Mr. Yuen, now living in the United States, was one of the first three Hong Kong businessmen the CCP chose to enter mainland China in the 1970s. His watch business, Tele-Art, is the first Hong Kong-owned company to list in the United States. The company also once gave a watch factory to China’s Guangdong Province as a gift.
Beijing Has Huge Debts Building
The main contributor to the CCP’s fall is its financial debts, according to Mr. Yuen.“We must look at China in this big picture. The big picture is the whole country is bankrupt. If China is one company, it’s bankrupt,” he said.
The former businessman explained that his definition of bankrupt is failing to pay the debt.
“My definition of bankruptcy, for example, is you owe a lot of money to the bank, you cannot pay the interest, and you cannot pay the principal back; that’s basically bankrupt. This is the situation in China.”
Mr. Yuen doesn’t buy that number. He says the figure is much higher.
China’s GDP is another point of concern.
Low Population and High Unemployment
The lack of population is another factor contributing to the regime’s collapse, Mr. Yuen argued.“They claim [they have] 1.4 billion people. My estimate is they have less than one [billion],” he said. “You need people to work to pay off the debt. Right?”
What makes things worse is unemployment.
“My number is 500 million people unemployed,” said Mr. Yuen. “Because they consider everybody working in the rural area as farming… in the rural area, I believe [there’re] about 300 million [unemployed people] and in the urban area [it’s] 200 million.
“So now with all these problems, not enough population, so much unemployment, higher debt, and lower GDP, all these things adding up, they’ll be uncomfortable.”
The industrialist believes that by the winter of 2023, there will be people starving and freezing to death.
Diverse Opinions Among Sydney Scholars
The dire prediction of the regime’s longevity has triggered different opinions from China experts based in Sydney.“I’m sceptical about an imminent collapse in the CCP’s hold on power,” James Laurenceson, director of the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney, wrote in an email to The Epoch Times.
“It’s one of those things that cannot, of course, be entirely discounted, but I’m seeing very little hard evidence pointing in that direction right now.”
Mr. Laurenceson said similar predictions before have failed to come true.
‘CCP May Collapse Anytime’: Former History Professor
However, Li Yuanhua, an associate professor in history education at Beijing’s Capital Normal University, who now resides in Sydney, believes that it may not even take that long for the CCP to end.“It can collapse anytime,” he told The Epoch Times on Aug. 11. “It acts like a bully.”
“It is nonsense to say that this rain is the worst in a hundred years. It’s not that much rain at all,” he said, referring to the domestic news report in China.
“Same thing for Evergrande... In fact, these real estate [projects] have long been about to go bankrupt, but the authorities are afraid of too big a chain reaction, so they have been letting them hang on there,” he said.
Regarding the military, the former professor who lived in Beijing said that nearly all officers in the CCP military have now bought their posts.
“They want to make money after buying the official positions… It’s not like they want to defend the motherland,” he said.
Li concluded that being unable to function correctly, the current Chinese society is living in a suspended state.
“Any incident. Either wind or rain comes, and [the country] could be paralyzed.”
