Some of us are inheriting a difficult legacy. What China's President Xi Jinping is now facing is no easy task either.

The announcement of the Chinese Communist Party's five-year economic plan is traditionally a special event. It is associated with the belief that complex economies can be clothed in a calculable, plannable design. Of course, we know from observing the past that this is nonsense and only serves one purpose: the concentration and stabilization of power in the hands of a small, selected caste of politicians.

We are also seeing a similar trend these days in the European Union, which is moving further away from democratic principles and establishing increasingly centralized decision-making processes in the area of economic and monetary policy besides a dangerous path of far-reaching censorship and control efforts.

The Chinese Communist Party's magic number is the growth rate of 5% GDP per year. A downward deviation from this guideline basically indicates a violation of the implicit contract between the political caste and the Chinese people, which, roughly speaking, reads: you hand over all decision-making power and sovereignty in the political arena to us, we provide the prosperity that only we, as all-knowing functionaries, can provide.

However, China is now in a difficult economic situation. With the collapse of the real estate market, which accounted for around 7% of the global economy before the crisis, the demographic squeeze caused by the one child policy and China's enormous national debt, the real growth of the Chinese economy on a shrinking track. As the heir to the political model, President Xi is now in a situation where he can no longer guarantee the growth that is needed to keep all these problems under control.

With his foreign policy, which manifests itself in the new Silk Road and infrastructure projects designed to secure China's supply of raw materials and at the same time open up new sales markets, the country may have overreached itself. The current growth rates, which are clearly below the threshold, continue the declining growth path of the Chinese economy. This path also limits China's geostrategic options in the longer term and will force Chinese policy into cooperation.

China is well advised to position itself cooperatively within its geopolitical construct, the BRICS states, and to bring its strengths to bear there. In my opinion, it is above all the demographic situation, a dramatic collapse of China's population, that will make Chinese imperialism almost impossible. This should put the West in a position to negotiate with China on an equal footing in the long term and to return to a new model of cooperation once the Ukraine crisis has been overcome.

The West should counter China's weak growth with an initiative and a return to a market economy. It should rethink and reduce its welfare state models and focus on the sovereignty of the individual and free enterprise, and play to its creative strengths in interaction with the powers of this world.

It is possible that global debt is the reason why we can no longer afford kinetic conflicts on a large scale. In this respect, debt creation and the infantile model of Keynesian global economic management, to which all Western states adhere as if spellbound even has a humanistic setback to offer.

If you like: peacekeeping through economic illiteracy.