2027 -The Year World War Three Begins

         In one of those global futurology scenario  foreign correspondents love to write Martin Walker, who had reported with distinction from Moscow, Washington and Brussels for the Guardian made the point a decade ago that China would get old before it got rich.

The dictatorship regime’s rejection of a liberal market economy based on free exchange of information meant that impressive as China’s  growth rate was it would never be able to generate enough wealth to create a balanced economy such as Asian neighbours like Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and Taiwan had achieved.

This remains the case. China has the world’s fastest growing elderly population. In 2019 there were 219 million Chinese citizens aged over 60. By 2040 that figure will grow to 402 million elderly Chinese, 40 million fewer than the entire population of today’s European Union.

28 per cent of the Chinese population will be of pension age except very few of them will have pensions. The Chinese state had made no provision for pensions. Nor have Chinese communists obliged firms and public sector institutions to create the funded pensions that ensure there is an income after working life for citizens living in democracies.

However the question the Chinese are asking is whether their increasingly autocratic “paramount” leader, Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and Chairman of the State Military Commission,  will get old before he gets Taiwan.

China watchers have noted several references this year to 2027 figuring as a key anniversary for Xi. He will complete an unprecedented third term as supreme leader. He will be 73 - much younger than Joe Biden or Donald Trump but the importance of the year is that it is the 100th anniversary year of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army. Mao Zedong founded the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, followed six years 1927 later by the PLA.

What better way to celebrate the PLA’s centennial year than using it to re-unite what the Chinese leaders see as an integral part of their  country?

Xi has been in charge of China for a decade. In addition to doing nothing to help the rapidly rising older population, Xi has also presided over a big jump in unemployment among young people. In May 2023 urban youth unemployment had risen to 21%.

The Chinese middle classes who rose in force after the Deng Xiaoping reforms that fused communism and capitalism are no longer sure their prosperity will keep rising. Any savings are used to buy bricks and mortar and Chinese municipal authorities have sold off land to generate income for running cities and towns. But recent crashes of building firms and banks financing housing loans have shaken confidence in China that the bubbles and booms would continue indefinitely and everybody would get a bit richer  as in the open market capitalism based on a free media and shareholders removing CEOs and executives who underperform.

In China that means taking on a communist cadre with powerful political connections so poor management of firms, and of provinces and cities continues unchecked.

The wealthy millionaire class of China is shifting its money and its sons and daughters abroad as any glance at a university campus in the US, Australia, Canada, Britain and the European universities which teach in English now shows.

Beijing is bringing in controls on illicit currency outflows which only serves to heighten the gap between the new wealth creating elites and the unreformable dead hand of communist party control.

Thus Xi faces a restless, scratchy population. The deal China’s communist rulers offered between 1980 and 2020 of everyone getting richer in exchange for not challenging the exclusive monopoly of power of a self-referring unreformable dictatorship is no longer working.

When a supreme leader is sitting on a giant military but is no longer able to offer his people a decent life or permit the freedoms and rights associated with democracy the temptation  to change the story by a patriotic nationalism of regaining lost territory rises to the fore.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is the latest example. Geo-political writers like Harvard’s Graham Allison refer to the “Thucydides trap” based on ancient Greece history  when the rise of a militarized Sparta challenging the rule of Athens made war inevitable.

For Athens read America and for Sparta read the giant armaments programme of dictatorship China.

There are increasing references to 2027 when Xi’s third term as leader of China comes to an end as the moment when the fatherland will recover its lost province and island of Taiwan.

The CIA has issued such warnings as has the Taiwanese government.

These may be dismissed as alarmist attempts to get the US to provide ever more advanced weaponry to Taiwan. But the failure of the West to provide Ukraine with adequate advanced weapons to drive back Putin’s invasion and the growing calls for a Korean peninsular type truce which leaves Putin with nearly all the territory in Ukraine he conquered in 2014 shows the will to wage war is absent in the democratic world.

The democratic world no longer follows the adage “If you want peace, prepare for war.” No European government dealing with unwinding the massive state borrowing needed after the Covid Pandemic is spending serious money on defence and the EU still has no common procurement policy for arms as each European nation wants to keep its cottage arms industry.

Britain has seven times as many people in prison as it does combat ready soldiers. The only invasion European rightwing politicians talk about is that of asylum seekers from failed states like Iraq, Libya, Syria and sub-Saharan Africa caused by Europe’s inept  foreign policy shapers, especially those in London.

America has forward military bases in Korea and Japan, the equivalent of Pearl Habour in 1941. If Xi is serious about taking over Taiwan by force he will have to neutralise US forces in East Asia.

That is World War 3 with the Global South led by increasingly anti-democratic political elites who have no sense of a common destiny with the more northerly Euro-Atlantic community of advanced democracies.

Joe Biden can meet Xi in San Francisco and warm words flow. No-one wants conflict now. This is a dance of dupes however.

Stand by for 2027, a year of living dangerously.