Foresight 2020: The Challenges Facing China

Abstract

The next few years may see the high tide of China’s power. Charles Parton highlights significant domestic challenges which the country will confront, and which may combine with an unfavourable international environment to make the Communist Party’s ambitions unaffordable and unreachable. Parton argues that breakthrough reforms are making slow progress, while President Xi Jinping is imposing a system of governance stripped of past flexibility, and relations with the West will be brittle.