This analysis, like many others that I have read, overlooks the real elephant in the room: the accelerating climate crisis, with prolonged droughts punctuated by catastrophic flooding and melting glaciers drying up major river basins worldwide (and especially in China!) Not to mention sea level rise as the ice melts from the polar land masses of Greenland and Antarctica. And swarms of migrants from the global South as its heat waves render huge areas uninhabitable won’t help either. I am not describing a future dystopia here; this is already happening worldwide. It’s hard to play the game of power politics if your playing board itself is eroding away…