Hey Bert, I think it would be really good to get the ideas/analysis of Michael Pettis (and again as I've mentioned, they are endorsed by notable non-fresh water economists like Krugman, Martin Wolf, Olivier Blanchard, Barry Eichengreen and many others) out into the mainstream of the China watching community. If you don't know him, he used to run Bear Stearns Asia bond trading I think during the Asian Financial Crisis then became an Econ prof at Beida, been there since like '06 or something way back. I became convinced by him because in his older blog posts from 06 to around 2013 when he was still bothering to argue with the China bulls pre-Xi era, he went point by point through the perma bullish arguments and essentially dismantled them it seems to me (dismantled defined as, he criticizes the view that China can grow at 10% forever because xyz factor, i.e. because Western China is undeveloped, or because China's per capita investment is 1/10th that of the US so they can invest up to US level for a few more decades etc, or because infrastructure is never a bad thing etc, then that side makes their case, and he responds point by point in a clear and logical manner, and then the other side... just repeats their original argument). His view is that as China has followed the investment led growth model common to around two dozen countries in the past century (including Japan until the late 80's, Soviet Union until the late 80's, Brazil in the 60's and 70's, etc), a model very well understood by economic historians, but with much greater imbalances even than Japan by the late 80's, it will have an even worse economic stagnation and time rebalancing and dealing with the fallout of all the debt than Japan did. Recall that Japan went from 19% of global GDP in 1989 to 6% today, with 0.5% growth a year for 3 decades (although 1.5% growth a year roughly in household income, so they managed to rebalance somewhat over an ultra long and painful period, and their household income as a % of GDP was never as low as China's 33%). Also remember that when economics, not ultra-nationalist ideology, reigned in China up to around 2013-2015, rebalancing was the watchword, but you never hear that anymore despite the fact that very little rebalancing has been achieved since Wen Jiabao's famous imbalance speech over a decade ago (they've probably increased consumption as a % of GDP from 33% [!] to 40% over more than a decade, implying a rate of less than 1% a year so they still need 2 or 3 decades to get consumption to a level which can sustain economic growth without debt-fueled, unproductive infrastructure investment). So in that analysis, China's GDP is vastly overstated as is because bad debt for SOE's and local governments is never written off for political reasons, and rebalancing defined as transferring state-owned assets especially those of local governments to the household sector never happens therefore the only way there can be enough economic activity to create GDP "growth" (really defined in China as in an input not an output) is unproductive infrastructure spending which ultimately creates more debt and exacerbates the problem. I bring this up not to claim that there will be an imminent collapse in China or anything like that, nor to say that the US and those who believe in liberal values shouldn't absolutely want to take strong and well-calculated action in defense of them, and nor again to say that the US response to Covid or militarily or economically has been at all good the past 2-3 decades, but to say that China has its own massive internal problems and likely will have it's share of global GDP decline dramatically in coming decades as it fails to rebalance just like almost every other country with its growth model (hence the term middle-income trap). So that is one piece of favorable news from the perspective of those who strongly believe in liberal values.