Walker Webcast: Evan Osnos on China’s New Era of Malaise

“Anybody who tells you they know what Xi Jinping is going to do on Taiwan is really lying to you because nobody knows,” journalist and author Evan Osnos said on this week’s Walker Webcast. “All you can do is make your best guesses.” 

Author most recently of a New Yorker article titled China’s Age of Malaise, the Pulitzer Prize winner wrote in that article, “Exports have dropped and debt has soared. Economists who once charted China’s rise are now flatly pessimistic.” Over the course of his hour-long discussion with Walker & Dunlop CEO Willy Walker, Osnos contrasted the current state of the Eastern superpower with what we saw a decade or two ago. 

Whereas China’s Communist Party in the post-Tiananmen Square years seemed determined not to repeat the mistakes that eventually led to the Soviet Union’s collapse, “these days the party is once again involved in people’s most intimate lives,” Osnos told Walker. “They are calling for an uptick in marriage and birth rates because of the predicted demographic shortfall of workers by the middle of the century.”  

The party’s inroads into citizens’ lives are tantamount to a violation of an assumption, held by young Chinese people in particular and the population in general, “that they would have some realm of personal control, even within the umbrella of political loyalty. And so that has produced a real sense of frustration.” 

A few years ago, Osnos recalled, there was an expectation among Western businesses that “China is going to be autocratic on its own terms. It was going to continue to be a place that is allergic to democracy, but it wanted to maintain as much as possible the idea that it was hospitable to foreign money and foreign businesses. And I think there has been a recognition recently that it is just a much more dangerous place to have your money and to have your expectations.”  

And while the watchword of Xi’s predecessor, Deng Xiaoping, was that “China should hide its strength and bide its time in its dealings with the West,” the current General Secretary and President doesn’t share that view, nor does he use that expression. Self-reliance on China’s part is more important nowadays, Osnos pointed out. 

In his introductory remarks, Walker said the catalyst for inviting Osnos to appear on the weekly webcast was the comment of a commercial real estate colleague. The industry colleague recently visited Singapore and South Korea and was told by investors there that although they’d like to put their money into the U.S. after withdrawing it from China, “with your Speaker of the House having just gotten voted out and Joe Biden and Donald Trump as the likely next President of the United States, we’re really concerned about putting money into the United States right now.” He and Osnos brought the conversation back to the U.S. to conclude the webcast. 

Regarding the newly installed Speaker of the House, Osnos said, “Mike Johnson is, I would say, an utterly unproven asset. He’s like some sort of new isotope that’s been discovered in the lab. And we just have to figure out what he could actually do.” 

On-demand replays of the Nov. 1 Walker Webcast are available through the Walker Webcast channels on YouTube, Spotify and Apple.