Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s recent speech to the Communist Party Congress could be one of the most consequential of the decade. He told the audience – and the world – that his economic growth-crushing zero-COVID policy is here to stay, and that Beijing is more determined than ever to reunify with Taiwan, peacefully if possible and by force if necessary.
We are living in a moment of deep geopolitical rifts and extraordinary economic uncertainty, epitomised by Xi’s pronouncements. The world is clearly not reverting to some pre-COVID status quo. Instead, a combination of underlying forces has upended the previous world order and ushered in a period of profound disorder.
I want to look at four of these forces – the deterioration in US-China relations, Russia’s war in Ukraine, populism and inflation – to construct some political-economic scenarios for the next two to five years. Any list of destabilising global forces is necessarily incomplete. I won’t consider climate change or biodiversity loss (arguably the greatest challenges facing humanity), a possible COVID resurgence, the impact of artificial intelligence and other disruptive technologies, or the role of rogue regimes from Iran to North Korea.
