Chang lived and worked in
mainland China and
Hong Kong for almost two decades, most recently in
Shanghai, as counsel to the law firm
Paul Weiss and earlier in Hong Kong as Partner in the law firm
Baker & McKenzie. Chang has been elected twice as a trustee of Cornell University.
Commentator His writings have appeared in
The New York Times,
The Wall Street Journal,
The Daily Beast, the
International Herald Tribune,
Commentary,
National Review, and
Barron’s among others, and he has appeared on
CNN,
Fox News,
MSNBC,
CNBC,
PBS,
Bloomberg Television, and others as well on as
The Daily Show with
Jon Stewart. Chang is a contributing editor for 19FortyFive, member of the advisory board of the Global Taiwan Institute, and member of the Board of Directors of the
Conservative Political Action Conference.
China Chang has made numerous predictions of the imminent collapse of the Chinese government and fall of the Communist Party since 2001 including the specific years. In the 2001 book
The Coming Collapse of China, Chang insisted that the government would collapse in 2011. When 2011 was almost over, he admitted that his prediction was wrong but said that he was off by only a year and wrote in the
Foreign Policy magazine, that "Instead of 2011, the mighty Communist Party of China will fall in 2012. Bet on it." Consequently, he made Foreign Policy's "10 worst predictions of the year" twice in a row when his predictions were proven wrong again. Chang has said that China is not trying to compete with the United States within the
Westphalian order but to overthrow that order altogether. In his book
The Great U.S.–China Tech War (2020), Chang posits that China and the United States are involved in a "cold tech war," with the winner being able to dominate the 21st century. According to Chang, Chinese students in the United States are controlled by the authoritarian regime in China. He said that Chinese students "have become the long arm of authoritarianism" and collect intelligence for the Chinese regime. In a separate interview, he remarked that China achieved its 149.2 percent trade surplus with the United States by "lying, cheating, and stealing" and that if China decided to realize its threat, expressed since August 2007, to sell its
Treasury bonds, it would actually hurt
its own economy since it is reliant on
exports to the United States. The
US economy would be hurt by a selloff of Treasuries, which would cause the US to buy less from China, which would in turn hurt the Chinese economy. In a 2022 piece for the
Gatestone Institute, Chang suggested that Taiwan could
deter the PRC by threatening a conventional missile attack on the
Three Gorges Dam and signal that they are "prepared to take Chinese lives in the hundreds of millions" by drowning the population downstream of the dam. This would pack "the wallop of a nuclear" strike. Chang believes that the United States should help Taiwan manufacture more missiles with such capabilities. In a 2026 interview with Fox News,
United States President Donald Trump stated he has "very good relationship" with Chinese President Xi Jinping and criticized Chang's understanding of China relationship in the context of
US-China trade war, with Trump stating: "I listen to this Gordon Chang [on China]. He has no idea what he's talking about."
Other views In
Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes on the World (2006), 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 often criticized
South Korean President
Moon Jae-in's term as "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." In what
The New Yorker described as the "loopiest" speech of CPAC 2023, Chang alleged that the Chinese government had "deliberately spread [COVID-19] beyond its borders to America and to the world". He also made claims that China was "likely planning to launch pathogen" from an illegal California lab. However a federal investigation into the lab in question, had not substantiated those claims but instead determined that it wasn't trying to make biological weapons, but instead was simply growing antibody cells to produce test kits for COVID-19. In a 2019
Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Chang stated that
Donald Trump is "the only thing that stands between us and a world dominated by China." ==See also==