Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China (Random House, August 2001), and Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes On the World, released by Random House in January 2006, and is an expert on China and Chinese-US Relations.

He lived and worked in China and Hong Kong for almost two decades, most recently in Shanghai, as Counsel to the American law firm Paul Weiss and earlier in Hong Kong as Partner in the international law firm Baker & McKenzie.

His writings on China and North Korea have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Far Eastern Economic Review, the International Herald Tribune, The Weekly Standard, and the South China Morning Post.

He has spoken at Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Yale, and other universities and at The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, RAND, the American Enterprise Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations, and other institutions. He has given briefings at the National Intelligence Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the Pentagon. He has also spoken before industry and investor groups including Sanford Bernstein and Credit Lyonnais Securities Asia. Chang has appeared before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission and has delivered to the Commission a report on the future of China’s economy.

He has appeared on CNN, Fox News Channel, CNBC, MSNBC, and Bloomberg Television. Outside the United States he has spoken in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo, The Hague, Vancouver, and Taipei.

He has served two terms as a trustee of Cornell University.

China on the Edge: What It Means for Us

The dominant narrative of our era is that this is “China’s century.”

China, however, has already passed certain inflection points.  The economy is stumbling, in fact growing only in the low single digits and on the edge of an historic debt crisis; the political system is in distress, with the military gaining influence; and the populace is volatile.  China is on the edge.

The motor of the country’s rise will also be the engine of its failure.  Even if official gross domestic product numbers are accurate—and they almost certainly overstate economic output by a wide margin—China is creating debt at least two times faster than it is growing.  So the country is in an impossible situation.

And why are China’s severe economic problems relevant to us?  Because for more than three decades the Communist Party has primarily based its legitimacy on the continual delivery of prosperity.  And without prosperity, the only remaining basis of legitimacy is nationalism.  China’s militant nationalism is creating friction in an arc of nations from India in the south to South Korea in the north.

Unfortunately, because of problems inside the Communist Party’s political system, China cannot compromise or maintain good relations with its neighbors, the international community, or us.  These days, Beijing is lashing out, a sign its leaders are now acting according to a logic the rest of the world is not familiar with.