George Soros probably shouldn't expect any warm invitations to Beijing—not with the much-reviled short seller warning of a giant Chinese crash.

The billionaire first shook a major government in September 1992, when he led an attack on the British pound. For his role in humiliating London and forcing John Major's government to exit the European exchange-rate mechanism—essentially the euro—Soros reportedly netted $2 billion. Soros made a bundle off America's subprime debt crisis as well. Here in Asia, his legend has loomed large since 1997, when then-Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad accused him, bizarrely, of heading a Jewish conspiracy to spark an Asian crisis.

Now Soros has his eye on China. In a Jan. 2 op-ed for Project Syndicate, Soros didn't say whether he's shorting China. But he did connect the dots in a way that can't make President Xi Jinping happy. To Soros, the main risk facing the world isn't the euro, the U.S. Congress, or a Japanese asset bubble, but a Chinese debt disaster that's unfolding in plain sight.