Sam BrownbackChinese President Xi Jinping likes to act on the world stage as if his country is not just a rising power, but a true rival to the United States. He does this while trying to hide the truth. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is facing the most serious challenge to the economic foundation of its political bargain in decades.
China is no longer a rising power. Its decline has already begun.
Under President Xi’s leadership, China has steadily slipped backward. Yes, its military has grown by some measures, but its alliance of authoritarians and the mercantilist model that underpins its economy are in serious trouble.
China’s economy has been shrinking relative to the United States for years. In 2020, China’s nominal GDP was 70.2% the size of America’s, but by 2025 it had dropped precipitously to 63.3%. Foreign direct investment has fallen from its peak of $344 billion in 2021 to roughly $19 billion by 2024 — more than a 90% decline. Housing investment as part of GDP dropped by more than 50% from 2020 to 2025, and the International Monetary Fund estimates that China’s housing inventory now amounts to roughly 30 months of sales.
China still poses a threat to the U.S. despite its decline — perhaps even because of it. Backed into a corner, declining powers with delusions of grandeur sometimes turn to diversionary wars. These diversionary wars often occur when a state faces serious internal threats and rising domestic dissatisfaction. They whip up nationalist sentiment through militarism, hoping that this will rally the people to their leadership.
In the case of China, Taiwan has long been a nationalist rallying cry, used by political leadership to distract citizens from the problems of a failing economy, harsh crackdowns, high youth unemployment, and a government the people never have a say in choosing.
For decades, the deal between the CCP and the Chinese people has been centered around economic promise. If the people leave the CCP in power, the Party will see that workers’ daily lives steadily improve.
And it worked for as long as China had a rapidly expanding economy. So long as money came to the people, construction abounded, direct foreign investment expanded, and government spending exploded, everyone was happy.
Not today.
China’s population is aging far more rapidly than a country naturally would due to its diabolical and disastrous one-child policy, which it used to abort and export its future. Official Chinese government data states that 336 million abortions were performed under this horrific policy. Another 160,000 Chinese children, 90% of whom were girls, were put up for international adoption so families could try again for their only child to be a boy.
No wonder China’s demographic problem is already here, with the current median age being 40.6 years. In 2025, China’s population fell by 3.39 million people, and nearly one-quarter of the population is already 60 or older.
Urban youth unemployment reached nearly 19% in 2025. China’s export economy is humming along for now, but the problem is no longer simply whether China can produce. The problem is whether it can generate enough domestic consumption and household demand to sustain growth.
We have seen “Peak China,” as Michael Beckley of Tufts University puts it.
So, domestic dissent grows. Freedom House’s China Dissent Monitor reports thousands of protests inside China driven by rising economic pressure. Retirees protest for their promised benefits, laborers strike for better working conditions, and failing developers spark housing disputes that boil over into the streets.
Religious practitioners have seen some of the harshest crackdowns in this period of a failing CCP. Concentration and forced labor camps house over a million Uyghur Muslims under appalling conditions of regular torture and routine abuse. The Chinese government asserts that it has the right to appoint the next Dalai Lama, even as they still hold the Panchen Lama it kidnapped as a child 31 years ago. Falun Gong practitioners are brutalized with torture and death, cataloged in massive government databases. Brutality is how China conducts its war on faith.
Then there are the Chinese Christians. They could practice their faith in government-run churches, but many refuse and have started underground churches. Ten Chinese Catholic bishops who have refused to toe the Communist Party line are now missing or in detention. Protestant house churches, some of which had been allowed to operate, now experience the terror of dramatically increased harassment, imprisonment, and torture.
In the case of Pastor Ezra Jin of the Zion Church in Beijing, the government knew his church had operated outside official channels for years, but it wasn’t until October 2025 — when it became clear how rapidly China’s economy was falling behind — that they arrested him. It took direct intervention from President Trump before he was released in July 2026, but other members of his church remain imprisoned.
A government that is losing its grip is a dangerous government. Xi’s rhetoric feeds his delusions, but it rests on a lie exposed by the desperate way his government is lashing out domestically and abroad.
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Sam Brownback is former U.S. ambassador at large for international religious freedom and co-chair of the International Religious Freedom Summit. He is the author of “China’s War on Faith.”
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