The developer’s collapse isn’t leading to global contagion, but China’s looming economic disaster might.
A major mistake of the Cold War was the tendency of Western observers to overestimate the Soviet Union. I have often wondered if the same mistake is being repeated with the People’s Republic of China. Then again, for every article over the last 10 years that predicted China’s economy would overtake that of the U.S., there were at least two prophesying a “China crisis.”
“The endgame of Chinese communist rule has now begun,” wrote David Shambaugh in 2015. Wisely, he added: “Its demise is likely to be protracted.” That same year, Jim Chanos of Kynikos Associates warned, “We’re getting inexorably to a tipping point in China.”
What if winning playground games could make you rich? That’s the basis of Squid Game – the South Korean show currently at number one on Netflix around the world – where debt-ridden players sign up to compete in six games for a cash prize of 45.6 billion won (around £28m). The small print: if you lose, you get killed. In the first episode, a game of Grandma’s Footsteps (known as Red Light, Green Light in South Korea) leaves bodies piled high as the shell-shocked winners proceed to round two. It’s blood-splattered child’s play – a kind of Takeshi’s Castle with fatalities, or Saw with stylish 
