The Truth About China: Collapsing & Conquering? | Peter Alexander

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Peter Atwater (1:00)

The truth when it comes to China is always in the middle. Again, just to reiterate the point, China is not on the precipice of collapse, nor is China on the verge of assuming hegemonic global power.

Adam Taggart (1:21)

Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money founder and your host, Adam Taggart. I'm very pleased to be welcoming you here for a special return discussion with Peter Alexander. He's founder and CEO of Zeeben Advisors, a leading provider of market intelligence and strategic advice on every facet of China's asset management industry. Peter, thanks so much for joining us again.

Peter Atwater (1:44)

Great to be back, Adam.

Adam Taggart (1:46)

Thanks. I also want to note for folks, Peter's too kind to say it, it is very early his time, but he was kind enough to get up, get in the office to have this discussion with us. So Peter, as best I understand in a nutshell, your mission and especially why you're coming on programs like this one, is to just help demystify China for Westerners. There's so much we in the West don't know about China, maybe assume about China, that might not be correct. You have lived and worked there for decades. How long has it been? Thirty years. Thirty years, man. You look like you must have started when you were 12 years old. Thanks. All right. But anyways, you know of what you speak because you have lived and worked there for three decades.

There's a lot of questions I have about China and many of which come to my attention from Thoughtful Money users or reading your works that you publish, which are great, by the way. I highly recommend everybody get on your list and we'll talk about at the end of the discussion how folks can do that. But I'd like to start with something you just wrote about called the cat theory of geopolitics.

Yeah, if you don't mind. Feel free to elaborate on it any way you like. But the point is, is there's a lot going on geopolitically. This whole shift from globalization to deglobalization and reshoring just seems to be accelerating. As time goes on, there's a lot of specific events that seem to be adding propulsion to it, like what's going on with Iran, obviously.

When it comes to the grand game, the big world powers playing here and China's role in it, give us your latest assessment and maybe explain it through the lens of the cat theory.

Peter Atwater (3:45)

So, you use the word mission, and I think this is critical when anybody is consuming any content they see from myself, whether it's on a podcast or reading anything that I might write, is, as I mentioned on our last podcast when we talked six months ago, the truth when it comes to China is always in the middle. Again, just to reiterate the point, China is not on the precipice of collapse, nor is China on the verge of assuming hegemonic global power.

The process that is underway is a shift, if you will, where we've heard Chinese leaders, particularly Xi Jinping, coming out, talking about changes not seen in a millennium. And there is a lot of that that's in play, but it's not really about China seeking to replace the United States. So when you're assuming, or I guess when you're looking at and talking, or basically reading anything about China, there is a level of projection that gets used, whereby, whether it's think tank analysts in the Beltway, or other people that are weighing in that are geopolitically focused, what you're going to find is there is an American or a, what I refer to as a post 1945 mindset that seeks to be able to overlay exactly what's going on today, whether it's with regard to the Iranian conflict, whether it's regarding AI, whatever the case may mean. And then they'll take that mindset and apply it to China. And it's very understandable why that's the case, because what you actually have had over the past 500 years, I mean, look at someone like Ray Dalio, right? He comes out and he talks about the great powers and what it means to have financial insecurity and over indebtedness and what have you. But he's looking at the United States, then he's looking prior to that at the UK, and prior to that, what, Spain, Portugal, the Dutch. These are all Western powers, and they all operate from a perspective of what I refer to as sort of Judeo-Christian ethos. So when you hear things like cultural gaps, that is, I think, one of the most important missing elements. As people try to navigate or understand what is going on today. Because China clearly is not a Judeo-Christian or a Greco-Roman basis. They're either Confucian or they're Daoist or whatever the case might be. So in a lot of the work that I try to do, I try to find a way to bridge that gap and try to explain, look, if you want to have a sense of what's really going on, you actually have to understand where China is coming from. What is the driving motivation? There are some that have come out recently with articles talking about what does China want. But again, what I have found in a lot of that writing or analysis, is it's what does China want from our perspective as Americans, as the hegemon, and we're going to project our worldview on that thinking. So you raise the concept of cat theory, the cat theory of geopolitics.