Gordon G. Chang


Gordon Guthrie Chang is an American columnist, blogger, television pundit, author and lawyer. He is widely known for his book The Coming Collapse of China. He has been criticized for making incorrect predictions and analyses about China.

Early life and education

Chang was born in New Jersey to a Chinese father and an American mother of Scottish ancestry. His father is from Rugao, Jiangsu, China.
Chang graduated from Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, in 1969, and served as class president in his senior year. Four years later, he graduated from Cornell University, where he was a member of the Quill and Dagger society, and graduated from the Cornell Law School in 1976.

Career

Chang lived and worked in Mainland China and Hong Kong for almost two decades, most recently in Shanghai, as Counsel to the American law firm Paul Weiss and earlier in Hong Kong as Partner in the international law firm Baker & McKenzie. As a student, Chang was elected a trustee of Cornell University. He is a regular contributor to The John Batchelor Show, The Glenn Beck Program on Fox News, and CNN.

Collapse of China

Chang has said that the Chinese government would collapse in 2012 and 2016. Chang also says that China is a "new dot-com bubble", adding that the rapid growth by China is not supported by various internal factors such as decrease in population growth as well as slowing retail sales. In a separate interview, he remarked that China achieved its 149.2 percent of its current trade surplus with the United States through "lying, cheating, and stealing" and that if China decided to realize its threat that had been expressed since August 2007 to sell its US Treasuries, it would actually hurt its own economy which is reliant on exports to the United States; the economy of the United States would be hurt by a sell-off of Treasuries, causing the United States to buy less from China, which would in turn hurt the Chinese economy.
Since 2001, Chang has made predictions that the Chinese government will eventually collapse. Shen Dingli, director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University, wrote that Chang's predictions "collapse his own credibility." John Tamny of RealClearMarkets has criticized Chang's predictions and analyses about China, stating that Chang possesses "limited knowledge of simple economics" and that "Chang’s feel for China has been impressively incorrect for close to twenty years, and if his latest commentary is at all indicative of his grasp of what authors economic growth, Chang’s batting average on the matter of China isn’t about to improve."

Other activities

In Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes on the World, Chang says that North Korea is most likely to target Japan, not South Korea. He also says that North Korean nuclear ambitions could be forestalled if there were concerted multinational diplomacy, with some "limits to patience" backed up by threat of an all-out Korean war.
Chang is a former contributor at The Daily Beast.
Chang often criticized South Korea's President Moon Jae-in's term. Chang criticized Moon Jae-in, calling him "dangerous," and said that Moon should be considered "North Korea's agent." Chang also asserted that Moon Jae-in is "subverting freedom, democracy, and South Korea."
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Chang praised the US for acting 'very, very quickly' in response to the epidemic.