept under the rug. That's not a validation of China's model of growth, it just postpones the pain, like Japan's lost decade. And Japan was a lot more developed when its real estate bubble popped.

China has experienced the catch-up growth that it missed out on after 1949 in the past 3 decades or so. The trajectory of growth is less than for example, the South Korea or the Japanese. The big difference being that China has more people.

The evergrande situation has nothing to do with the US or the trade war or the political tensions between PRC and the USA, it has more to do with the internal economic situation of China really.

The internal economic situation if China is related to the external economic situation of China