180 Paula J. Dobriansky, “An Allied Plan to Depend Less on China,” opinion, Wall Street Journal, April 30,2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-allied-plan-to-depend-less-on-china-11588288513.
181 Michael R. Auslin, The End of the Asian Century: War, Stagnation, and the Risks to the World’s Most Dynamic Region (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), pp. 24-25.
182 Anjani Trivedi, “A Wave of Bad Loans Could Swallow China’s Banks,” Bloomberg, April 28, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-29/a-wave-of-bad-loans-could-swallow-china-s-banks
183 Andrew Frew McMillan, “U.S.-Listed Chinese Stocks Open Secondary Escape Hatch in Hong Kong,” Real Money’s The Street, June 5, 2020, https://realmoney.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/u-s-listed-chinese-stocks-open-secondary-escape-hatch-in-hong-kong-15341110.
184 Derek Scissors, “A Stagnant China in 2040, Briefly,”AEI, March 16, 2020, https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/a-stagnant-china-in-2040-briefly/; Christopher Balding, “What’s Causing China’s Economic Slowdown?” Foreign Affairs, March 11, 2019, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2019-03-11/whats-causing-chinas-economic-slowdown; and Alexandra Stevenson, “China’s Spenders Are Saving: That’s a Problem for Everyone,” The New York Times, October 2, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/02/business/china-consumers.html.
185 For more on social unrest research, see Christian Gobel, “Social Unrest: A Bird’s Eye View,” in Teresa Wright, ed., Handbook of Protest and Resistance in China (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019), pp. 27-45; Christopher Gobel and Lynette H. Ong, “Social Unrest in China”; and “Why Protests Are So Common in China,” The Economist, October 4, 2018, https://www.economist.com/china/2018/10/04/why-protests-are-so-common-in-china.
186 James Mann, The China Fantasy, pp. 49-54.
187 Nicholas Eberstadt, “China’s Demographic Outlook to 2040 and its Implications: An Overview,” AEI, January 22, 2019, https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/chinas-demographic-outlook-to-2040-and-its-implications-an-overview/.
188 Eleanor Albert and Beina Xu, “China’s Environmental Crisis,” Council on Foreign Relations, January 18, 2016, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinas-environmental-crisis.
189 Jing Huang, Xiaochuan Pan, Xinbiao Guo, and Guoxing Li, “Health Impact of China’s Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan: an Analysis of National Air Quality Monitoring and Mortality Data,” Lancet Planetary Health, Vol. 2, No. 7 (Jun 30, 2018), pp. e313-e323, https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lanplh/PIIS2542-5196(18)30141-4.pdf.
190 Tyler Headley and Cole Tanigawa-Lau, “Measuring Chinese Discontent,” Foreign Affairs, March 10, 2016, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2016-03-10/measuring-chinese-discontent. They write, “Even though protests in Hong Kong are larger in scale, protests happen more frequently in mainland China. According to a broad scholarly consensus, there are more than 130,000 protests per year, or nearly 400 daily, with fewer than 250 (less than one percent) involving more than 100 people.”
191 See endnotes 14-17.
192 Adrian Zenz, “China’s Domestic Security Spending: An Analysis of Available Data,” Jamestown Foundation’s China Brief, Vol. 18, No. 4 (March 2018), p. 6, https://jamestown.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/CB_18_4-2.pdf?x47979. Zenz estimates China spent 1,046,000 million RMB on external defense in 2017. Given how he calculates 1,200,400 million in RMB in national domestic security spending in 2017 as equal to $197 billion or $349 billion on a PPP basis, we proportionally calculated 1,046,000 RMB on external defense spending in 2017 as roughly equal to $171 billion in nominal dollars or $304 billion on a PPP basis.
193 Adrian Zenz, “China’s Domestic Security Spending: An Analysis of Available Data,” p. 6. Given how Zenz
