There is a significant issue however:
China does not allow Americans to principally invest in Chinese land. There is (always) a primary Chinese owner.
That becomes a bigger issue, the more money the Chinese have. And China is currently exporting MORE than America does.
We are holding the short end in this deal. Big time.
“We are holding the short end in this deal. Big time.”
Maybe. Maybe not.
My own view is that China is on a short fuse. Demographically, they are, right now, at the their peak. It's pretty much downhill from here. The Chinese are no longer the low wage economy of the world. Any number of other countries have up-and-coming employment sectors where workers will work for less than the Chinese. The Chinese have likely squandered stupefyingly large amounts of capital on dead-end capital projects in their own country, and the downsides of these projects haven't yet become apparent.
There are any number of reasons to think that the Chinese are peaking, and that by, say, 2030, folks who worried about China “buying” the US in 2014 will seem like folks in the late 1980s and early 1990s who thought we'd all be working for the Japanese by now.
To provide a little perspective, the Chinese own less than $1 trillion in US dollars. While that's a considerable chunk of change, if they spent the ENTIRE WAD on US real estate, they wouldn't own but a couple of percent of our real estate.
The US has a lot of problems. I don't know whether, as a country, we'll outlast and overcome those problems. But letting Chinese buy some of our real estate is not one of the five or ten most pressing problems our country faces in the next 10 or 20 years.
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