Post-China: Thinking Beyond Beijing

Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CCP), is no longer effectively in power. He reigned for a dozen years before he was cornered into relative impotence.

The collapse of communist China had become irrefutable as 2025 came to an end.

As well, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) over which Xi was also President, was, by late 2025, no longer the major economic or military power it had become in recent years. It now only had sufficient weight to act as a disruptor for the coming few years. Maybe not even that.

So now is the time to begin a re-assessment of the global balance of power, and not solely because of the implosion of the PRC and CCP. The United States had also embarked on a surge of global dominance, but with its own deep internal divisions. The European Union (EU) was in deepening economic, social, and strategic decline and division; and hitherto prosperous states such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada were in what could be a terminal (or at least serious) malaise.

The power and stability of middling states, such as Türkiye, Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, and Nigeria were questionable, and the global realignment seemed to promise that a new world would, by default, emerge. Even such promising stars as Saudi Arabia, or India, faced challenges, and all would be subject to the downstream effects of the collapse of the PRC economy. So, too, would Russia be severely impacted.

Even by the end of 2025, few were willing to accept that the PRC had, indeed, already imploded economically, but forecasts that mainland China would probably reduce steel production by 50 per cent in 2026 highlighted the reality of the situation, especially to iron ore exporters such as Australia and Brazil. And yet the PRC’s resources are dwindling. The PRC has been importing some of the “rare earths” it has been re-exporting to the world, indicating it has dwindling control of this asset. Its imports of petroleum rose in November 2025 by 4.48 per cent over November 2024, but this was the highest petroleum import level in 27 months, and less of it was imported from Russia. This was despite the economic crash which should have eased the burden on energy resources. None of the indicators are moving in the right direction for the PRC.

Much of the 2025-26 global restructuring, indeed, is linked to the economic chaos caused by the collapse of the PRC. This was not a sudden or clearly-defined thing which could be ascribed solely to a certain specific date or action, but rather to an accretion of actions and symptoms with roots going back decades. Constant identification of the decline of the PRC as a strategic power, economic giant, or military threat raised no concern among states addicted to PRC investment in them.

There has been the willing suspension of logic that should be expected to be characteristic of a narcotically-addicted subject.

This writer saw the signs in 2006-07 that the PRC would not be able to sustain itself beyond 2025 as the great power it determined it wished to be. My rationale for stating this explicitly in 2007 — in the study, Australia 2050: An Examination Of Australia’s Condition, Outlook, And Options For The First Half Of The 21st Century — was that the PRC had neglected to secure its base of stability before it attempted to move, as a gunpowder state, to seek military equality or dominance in the world. It failed to guarantee internal lines of supply for food, water, or energy, and attempted to intimidate those states which could have an impact on the PRC’s food, water, and energy supplies. Such a condition, and on such a scale, caused the downfall of the Western Roman Empire, as it became isolated from its originally internal (effectively so until that point) grain supply from Egypt.

That is not to say that the PRC — or, to be more accurate for the future, China — could not resurge and rebuild, but this is not a short-term prospect. The major problem to undertaking clean-sheet analysis of the new global architecture today is not the PRC, but the reality that much of the world looks on current realities through antique lenses, and through mindsets developed around old myths and half-truths.

This results in poor allocations of resources in defense, diplomacy, and techno-economic policy.

Several realities needed to be acknowledged at the close of 2025:

1. The PRC may not anymore be — if it ever was — the “second largest economy in the world”. But its size was determined by an interpretation of statistics, such as GDP, and not by real strength or wealth, not even so-called per capita GDP. None of its official statistics could be taken at face value, and it must be assumed that any and all such numbers and claims have been distorted to suit the political ends of the ruling CCP. This includes the population of China, still being cited at around 1.4 billion souls. There are sufficient visual and economic cues to indicate that the real population could be well under one billion, and possibly as low as 500 to 600 million;
2. Xi Jinping, who, by late 2025, still held the titles of General Secretary of the CCP, Chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), and President of the PRC, was essentially marginalized and had become powerless, except for some disruptive powers caused by “wolf warrior diplomacy” statements on the world stage. Moreover, this paralleled the collapse of the CCP itself, largely because Xi’s opponents within the CCP left it too long to challenge him. Then, all the contestants for power — including Xi and his remnant loyalists, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and the reformists and elders — became committed to the appearance that the Party remains “in charge”, even though economic and social collapse had become irreparable. Late 2025 saw the reality become clear: the PLA, under CMC Vice-Chairman General Zhang Youxia, was debating how to determine an outcome which would ensure that the PLA was no longer a pawn in the hands of a political leader. If power — as Mao Zedong had said — came from the barrel of a gun, and Zhang controlled that gun, then the only path to continuity of nominal CCP rule in 2026 would be through a deal with Zhang;
3. The PLA was, by late 2025, committing all its resources to controlling the country, and could not jeopardize this by “foreign military adventures” to distract the Chinese populations from their internal economic woes. In any event, from a strategic perspective, the PLA was by then proving incapable of providing a coherent force which could undertake any major military confrontation abroad, including a war against Vietnam, let alone Japan, or the Republic of China (ROC: Taiwan). And yet the PLA’s inventory of nuclear weapons and ballistic/hypersonic missiles is sufficient to ensure that the PLA is given a free hand by external powers to do what it needs to do in mainland China. Corruption, over-politicization by the Party and Xi Jinping, and technical shortcomings have ensured that the PLA has failed to coalesce as a credible global military force; what power and prestige it had amassed has evaporated;
4. Russia, normally cautious about showing its hand with regard to the PRC, in October and November 2025 came down on the side of supporting General Zhang Youxia as the real power in the PRC. General Zhang was given head-of-state protocols when he visited Moscow on November 20-21, 2025, something far above the recognition given to Premier Li Qiang when he was in Moscow on November 17-18, 2025. This was a pointed, public slap in the face by Russian President Vladimir Putin to Xi Jinping. It also showed that Russia was not now — if it had ever been — a “junior partner” in its tacit alliance with the PRC;
5. As in Russia before the 1917 putsch which led to civil war, or in the 13 British colonies of North America in 1776, and other examples, the situation inside the People’s Republic of China by late 2025 showed that there were still great areas of “normalcy” and productivity within society, but that the dynamic elements of mainland Chinese society were in a condition of flux and angst, due to unemployment, poverty, homelessness, and often starvation. As a result, the country — particularly amidst a major remigration of “migrant workers” from the countryside back to their villages from the cities — could be described as being in a pre-revolutionary condition. It should be remembered that, with the death of Dowager Empress Cixi on November 15, 1908, it was the unrest among rural “migrant workers” in China’s cities which led to the end of the Qing Dynasty, and the civil war which was brought to a standstill — but unresolved — in 1949;
6. The immediate outcome in 2026 of the PRC collapse is that it is unlikely to be in a position to claw back any of the investments it made to build its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), leaving debtor nations with a margin of relief. Those foreigners who financed Qing Dynasty Chinese Government bonds also saw their investments wiped away by collapse and revolution. Bets and investments turn sour when strategic reality takes precedent. But the vast economic benefits which the PRC was able to deploy around the world by buying food, energy, and raw materials from supplier nations (and finished goods from others) were also over, leaving countries such as Australia, Brazil, and the like — and Russia — without markets for their exports. The result of this termination of trade would become evident through 2026, and although the PRC had largely been replaced in the global supply chain, the impact on global wealth was such that there would be a reduction in demand;
7. It was the supposed “rising power” of the PRC which had driven threat estimates for much of the world, and there had been a profound attempt by many states to define their own identities by the stature of their adversary. For many states, this was the PRC; for others, it also included an attempt to postulate Russia as a continuation of the USSR. In other words, in the post-Cold War era, Western states defined themselves not by their own attributes but by the caliber of their adversaries. But if the reality was, by mid-2026, that neither the PRC nor Russia resembled the overwhelming threat they had been painted to portray, then how would future alliances and defense postures be expressed? The collapse of the USSR in 1990-91 was so simplistically portrayed as a great victory for “the West”, as the Ronald Reagan leadership handed over to George H. W. Bush in the US and as Margaret Thatcher retired from office in the UK, that the West declared a “peace dividend”. This “dividend” included not only reductions in defense spending, but a total loss of cohesion or credibility in threat assessments, all of which led to a decline in Western identity and cohesion. But the collapse of the PRC, which has been foretold for more than a decade due to the PRC’s own shortcomings, was by 2025 already being portrayed solely as a victory of the United States, unshared with any other states. So how will, or how can, the US use this “sole remaining superpower” image in the coming years?;
8. US President George W. Bush (2001-09) saw the US as a global power which left it unfocussed strategically. When the September 11, 2001, al-Qaida attacks occurred against the US, President Bush declared “a War on Terror”, and thereby elevated al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden to the status of a superpower. So bin Laden defined the US in a very meaningful sense. How, after the PRC, does the US now identify itself? And how will the US’s allies identify the US when no clear threat to “the West” is evident? Will US President Donald Trump be able to convince much of the world — as he would need to do — of a rationale which causes the world to accept US predominance, absent a threat?

The new Trump Doctrine, released as the National Security Strategy of the United States of America, in late November 2025, pointedly does not specify a strategic adversary for the US. This, arguably, is the bold step by which the US argues its purpose as its own ethos, not defined by a threat.

By arguing this, Trump has already declared the end of the PRC-CCP era, and an America defined by America. Can that strategy survive Trump?

But first, the post-China chaos.