Something that concerns me greatly is China's gender imbalance. It would be easy to recruit a bunch of frustrated Chinese men into infantry units with the premise of invading a country to take its women.
China to pass US as world’s leading economic power this year
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Orion said:
The phrase "second world" simply refers to communist countries during the Cold War. The Soviet Union very clearly had a third world economy.
Orion said:
You need to re-read what I wrote. The Chinese economy evolved for a single reason: so that the communist leadership could maintain control over the country, not for true market purposes. Its economy will always be a slave to the primary goal of subjugating its people.
In other words, China will never have a market economy while the Communist Party is in power.
svenski7
Woodpecker
Samseau said:
Talk to someone who lived through the Cultural Revolution. China has been much poorer than it currently is. There is plenty of room for a decline in standard of living.
Samseau said:
70% of China's arable land is unusable due to pollution.
Samseau said:
Pretty pessimistic.
China has room to go down. The US can continue to climb. It's not a zero-sum game.
Samseau said:
So where are you moving then?
Feisbook Control
Kingfisher
Handsome Creepy Eel said:
Really, I have to completely disagree with this. It is good at decision making some of the time. I'll give you three examples of where it is really bad at decision making:
1. Ghost cities. These speak for themselves.
2. Pollution and environmental degradation. The cost to clean this up in the future is estimated at trillions of USD. It is going to become a major issue for China in every possible way (including social). In the best case scenario, it's going to severely impact the economy. In the worst case scenario, it's going to cause mass starvation, make the country unlivable, etc.
3. Foreign policy. This is a huge one that has been overlooked in this discussion. Firstly, let me fend off the inevitable comments about U.S. foreign policy being a shambles. You won't get any disagreements about me on that one. This is about China, however.
A few years ago, everyone was talking about Chinese soft power, about how they're building transport networks in SEA, how they're building port facilities on the Indian Ocean, etc. in order to expand their economic, military and diplomatic reach without having to resort to a war or threaten anyone to do so.
Yet in the past couple of years, China has managed to reawaken longstanding territorial disputes with pretty much all of its neighbours. When Vietnam actually wants closer military ties with the U.S., I'd call that a foreign policy failure on the part of the Chinese government. India, Australia and the U.S. have engaged in joint military manoeuvres in the recent past.
The situation now is that there is movement towards regional military cooperation for the purposes of opposing China. Not only would that not be affected by the non-involvement of the U.S., if anything, it would be hastened without the involvement of the U.S. There'd very likely be a regional military alliance between several countries who previously had little to no military ties simply to act as a counter balance to China. I don't believe it's far-fetched to imagine Japan and South Korea putting their disagreements aside somewhat. Certainly though, everyone from India to Australia to Japan, and many nations in between (at least those with South China Sea disputes with China -- i.e. much of SEA) would get on board. I also think that without the U.S. to calm things down, Japan would massively expand its military (after revising its constitution). Also, Japan and South Korea in the least would certainly rapidly undertake a nuclear weapons development programme.
How would two of China's rivals going nuclear as a response to their sabre rattling not constitute a major foreign policy failure, especially given that, half a decade ago, everyone was lauding China for its brilliant use of soft power whilst the U.S. was acting like a drunken bull in a china shop around the Muslim world?
Now none of this may eventuate, and things may settle down, but a lot of people in Asia are suddenly VERY worried about the rise of China and what its leaders both say and do.
While I'm skeptical about your first two points, I can definitely agree with this one. I haven't been in touch with their foreign policy.
Actually, the inside story is that we actually won't know how big the US is relative to China until the next round of the Penn World Tables comes out. Why? Because the last round was based on the 2005 International Comparison Project, and then extrapolated forward based on country growth rates. This method is good for 2005, and probably fine for 2008, but by 2013 is likely off by potentially a lot. The new round will be based on the 2011 ICP, and it could potentially have a large adjustment... Cross-country income comparisons are actually really tough...
We already know that China surpassed us in manufacturing -- maybe it was 2009, maybe it was 2011, but they produce more manufactures than anyone. China's undervalued currency has turned the US into essentially a commodities exporter (we still export few services, same as it ever was). China still undervalues its currency, and the US still does nothing about it. Meanwhile, China's economic policy through the crisis was exemplary -- they had a much larger stimulus than the US did, even though they didn't have a financial crisis, and they withdrew it appropriately. The US stimulus was too small, and then withdrawn too soon. The Chinese leadership is simply endowed with many more IQ points that your typical Tea-bagger Republican House member, who has never left the United States, and knows what he does of the world based on Fox News platitudes...
We already know that China surpassed us in manufacturing -- maybe it was 2009, maybe it was 2011, but they produce more manufactures than anyone. China's undervalued currency has turned the US into essentially a commodities exporter (we still export few services, same as it ever was). China still undervalues its currency, and the US still does nothing about it. Meanwhile, China's economic policy through the crisis was exemplary -- they had a much larger stimulus than the US did, even though they didn't have a financial crisis, and they withdrew it appropriately. The US stimulus was too small, and then withdrawn too soon. The Chinese leadership is simply endowed with many more IQ points that your typical Tea-bagger Republican House member, who has never left the United States, and knows what he does of the world based on Fox News platitudes...
_Cicero said:
As a new member of the forum without much credibility in the first place, and then losing any remaining credibility by making simple-minded ad hominem attacks, I fail to see what you hope to accomplish. So why even bother posting?
BIGINJAPAN
Kingfisher
Who knows how things will play out for both countries in the coming decade.
But one thing is for sure, they are both fucked and neither country will look like it does today.
My bet is on the country that hangs its bankers first
But one thing is for sure, they are both fucked and neither country will look like it does today.
My bet is on the country that hangs its bankers first
BIGINJAPAN said:
lol. In a communist country, however, the rulers are the the bankers. So that won't happen in China -- unless a revolution occurs.
BIGINJAPAN
Kingfisher
Tail Gunner said:
The exact same thing can be said for America
How much will the Republicans push this as Obama's fault. If they win they will back track or blame the demos. Fucking politicians. In the end, who cares. We will be dead in40 years. Make sure you can move when you can and you will be straight.
Feisbook Control
Kingfisher
Handsome Creepy Eel said:
I'm not quite sure what there is to deny about the ghost cities. The government threw stimulus money (i.e. debt) around to produce something that obviously isn't being used and is not about to be used any time soon given that China 1) has a low TFR, 2) doesn't have immigration, and thus, can't soak up the oversupply. This is the problem with a massive, command economy. The same government that "gets stuff done" also literally ends up building bridges to nowhere, or in this case, cities and malls in the middle of nowhere that no one wants to go to, much less utilise. This isn't even like the old Soviet system where cities that had once been mandated as the sole source of X collapsed once the free market rode in. These places simply aren't being used, period.
Likewise, I'm not sure how or why you would deny the environmental impact of all of this in China. We've all seen the pictures of smoggy skies. We've all heard about the bizarre stuff that turns up in rivers and in the soil. People have to breathe that air, drink that water, and grow food in that soil. This isn't some green hippie rant from me, this is just common sense: you don't shit where you eat. The Chinese are shitting where they eat in a massive way. One hundred years from now, the south of France or the Great Plains in the U.S. are probably still going to be fertile, productive places. Not so for much of China if they keep going as they are.
In some cases, as in the development of the West, these problems will be resolved by upgrading to better technology. Yet in a lot of cases, it will require a significant diversion of GDP to clean these things up, so in the least, it will knock a couple off points off GDP. There are other issues -- most notably anything to do with soil or the water table -- that aren't so easily solved. How do you deal with poisoned soil or the water table, other than just let that land go fallow and let nature take decades or centuries to sort that out? How do you deal with topsoil erosion and loss of arable land?
In the meantime, all of these chemicals have worked their way through the food chain or simply gone directly to humans. There may be some very subtle (or not so subtle) effects of this pollution upon the human population that also inhibit their long term health or development, including their cognitive or reproductive development. The Chinese may be setting themselves up for long term mental retardation and/or infertility. We know that, in the West, massive exposure to various chemicals (most notably in plastics) has decimated male sperm counts, motility, etc. over recent generations. What is occurring in China is on a magnitude several times that. There are going to be long term negative effects upon their populace as a whole.
Put it another way. If you think all of this is okay, would you pull a fish out of a river in a major Chinese city (assuming you can find such a fish) and eat it? If not, why not? Now imagine living like that for decades.
The great tragedy about all of this is that we may well ask what the Chinese have actually got from all of this. They're getting a little smarter now and obtaining as much gold as they can, but essentially, they've poisoned themselves in exchange for bits of paper from America. Those bits of paper may be worth considerably less than they think in the future. China knows this, yet is caught between a rock and a hard place because it holds something that is fairly worthless, but it holds so much of it that if it tries to get rid of it, it actually will be completely worthless. It's like the old saying: if you owe the bank $1,000, you've got a problem, but if you owe the bank $1,000,000, they've got a problem. Which country is the bigger fool, the one that issues such paper IOUs or the country that takes them thinking they're actually worth something? In my opinion, Chimerica (as Niall Ferguson calls it) is the perfect marriage of two idiots to one another.
Cattle Rustler said:
I cannot answer for BIG, but I can answer for myself. I am about as pro-capitalism as they come. I applaud people who work hard and work smart to better themselves and to, oftentimes, lift themselves out of poverty and to create a better future for themselves and their family.
On the other hand, I absolutely despise those who game the system through government intervention to enrich themselves. This process is often called "crony capitalism," although it is not a form of capitalism at all -- but a form of socialism where government rewards the politically connected.
There is no greater example of this "crony capitalism" than the bankers, who used the Fed to artificially suppress interest rates, thereby transferring wealth from the middle-class in the form of interest on savings to Wall Street bankers in the form of rising equity prices.
For example, "Mom and Pop" can conscientiously save $1 million over their lifetimes (representing over 100 years of work between them). If they could rely on historical real market interest rates of between six and eight percent, they could live very comfortably on yearly interest payments of between $60,000 and $80,000.
Instead, the Fed's artificially low-interest rates of less than one percent means that although Mom and Pop have saved $1 million they must live on less than $10,000 per year in interest income and eat cat food in their old age. Meanwhile, the bankers use those low interest rates to borrow money that it then lends to the government at higher rates with no risk, which is then paid back by taxpayers -- or they use that cheap money to buy equities that are in a bubble created by that cheap money.
This is legalized institutionalized theft -- and a transfer of wealth from the middle-class in the form of interest on savings to Wall Street in the form of an artificially-created rising stock market. Most poor people are poor because of their own personal choices. I care about the hard-working members of the middle class who the government is victimizing by transferring their wealth to the uber-wealthy bankers through artificially low interest rates.
This is just another example of why most serious problems are not caused by government inaction, but by government intervention. Allowing market interest rates to prevail allows members of the middle class to keep their own money and prevents them from falling into the ranks of the poor, where taxpayers must then pick up the tab. We will always have the poor. What we do not want are members of the middle class falling into the ranks of the poor because of insane government policies.
Creating artificially low interest rates prevent people from caring for themselves and forces them to rely on the government, creating a vicious cycle of dependence that helps re-elect those who created the problem in the first place.
So China has ghost cities... while America has ghost cars. Billions of them, in fact:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-05-16/where-worlds-unsold-cars-go-die
Good thing we bailed out GM.
Don't worry guys, America's economy rests on strong fundamentals. No bubbles here
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-05-16/where-worlds-unsold-cars-go-die
Good thing we bailed out GM.
Don't worry guys, America's economy rests on strong fundamentals. No bubbles here
If you read the ZH article, you will see that almost none of these images come from the US -- they are from all over the world.
Why is it surprising that some cars go unsold? And how do you know if it's a lot or a little?
Also, billions -- there are currently about 7 billion people in the world, do you really think that "billions" of cars are made let alone go unsold?
Showing some pics from all over the world with a bunch of unsold cars is not very convincing evidence of a "bubble" in the US. Certainly nothing to compare to entire ghost cities which really do exist in China.
Why is it surprising that some cars go unsold? And how do you know if it's a lot or a little?
Also, billions -- there are currently about 7 billion people in the world, do you really think that "billions" of cars are made let alone go unsold?
Showing some pics from all over the world with a bunch of unsold cars is not very convincing evidence of a "bubble" in the US. Certainly nothing to compare to entire ghost cities which really do exist in China.
If you want to know more about China's "ghost cities". This is a great documentary on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpnoPhY1f70
In there around the 9:15 mark, it has said that "ghost cities" of today will be filled up 5 years later as a standard development in China (not exactly sure on the veracity of that statement).
I think that as the government realize the death of the "baby boomer" generation, they are going to loosen up its single child policy so they build the cities in preparation for the "nation's rebirth". And as the "baby boomers" dies off, there will be more jobs available for the youngsters and thus they will earn the appropriate amount in order to speed up the economy by purchasing those households and won't make the housing investment a failure.
However all of the above is just a speculation of how things will transition from one state to another and while it sounds good in theory, we have yet to witness how will the Chinese government execute such strategy.
In there around the 9:15 mark, it has said that "ghost cities" of today will be filled up 5 years later as a standard development in China (not exactly sure on the veracity of that statement).
I think that as the government realize the death of the "baby boomer" generation, they are going to loosen up its single child policy so they build the cities in preparation for the "nation's rebirth". And as the "baby boomers" dies off, there will be more jobs available for the youngsters and thus they will earn the appropriate amount in order to speed up the economy by purchasing those households and won't make the housing investment a failure.
However all of the above is just a speculation of how things will transition from one state to another and while it sounds good in theory, we have yet to witness how will the Chinese government execute such strategy.
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