Posted on 12/20/2003 1:53:48 PM PST by truthandlife
A CIA report predicts that North Asia will prosper over the next 17 years and large states in South Asia could grow unstable.
The report also warns that China could "crash" in the coming years, leading to a desperate attempt by the Chinese Communist Party to unite Taiwan by force.
The report, "Global Trends 2020 — East Asia," was made public Dec. 8 by the National Intelligence Council, an advisory unit that reports for the CIA director. The report is part of a yearlong effort to study "alternative futures," according to the NIC web site (www.cia.gov/nic)
Robert Hutchings, chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said in a Dec. 1 speech that East Asia is "on the brink of major change, as China continues to move toward greater economic openness and political flux."
"The key question is whether that political system is sufficiently elastic, and its leaders sufficiently imaginative, to accommodate continued rapid economic growth and the social pressures it will bring," he said.
Hutchings also noted that unification on the Korean peninsula "cannot be far off, with all the uncertainties that entails."
"Northeast and Southeast Asia will progress along divergent paths: the countries of the North will become wealthier and more powerful, while the largest states in the South -- Indonesia and the Philippines — will become poorer, more populous, and more unstable," the report states.
Now I know it ain't gonna happen.
From AzJohn's link in post #5 to the NIC homepage;
[NIC]: This is not meant to be an exercise in prediction or crystal ball gazing; our project may be called “2020” but neither our hindsight nor our foresight is 20/20. Rather, after considering the forces that will shape our world, a variety of regional and global scenarios will be developed that represent alternative futures—and these futures will be discussed and debated through a series of conferences, in papers, and through dynamic Web-based interactions.
That won't do anything but accentuate the crash and extend it into the distant future. But, as you mention, it would distract the populace from their bankruptcy. China has chosen to buy the large military items, especially Navy ships, rather than create an infrastructure to build them internally. This might indicate that China has short-term military goals and perhaps they don't plan for a necessity for a long-term projection of force through the Navy. They may be relying on their nuclear deterrent to keep China safe from major foreign powers. China's industrial expansion would be limited by two factors. One, China is a little short of oil. Two, the rest of the world might tire of buying cheap plastic electronic toys.
China is right to develop a space capability, and they have some very ambitious plans including farms in space. Whether they can get ahead of the power curve and realize their goals in space is a fine question. America can do this, but China is moving too slowly in space sectors to reach the take-off point soon enough.
Their "Japan 2000" report (at Rochester Univ), though, along the same lines, was pretty pathetic and way off target. They did that back in 1993 I believe.
Bookmarking at any rate.
In other words, send billions more of the taxpayers money to finance our debates.
Oh sure, farming in space is much more efficient than here on the ground where all the dirt and water is. That's why everybody is doing it.
It's worth thinking about. The program would have to be massive, but there is no sign that China is making that kind of effort in space, nor that they can.
Hmm, I'm not sure what to make of this sentance. If the Chinese government is destabilized, in all likelyhood the roots of that destabilization won't be placated by the invasion of Taiwan. If nothing else, it would add fuel to their fire. I also doubt they'd send away the best parts of their military when they might need it to suppress the populace.
Unless China is in an advantageous position, I don't forsee them making a move on Taiwan. A period of danger to the regime's survival wouldn't exactly be great timing for an invasion.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China, published by Random House and he says,
There are two things to know about the banking system in China. First, the major state banks, the so-called Big Four, are insolvent. Second, the effort to bail them out is not working. Everything else is simply detail.
The most important is this: The crisis in the Chinese banking system is perhaps the most serious in the world today. The cause is not hard to understand. The Big Four, over the course of just a decade, have squandered the savings of a great people at the direction of Beijing. Senior technocrats tried to reform state-owned enterprises by replacing direct subsidies from the central treasury with loans from the four largest banks (Bank of China, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank and Agricultural Bank of China).
The theory was sound: Wean sick SOEs off grants and make them self-sufficient. In practice, the plan was a disaster: State enterprises knew they didn't have to pay back the banks. So they didn't. In an economic system divorced from economic reality, banks effectively became gift givers. They essentially vacuumed cash from small savers and disgorged it onto state enterprises at the direction of thousands of officials. The process was easy, quick and absurd.
The massive transfer of assets from the banks to the enterprises is a matter of indifference to government technocrats. After all, the state owns both. . . .
http://china.jamestown.org/pubs/view/cwe_002_006_001.htm
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