1. They are running out of energy.
2. They are running out of fresh water.
3. These two factors mean that they will eventually run out of domestic agricultural resources to feed their people.
That’s what is happening here. The small farmers are going bankrupt. Beef prices are being pushed down.
In the end, China may have to rely on its gigantic resources of coal to save itself. China could start building plants to convert coal to motor fuels on a very large scale using the modern verion of the Fischer-Tropsch process, something that South Africa during the apartheid age successfully pulled off and the Germans during World War II did the same until Allied bombing destroyed their synthetic fuel plants.