Quick Take: China 2026

The State of the Center has its own political debates, and they are just fascinating

I spent the Christmas and New Year Holiday at and around Beijing, same as last year, and then traveled a little to big, shiny Shanghai. So here’s my impressions of how China, possibly the world’s biggest economy right now, looks like from its mighty (and still ugly as hell) capital.

For context, you might want to check last year’s report first. I will try to repeat myself, and everything I wrote back then still stands (I even visited some of the same places I did last year) unless I specifically correct it in this piece:

Anyway, let me say that I was struck by the sight of Beijing’s and Shanghai’s shopping malls. Not because they are glitzier than, say, New York’s. Which they are! But because of the customers’ ages: in Europe, the vast majority of people you see in shopping malls are in their forties and fifties, for an average of, perhaps, around 42 years of age. In China, most people hanging in the malls are in their 20s and 30s, for an average of around 26.

“Welcome to Shanghai, it’s been waiting for you/Welcome to Shanghai, welcome to Shanghai”

Yes: young Chinese people have no interest in your Western democracy because China’s economy is still going pretty well. I live outside Madrid, Spain, quite an average EU country; even in the city’s better suburbs, young people just don’t have much disposable income and certainly few if any hopes of being able to afford buying a house or a car. Stats tell us the same is increasingly true in America. Not in China: the property market has been tanking because the government thinks that people being able to afford a house is a priority. I know! Shocking! Crazy Commies, amirite?

In the West we are enlightened and we know that helping property developers generate profits until the heat death of the universe is the meaning of sound governance, while the government congratulates itself on “strong economic growth” because everything is more expensive. That’s what capitalism is all about, mainstream media columnists tell me: and then they express surprise when people elect politicians like Mamdani.

An important point here is that, despite the relative youth of the crowds at malls, Chinese children remain near invisible. China is now at developed-world levels of fertility, and the only pram that I saw at a Beijing mall contained a rabbit, surrounded by ecstatic twenty-something girls, commenting of the animal’s cuteness.

My impression is that, even if family formation is cheaper in China than in the West, Western social mores as filtered through Japan and South Korea are a big factor driving the youth away from having children. There is a lot of Korean-style cosplaying going around in Beijing (not so much in Shanghai). A lot more than last year: all over the city, young women walk around dressed as Qing-era concubines or anime princesses. My working hypothesis at this moment is that ideology is the root cause in the depression of fertility across the world: wherever the current thing strikes, it leads to political polarization between men and women, with women becoming ever more enamored of political correctness and men pining for, let’s say, not the current thing.

Don’t ask me what the current thing is. You know very well. if you don’t, I have a Substack note on that too.

In any case, the current thing has struck China, via East Asian exporters of cultural slop. Despite the government’s best efforts, the East Asian ethos of K-Pop and Cosplaying is very influential on young people.

It’s not the politics here, really. There’s no debate of any kind in China about the stuff the Boomer and X-generation leaders of the West care about, like democratization and the “liberal, rules-based order,” which everyone understands to be a sad joke for the consumption of Western retirees and Bloomberg News commentators only.

People who know nothing about China or live off lying about China (like a lot of Western commentators) will tell you there’s no debate on democratization because the Party suppresses it, which is only true to a small extent. The Party does suppress political discourse, all the time, let’s make that clear. But that’s not the main reason people don’t agitate for democracy. The main reason is that they don’t care. Online debate about politics in China takes very specific Chinese characteristics, and is actually closer to the nationalist vs globalist than to the left vs right debate.

For example, there’s massive debate about the role of China’s last dynasty, the Qing, and whether its elite should be seen as a worthy group of strivers attempting to keep Westerners at bay, or filthy Manchus betraying the heritage of the preceding, indigenous Ming Dynasty. If you want to look for a proxy for left vs right discussions in China, it’s the debate between nostalgics of the egalitarian ethos under Mao Zedong and those who push for an assertive ethnic Chinese nation, and for an end to the Communist ideal of a great multi-ethnic empire with everybody singing together in regional costumes.

Easy to see here that what you have in the center of Chinese political discourse, right now, is the Communist Party. This may sound surprising, even heretical, to many, but it’s the situation on the ground. I’ve been a correspondent in several places and I know many correspondents seek the easy way of just telling editors what they want to hear, which is why seemingly everything you hear about Spain is sports, bullfighting and Francisco Franco. I tried to rebel against that as a correspondent, and will keep trying to do that as a historian. Also, I no longer have no editor, but I still have a duty to tell the truth as I see it. So here’s the real spicy stuff, as always for my paying subscribers only.