Last year, China recorded a goods trade surplus of US$1.2 trillion: a world record. The country staggers beneath perhaps history’s fastest-growing debt burden; meanwhile it faces the century’s largest absolute population loss (a projected 786 million people between 2024 and 2100—surely a figure without precedent). The ruling Communist Party boasts that its family-planning officials carried out 336 million abortions between 1971 and 2012. I could go on, selecting figures relating to culture, to the economy, to politics: each one of which is head-spinningly absurd.

This is what Napoleon meant when he is said to have warned of a sleeping lion that would one day wake to shake the world. He never foresaw the Communist Party, but he understood scale. In his day, of course, those numbers were still making little difference outside of China. The region was largely isolated (even the ancient Great Silk Road was mostly a modern fabrication), its sclerotic leaders forever freezing the people’s potential. Karl Marx observed a “giant empire … vegetating in the teeth of time.” When had it ever done anything else? Today, however, we live with the shocking historical anomaly of a globally interconnected Middle Kingdom. Now what happens in China matters to everyone.

And a totalitarian state can move at terrific speed. The People’s Republic conjures skyscrapers from the soil as if by magic, like some tremendous attempt to make up for China’s millennia of stasis. At the beginning of the pandemic, new hospitals sprang up in days. These scenes were reflective of the bigger picture: the PRC’s rise was one of the fastest in the historical record. Its fall could be similarly rapid. The combination of vast numbers and accelerated pace means the Chinese experience can show us our own future writ large: a bold-text, headline version of what will happen in the rest of the world; a vision seen in fast-forward.