Recently, I have noticed a growing trend of revisionist analyses that challenge the widespread belief that China will overthrow the United States from their place as the global superpower in the foreseeable future. Personally, I agree that the ascension of China is not a foregone conclusion and there's definitely the chance of Beijing failing to achieve its goal and America succeeding in maintaining its hegemony during the current century. However, in my opinion, most of these essays are written in a very childish and partial manner, while they suffer from the most common methodological mistakes.
The majority of them do not even try to keep any pretense of objectivity, but instead shape the conflict in moral terms of black versus white, while openly declaring their estimation (presenting it however as an indisputable fact) that the rise of China will have negative repercussions for humanity (in what concerns personal and state freedom, but not necessarily limited to that). Now, it's not surprising that the "experts" take sides, especially considering the scope of the subject, but that open admission of bias undermines the credibility and utility of their work. Most of the articles give me the impression of aiming to confirm the prejudices of the author, whose intention is not to test the validity of his hypothesis or to study a particular phenomenon, but, on contrary, to prove what he already suspected, no matter towards where the evidence will point.
1. Decline of the rate of China's economic development: In this case, some of the arguments can be convincing, but, from my experience, it usually consists of abusing statistical data. As China's urbanisation, industrialisation and generally gross domestic product is expanding, the growth rate has been gradually decreasing, which is sometimes interpreted as a sign of financial stagnation and upcoming crisis. However, the steady reduction is a perfectly reasonable development, because, thanks to the already accomplished growth, there's less room for expansion, in comparison to an agrarian society, for example, while the initial absolute quantity is so huge that it's practically impossible for China to replicate the old numbers in relative terms (those observed by statistics that measure growth in percentages). The inability (willing or unwilling) to understand statistics is a common misconception, when it comes to China, just like
Goldstone predicted their inevitable collapse, because he failed to realise how population and urbanisation work. His mistake reminds me of an old article that predicted that female athletes would eventually surpass their male counterparts, failing to imagine that the amelioration rates of women will slowly decline, as their sport records improve.
2. Deterministically declaring that autocracies are doomed to disintegrate: That's an unashamedly ideological perspective, according to which, totalitarian regimes cannot resist the challenges of a modern economy and a prosperous society, an incapacity which inevitably leads to their inevitable self-destruction. That's a purely circular fallacy, which can be basically summarised into China will fall, because it's an illiberal state and illiberal states fail, because China is doomed. The other historical examples (Third Reich, Soviet Union) these commentators use imply their tendency to examine China through anachronistic lens, while also don't verify their arguments. The inconvenient truth is that neither the USSR nor Nazi Germany failed because of their authoritarianism. After all, even if the party dictatorship of China is condemned, there's no reason to arbitrarily assume that the subsequent political change will provoke prolonged chaos, economic and military disintegration and etc. Moreover, China's aggressive policy in Hong Kong and the South China Sea or against the Uyghurs and Taiwan is also brought up, but that also looks like a non-sequitur. Common sense dictates that a more ambitious foreign policy indicates the ability of the state actor to promote and protect its interests in a wider sphere, thanks to its increased power and prosperity, not its desperation. The employed analogies usually concern the Third Reich (and, conveniently enough, not Britain or the USA in the 19th and 20th centuries), but even this case is the result of Germany recovering some of its former power, in comparison to the militarily crippled and bankrupted Weimar Republic of the '20s.
In my opinion, the reason for these obvious methodological errors is the need to satisfy the confirmation bias of the author, the editor and the readership. Optimistic scenarios in geopolitics are always more welcome than more sober and pessimistic expectations, as the Millennium 2002 debacle demonstrated. It would be described as wishful thinking, where the suspicions of the "researcher" are verified and his audience is relieved that the existing system guarantees the maintenance of the advantageous status-quo. To clarify, I don't believe that China's future path is decorated with rose petals or that there are still no obstacles to evade, like the notorious and slightly exaggerated ''middle income trap'', but the dark and bleak picture several pundits paint seems to be based on biased interpretations and abusive usage of data, whose goal is not to objectively investigate the issue, but to protect the confirmation biases of a certain group, which may feel threatened by the prospect of a Chinese hegemony.