No surprise here — and yes, it will fall further. China isn’t merely wobbling; it’s grinding itself into powder, and it’s taking its once-vaunted economic future down with it. You don’t need a PhD in macroeconomics to see the cracks: the ghost cities built for demand that was never real, the population statistics so fantastical that not even the Party’s most pious acolytes can recite them with a straight face, the global markets that have grown weary of its industrial overproduction, and the debt bubble that makes the American debt monster look like a cuddly plush toy by comparison.
When a dog dies, the signs are unmistakable. In its final days and weeks, it sleeps more, eats less, withdraws from the world. Nations die on a much slower clock — decades instead of days — but the symptoms show early, quietly, relentlessly. The slowing pulse, the deteriorating appetite for growth, the labored breathing of an exhausted system.China may coast on fumes for decades yet, staggering forward, dragging its own economic corpse behind it long after many of us have turned to dust ourselves. But it won’t be the ravenous, resource-devouring titan of old. That era is gone. What we’re left with is a sick man — and the sick need less of everything, not more.