Indeed I am speculating (honestly, was that not obvious?), as is everyone else. The difference I would say, is that I clearly realize I am speculating. I am making a bold and provocative prediction of future doom for the West, with the naive intention of shocking some people out of their sleepwalk of unconsciousness.

I would argue HN has one of the highest concentrations of informed logical minds in existence, yet go into any thread on HN on any topic of this general nature, and marvel at the inability of people to even remotely agree upon what the facts are that we're dealing with. Now imagine the general public, and our comically theatrical political system, somehow coming up with remotely optimal solutions to deal with the massively complex issues modern existence is forcing upon us (China is but one). If we can't even have reasonable conversations here, I speculate that it will always be far worse in our broad political and social spheres.

The long term risks (risks are always potentials) of the rise of China should have been clear to any logical and informed person for many years, but it's really just the last year or so that this idea has started to creep into the mainstream discussion. Remember how Trump's trade concerns were utterly mocked in the media and on forums like this at the start ("Trump thinks trade is a zero sum game, hahahaha what an idiot!!"), until magically something changed and the media simultaneously all got onto a different page.

We often hear how the American military has numerous scenarios & reactionary plans planned out "just in case", and the typical reaction to that tends to be "but of course, it's only logical". How likely does it seem that no one in past administrations were considering and planning for the possibility that democracy wouldn't magically bloom in China once they became wealthy? And yet, are there any signs that there were, or conversation among the serious political talking heads (whoever that might be)? Is this incompetence, or something else? No one knows, we can only speculate, but we seem to be not even doing that. Too conspiratorial.

I speculate that time is not just ticking, but accelerating. Each day China becomes richer, extends their sphere of influence, moves further up the technology chain, becomes ever more clever at global propaganda and skilled in exploiting the many obvious weaknesses in the Western system, and in Western minds. And they are moving fast, way faster than democracies could hope to even when they are operating at their very maximum efficiency. I speculate that an intelligent (yes, easier said than done, but this idea that only democracies can be successful is a meme, not a fact), authoritarian state will beat out a democracy every time, in the aggregate (which is what matters in such situations). Add in all their other advantages: 4x the population of any other single powerful state, a nearly completely ideologically aligned populace (as compared to our incredibly emotionally polarized populations), media/government/educational/corporate organizations of your "opponents" operating propaganda campaigns (to some degree) in your favor, the eye of the tiger, and so forth and so on.

Honestly, I simply don't see how China loses, short of some sort of unexpected shock to their system. I speculate that modern Western civilization is literally unable to counter this threat, short of military conflict. We would have to fix so many fundamentally broken things in our systems and thinking, and fast, to even hope to be able to compete. That seems incredibly unlikely to me. But hey, this is all speculation, maybe the wildly popular meme-based Pollyanna predictions will actually turn out to be correct after all. I am perfectly happy to consider that possibility. But I suspect very few are willing and able to even consider the possibility that my less optimistic predictions might turn out to be right. Rather, I speculate that the very reading of ideas such as this will provoke a very strong emotional reaction and an immediate, extremely confident mindset that this person is wrong, self-evidently and to such a degree that no counter reasoning is even necessary. This behavior is one of the broken things I refer to, by the way: emotions completely overpowering rationality, very often in even the most rational of Western minds as is the norm here on HN. I speculate that we have largely lost the ability to even think clearly (particularly on topics of a particular kind) at the individual level, let alone at the collective level.

Something could be done about this, and HN in theory seems like one of the better places on the planet to start, but for the above stated reasons I suspect it would be passionately and overwhelmingly opposed. That the genuinely intelligent refuse to think is perhaps the primary reason I see no hope.