China Seeks Return To Status Quo

China as an economic power didn’t just show up out of nowhere, says Marko Papic, a partner and chief strategist at the Clocktower Group. Speaking at the CFA Society Toronto’s ‘2022 Annual Pension Conference’ on ‘Is China Still Investable?’, he said, on one hand, the U.S. as an economic power “literally shot from nowhere.” China was a global economic power for a long part of history. So when it thinks about challenging the current order, “it doesn’t see it as a challenge, it sees it as a return of the status quo,” he said. Up until 200 years ago, it was the world’s largest economy. However, he doesn’t see this becoming a Cold War between the U.S. and China. First of all, the biggest constraint to the U.S. is that its allies couldn’t care less what America thinks about China. This is because the rest of the world is pursuing their own foreign policy, independent of the U.S., “because we’re in a world where neither the U.S. or China are really powerful enough to compel their allies to follow them.”