President Xi Jinping welcomed President Trump to the Great Hall of the People on Wednesday with a line he wanted the cameras to catch. “Transformation not seen in a century is accelerating across the globe,” he said. Then he made his real point:

“The world has come to a new crossroads. Can China and the United States overcome the so-called ‘Thucydides Trap’ and create a new paradigm of major-country relations?”

Xi was trying to set the stage for China’s view of the world. Tellingly, he used the same framework western elites have been wringing their hands over for several decades: the story of an ascendant China, descending America, and the threat of war between the two — especially with Trump driving things.

That story traveled around the world in press circles in predictable fashion. The problem with it, and with Xi’s framing, is simple: it’s wrong. China is not ascending, the China century is dead, and the Chinese Communist Party is increasingly terrified of getting left behind economically in a similar fashion to Japan since the 1980s.

What Xi Was Reaching For

Thucydides was a Greek historian who lived 2,400 years ago. He wrote about the long war between Athens, the rising city, and Sparta, the established one. Athens won the wars with Persia and built a maritime empire. Sparta panicked. The war that followed wrecked both of them.

A Harvard professor named Graham Allison turned that into a theory in a 2017 book called Destined for War. Allison studied sixteen times over the last 500 years that a rising country got close to overtaking an established one. Twelve led to war. He named it the Thucydides Trap.

That is the lens Xi demanded the world view the meeting through. China is rising. America is panicking and in decline. War follows because America panics, and is weak and scared of China. This plays to the beliefs and sensitivities of a press that hates Donald Trump and believes our power abroad is bad. Xi played to the crowd.

For that story to work, China has to actually be rising.

China Is Not Rising

China is not rising. China started falling years ago. The experts who study rising and declining powers have a name for it: the peaking power trap. A country that has peaked and started to fall is more dangerous than one still climbing. It knows time is running out. It moves before its hand gets weaker.

None of this means China is harmless. China still builds most of the world’s electronics. China still refines most of the world’s rare earths. China still has trade pressure on America that hurts. Those things are real. But they are all that’s left.

Start with the people. A country that is shrinking cannot fight a long war. Chinese government statistics put births last year at 7.92 million and deaths at 11.31 million. China shrank by 3.39 million people in one year. The fertility rate is roughly one child per woman. To hold a population steady, you need 2.1. China is having half the children it needs.

The working-age population fell by 6.6 million in one year, to 851 million. That number will keep falling for the rest of Xi’s life. Empires need young men to fight wars and young workers to pay for them. China is losing both, on the regime’s own numbers.

China’s Military Has Lost Three Wars This Year

China has had three real-world tests of its military equipment in the last twelve months. China lost all three.

Pakistan, May 2025. Pakistan fought a four-day war with India after a terror attack killed twenty-six civilians in Indian-controlled Kashmir. Pakistan flew Chinese J-10C fighter jets armed with Chinese PL-15 missiles, defended by Chinese HQ-9B air defense systems. By day three, the Indian Air Force had taken control of the air over Pakistan. India destroyed four or five Pakistani F-16s, one surveillance plane, one C-130 transport, several drones, two radar systems, two command-and-control centers, and a surface-to-air missile battery. Eight Pakistani air defense sites were hit on May 8. Four more the next day.

Venezuela, January 2026. American forces flew more than 150 aircraft into Venezuelan airspace at two in the morning to seize Nicolás Maduro. The Chinese-built JY-27 radar Caracas had bought, sold as a system that could spot stealth fighters from 175 miles out, did not see a single one of them.

Iran, spring 2026. American and Israeli strikes destroyed Iran’s air defense. Chinese-made HQ-9B missile systems, Chinese radars, and Chinese drones were among the wreckage.

The HQ-9B is supposed to be China’s answer to the American Patriot missile. It did not stop Indian jets, American jets, or Israeli jets. China has no navy that can fight in the Strait of Hormuz. China has no air defense that holds up against a serious military. China cannot win the wars its own clients pick.

China’s Economy Stopped Growing the Way Allison Counted On

Allison’s whole argument depended on the Chinese economy passing the American economy. He spelled it out. If Chinese workers became half as productive as American workers, the Chinese economy would be twice the size of America’s. That has not happened. China is falling further behind.

Chinese productivity fell ten percent between 2010 and 2019. That was the worst drop for any major power since the Soviet Union in the 1980s. China set its 2026 growth target at 4.5 to 5 percent. That is the lowest in roughly 35 years. Consumer prices are flat. China is fighting deflation. Real estate investment fell 15.9 percent. Youth unemployment in Chinese cities hit 16.9 percent in March on Beijing’s own numbers. Outside estimates run higher. China’s GDP per capita is $14,730, about a quarter of America’s.

China is doing what Japan started doing in 1989: getting older, deflating, and stuck. The Chinese Communist Party fears that ending. It fears the Soviet ending just as much. Both are visible from Beijing right now.

China cannot even feed itself. China imports more than 80 percent of the soybeans it eats. The Chinese meat supply runs through American and Brazilian farmers. The Soviets hit the same wall in the 1980s. They could not feed their own people without buying grain from the country they said capitalism would bury.

Allison’s straight-line prediction was the spine of the theory. The line stopped. So did the theory.

China’s Allies Are Broken

A rising power has friends. China does not.

Russia is stuck in Ukraine. Dutch military intelligence puts the Russian dead past 500,000 and total casualties past 1.2 million. The Russian army is losing more soldiers every month than it can recruit. April was the first month Russia lost ground on the battlefield since the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk last year.

Iran is broken after American and Israeli strikes this spring. The Tehran regime no longer has a nuclear option or a Hezbollah forward arm. I covered the wider arc in Friday’s Cuba column.

Panama kicked the Chinese out. The Panamanian Supreme Court annulled the long-standing concession of Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison on February 23. The ports of Balboa and Cristobal, the two ends of the Panama Canal, returned to Panamanian control.

Peru is next. The State Department’s Western Hemisphere Affairs bureau warned publicly that Peru could be “powerless” over the $1.3 billion Chinese mega-port at Chancay. A new American-led critical-minerals coalition is taking shape with Argentina, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, and Peru.

Africa cannot pay China back. Ghana and Zambia have already defaulted on their Chinese debt. Ethiopia rescheduled a ten-year loan to thirty years. African countries owe China roughly $150 billion. Beijing cannot make them pay.

Athens had real friends and a real navy paying for them. Xi has a creditor’s empire that cannot collect.

The Cameras Tell You Who Is Afraid

The clearest proof China knows it is sinking is the way the Chinese Communist Party is treating its own people.

In February of this year, the CCP’s internet regulator ordered every Chinese social media platform to censor any post that spreads “fear of marriage” or “anxiety about childbirth.” The regime is now censoring discussion of why its citizens are not having children.

In November, China’s Ministry of State Security warned the public that using a VPN to reach the wider internet is illegal and a “national security” threat. Beijing then deployed an AI-generated police spokesman to repeat the warning across Chinese media.

In April, a leaked notice suggested Beijing is preparing to block all overseas internet access for ordinary Chinese citizens.

In September of 2024, a Chinese court sentenced six activists to between three and twelve years in prison. Their crime was trying to form an opposition political party. They organized mostly online.

That is the regime before any American visitor arrives in Beijing.

President Trump’s delegation got the rest of it firsthand. American officials arrived with clean burner phones and laptops. The Secret Service issued temporary equipment loaded with a “golden image” so the security team could check the device on the way out for tampering. Hundreds of high-value Americans landed in a city that added 1,500 new surveillance cameras in 2026 alone. Those add to Skynet, China’s nationwide camera network. Skynet runs 176 million cameras with face-recognition software capable of three billion comparisons every second. After the trip, the burner phones and Chinese-issued badges were dropped into a trash can at the foot of the Air Force One steps.

A confident rising power does not need 176 million cameras pointed at its own people. The Soviet Union needed them. The Chinese Communist Party needs them now.

This is the same mistake the Soviets made. Marxists believed capitalism would collapse from its own contradictions. The capitalist system did not collapse. The Soviet system did. The Chinese Communist Party is now running the same play with the same belief. They are reaching for the same answer when the data goes the wrong way: more cameras, more censorship, more arrests, more control.

Xi reached for Thucydides. He should have reached for Brezhnev. The trap closing in Beijing is not the one a rising challenger falls into. It is the one a declining power digs for itself. The cameras tell you which trap is closing.

China is not ascending, the China century is dead, and the Chinese Communist Party is increasingly terrified of getting left behind economically in a similar fashion to Japan since the 1980s, or worse, collapsing like the Soviet Union.