China is a particularly challenging case study for our thesis that institutional stagnation leads to economic imbalance, which in turn is responsible for Great Power decline. Could there be a more obvious example in history of a country that fell to military conquest by foreign barbarians, not once, but multiple times? Unlike Rome, with its long, slow demise, the history of China seems to reinforce military failure as the key factor in imperial decline, or at least a coequal factor alongside economics.
Regardless of these military incursions, we believe economics is the best explanation for China’s decline.
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