Peter Zeihan

And there is not an economic model that humans have yet to dream up that will work with where they will be demographically in less than 10 years' time.

So we are living in the equivalent of 2006 subprime.

where everyone's like, oh, and it's all about to go tits up.

All of that is legitimate concerns.

The river where most of them live on, the Yellow, isn't navigable.

They have never been able to use it for trade, so they've never internally traded among themselves.

The one river they have that is navigable, the Yangtze, has always been an independent, well, I should say always, but often been an independent political entity going back for 3,000 years of Chinese history.

And down in the south in the tropics where you've got Hong Kong, you've got city-states and little enclaves of flat land that have always looked to the outside world rather than the Chinese.

The soil sucks.

The northern part where 70% of the population lives, it's low-s soil in a drought zone.

So if anything ever happened to logistics or distribution, what would go down in northern China would be what has gone down in northern China 27 times before, and that's civilizational collapse.

If we were talking about any country that had fewer people than the Chinese have always had, that would just be the end of them.

It's just that there have always been enough Chinese in the past to pick up the pieces and move forward on the other side of the break.

But that requires you having children.

And so this really is an end to the concept of China and the concept of even the Han Chinese.

Because we're in a situation now where probably they have more people over age 54 than under.

And I'm sorry, that just doesn't work.

And very soon it will be over.

That's before you consider the broader geography of China versus the rest of the world.

You got the first island chain off the coast.