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5 Predictions for China in 2024
From a small crisis with Taiwan to growing youth disillusionment, here’s what China likely faces next year.
James Palmer, 12/26/23
The 2020s so far feel like China’s lost decade: The economy is slowing down, young people are disillusioned and jobless, and their parents are watching the value of their property crumble. An insecure but still dominant President Xi Jinping sits at the top of everything. It’s been a difficult year for Beijing, and the next one isn’t looking much happier. Below, we rounded up five predictions for China in 2024.
1. A Taiwan Mini-Crisis
Taiwan holds a presidential election on Jan. 13, and the year could start with a small crisis in the straits. Current Taiwanese Vice President Lai Ching-te, who serves under President Tsai Ing-wen and is a member of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), holds a narrow lead in the polls. His election would ire Beijing; he is an advocate for a more independent Taiwan and strongly opposed to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Although Lai has said he won’t call for formal Taiwanese independence or drop the Republic of China name—a red line for Beijing—he has also said that Taiwan’s sovereignty is “a fact” and reminded his fellow candidates that by Beijing’s standards, they are all pro-independence.
A Lai victory would likely prompt aggressive moves from Beijing, including naval maneuvers and airspace intrusions. Reports last week about comments made by Xi to U.S. President Joe Biden about reunification with Taiwan when they met in November stirred some panic in Washington, but an invasion remains highly unlikely. It would be risky and difficult, especially when China is struggling with other crises.
Even a victory for Taiwan’s opposition Kuomintang (KMT) on Jan. 13 may cause some problems. The KMT is more pro-China than the DPP, but it would hardly hand the keys to the island over to Beijing. Chinese officials might overestimate the significance of a KMT election win, seeing it as a sign of China’s influence in Taiwan. Although 17 percent of Taiwanese voters said in a recent survey that China is their main concern, more than twice that number picked the economy.
2. Growing Property Woes
Housing prices in China have teetered on the brink for years, and 2024 could be the year they finally go over the edge. The crisis among property developers this year was bad enough, reaching firms once considered to be relatively safe, such as Country Garden. There are many more failed real estate projects out there, but the thing that the Chinese government really fears is a dip in housing prices; after all, 70 percent of Chinese household assets are invested in property.
The government has fiddled with data and threatened commentators in what seems to be an effort to stop people from talking about how bad the Chinese economy is really doing. There is now a big discrepancy between official housing price indexes and what real estate will actually fetch on the market; prices are sliding by at least 15 percent in many cities and by as much as 30 percent in Beijing.
As these trends spread, even the official numbers may have to better acknowledge reality, which would cause a much wider crisis of confidence.
3. Political Leadership Shake-ups
A couple of high-level Chinese leaders fell in 2023, namely Foreign Minister Qin Gang and Defense Minister Li Shangfu. The full story of both dismissals remains opaque, but the politics of the CCP’s top leadership feels volatile going into the new year—despite Xi packing the top posts with loyalists last year.
That is hardly surprising: Xi is competent at party politics, but his rule has been bad for China, especially in the past three years. Mandatory adoration can’t stop him from feeling insecure—or from recognizing that many people blame him for the state of the country. That insecurity also affects the rest of the leadership, whose lives, wealth, and freedom depend on Xi’s whims. All this tension is likely to produce dramatic politics next year.
For all the talk of factions and allies, CCP politics in some ways resembles the dynamics of organized crime; when the knives come out, friendships don’t matter. If there ever is a significant move against Xi, it may come from the people he’s promoted and sponsored.
4. Youth Disillusionment
Last week, Associated Press reporter Dake Kang shared a pair of Weibo messages to his account that captured the public mood change in China in the last three years. In June 2020, a stranger messaged him, “Get the fuck out of China.” This month, the same account wrote simply, “I’m sorry.”
Many young people in China have taken the same path in the past few years. Nationalistic education primed them for the feelings of pride and triumph that came with an apparent victory over COVID-19 in the summer of 2020, when China returned to relative normality while the rest of the world took shelter. That feeling merged with greater hostility toward the West, especially the United States, with pandemic conspiracy theories taking hold that blamed the United States.
But frustration with China’s zero-COVID policy in 2021 and 2022, mixed with the economic crisis, have left the public, and especially the young, feeling very differently. One sign of this shift is that Chinese public opinion of the United States has risen sharply—a coded way of expressing discontent with Beijing’s course. In 2024, pessimism about the future, already clear at the beginning of the decade, is only likely to get worse.
The deflation of popular nationalism and dire economic prospects for young graduates seem to be contributing to a rise in depression among 18-to-24-year-olds in China. Youth disappointment and anger exploded in December 2022, when China experienced its largest mass protests in years against the zero-COVID policy. That isn’t likely next year, but cynicism and a desire to flee to other countries—among those with the resources to do so—will continue to fuel so-called runology in 2024.
One of the main reasons for the CCP’s swing into crushing dissidents a decade ago was the belief that the party was losing young people. The government’s response to this new bitterness will be to insist on more displays of compulsory patriotism and greater censorship of online spaces. (2023 is ending with another set of gaming restrictions.) There is little ability to offer young Chinese the kind of future they want.
5. No Collapse in U.S.-China Relations, but No Recovery Either
The successful summit between Xi and Biden in San Francisco in November, which both sides seem to have regarded as a victory, provided a temporary cooling-off period for a relationship that was heading downhill for years. Significantly, that has included a resumption of high-level military talks between Beijing and Washington. In Chinese state media, anti-U.S. rhetoric remains relatively muted—although still a constant.
Don’t expect that to last. Structural tensions between the two powers are intense enough that some new crisis will inevitably cause China to revert to so-called wolf warrior mode, especially since it’s such an easy way for Chinese diplomats to advance their own careers. But the posture is not likely to reach the heights of 2020; China has enough other problems to avoid risking too much trouble for a while.
There are always concerns that anti-China rhetoric in Washington will gum up the relationship during an election year. But the truth is that U.S. voters don’t seem to care about China at the ballot box. The real danger may be Chinese attempts at election interference, likely geared toward specific politicians in areas with high numbers of ethnically Chinese voters—but possibly following a pro-Donald Trump line.
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