In my last post, I argued why the China Evergrande bankruptcy is not the end of the economic crisis in China but just the beginning.

Knowing that such predictions have been made in the past by China observers, including yours truly, why should anyone think that it's happening today?

A bit of historical context helps provide an answer to this question.

In 2012, I was asked by Wiley & Sons to write a book on China's economic structure from my contrarian point of view. You may or may not recall that, at the time, China was the economic marvel of the world. Unlike most observers, I could see several critical problems with China's political economy model and wrote about them in "The China Crisis."

I identified seven key areas—given the basis upon which China or, more accurately, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) operated—that made China's economic model unsustainable. I wasn't the first to see this. Gordon Chang wrote about it in 2001 in his book, "The Coming Collapse of China." Mr. Chang predicted a collapse by 2011, which, of course, did not occur. This is an update of sorts.