Commentary From Evergrande to rising unemployment, blackouts to a rapidly aging population, China is facing an existential reckoning. The “wolf warrior” Chinese diplomats, still busy howling at the world, are understandably worried. Are we witnessing the “great fall” of Beijing? In the middle of September, I wrote a piece asking if China was in a state of permanent decline. The answer at the time was yes. Almost a month later, the answer still appears to be the same. As William Pesek, a senior contributor to Forbes, recently noted, China’s Evergrande “default drama” appears to be symptomatic of a deeper malaise gripping the Chinese economy. According to Pesek, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has done its very best to hide “surging local government debt.” Now, however, the cat is out of the bag. Evergrande’s default troubles, in the words of the author, “seem like small embers compared to the $8.2 trillion worth of local government financing …