Posted on 03/26/2005 10:47:50 PM PST by sukhoi-30mki
China does rule the world. Any dream that America is the worlds' super power is all but a memory. The own us. Thanks to elected officials of course.
Same here. I am tired of the BS nuclear treaties calling for the reduction of our nuclear aresenal. I am tired of the stupid laws that prohibit us from developing new nuclear weapons. Most of all I am sick that our government is not treating China the way Ronald Reagan treated the Soviet Union.
Well if we go down than we should take both China, Russia and the EU with us.
Put down the crack pipe.
There is every reason to be concerned about Chinese military modernization, but this silly claim is not among them. China is 100 years behind the US economically, and our economy grows by more every year than theirs does, absolute value added.
China has a $1 Trillion economy. More than 10% of that is trade with the U.S.
The U.S. has a $12 Trillion economy. Only 1% of our economy is trade with China.
China's economy is growing at 10% per year. The U.S. economy is growing at 4% per year.
How many decades will it take for China to grow to $12 Trillion, and how large will the U.S. economy be by then?!
No one with sense predicts straight line growth. But the linear projections are ominous. Within in a generation Lehman brothers places China number two. There is much to change the equation either way. I think China is headed for a hard fall but that it will be only temporary and thereafter it will take off again because of the innate cleverness of its people. At some point our own economy could crash as a result of being hollowed out by China and then China could actually take the lead and before the end of this century. China will eclipse us soon enough as a trading nation and therein lies a source of geo political power.
But China need not be number one economically to be number one geopolitically and our number one adversary militarily. Their huge market can reshape all of the worlds markets and alliances. Where will the Japanese put their chips when threatened by the mammoth market to their west with nukes? China's carrots and sticks could be bigger than ours. Can you predict with certainty?
I have taken the liberty of excerpting a few observations below which I regret I could not properly italicize because of this strange keyboard.
China Economy Overview
The size of the Chinese economy is likely to climb, in world rankings, from its current position as the sixth largest to the second largest by 2030, said economists with global investment bank Lehman Brothers.
With its gross domestic product (GDP) growing at an annual rate of 6 per cent, China will come in after the United States to secure the second place spot, the economists said.,p. http://www.china-window.com/china_economy/
Another truth is that the current feelings about China do not fully reflect today's reality. The U.S. economy is about eight times the size of China's. Our manufacturing sector is bigger than the entire Chinese economy. Americans, per capita, earn 36 times what the Chinese do. And there is no shortage of potential roadblocks in China's path, either. Its banks may collapse. Its poor and its minorities may rebel. Uppity Taiwan and lunatic North Korea may push China to war. The U.S. could slap taxes on everything China ships to us.
Still, barring Mao's resurrection or nuclear cataclysm, nothing is likely to keep China down for long. Since 1978, its gross domestic product has risen fourfold; in straight dollar terms, China's economy is the world's sixth-largest, with a G.D.P. of around $1.4 trillion. It has gone from being virtually absent in international trade to the world's third-most-active trading nation, behind the U.S. and Germany and ahead of Japan. Tom Saler, a financial journalist, has pointed out that 21 recessions, a depression, two stock-market crashes and two world wars were not able to stop the U.S. economy's growth, over the last century, from $18 billion ($367 billion in 2000 dollars) to $10 trillion. In constant dollars, that is a 27-fold increase.
China is poised for similar growth in this century. Even if China's people do not, on average, have the wealth Americans do, and even if the United States continues to play a strong economic game and to lead in technology, China will still be an ever more formidable competitor. If any country is going to supplant the U.S. in the world marketplace, China is it.
Ten years ago, Wanfeng was hammering out motorcycle wheels by hand in a Chinese garage; a few years later it was the No. l seller of aluminum-alloy motorcycle wheels, first in China and now in Asia. The company soon became a top national and global seller in alloy automobile wheels too.
China's miracle economy can come at you in a lot of ways. By now most of us know that China is the factory floor of choice for the world's low-road manufacturing: it assembles more toys, stitches more shoes and sews more garments than any other nation in the world. But moving up the technological ladder, China has also become the world's largest maker of consumer electronics, like TV's, DVD players and cellphones. And more recently, China is climbing even higher still, moving into biotech and high-tech computer manufacturing. No country has ever made a better run at climbing every step of economic development all at once. Behind China's rapid economic ascendancy over the last 25 (and especially last 10) years is the basic fact of China's huge population. China is home to close to 1.5 billion people, probably, which would make the official census count of 1.3 billion too low by an amount equal to roughly the population of Germany, France and the United Kingdom combined. China has 100 cities of more than a million people. Since economic liberalization began in 1978, under Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese have started tens of millions of businesses. The number of Chinese who have left farms and now trawl the cities for work probably exceeds the entire work force of the United States.
What these numbers mean is that China's people must be regarded as the critical mass in a new world order. The productive might of China's vast low-cost manufacturing machine, along with the swelling appetites of its billion-plus consumers, have turned China's people into probably the greatest natural resource on the planet. How the Chinese (and the rest of the world) use that resource will shape our economy (and every other economy in the world) as powerfully as American industrialization and expansion has over the last hundred years.
The government is pouring resources into creating the world's largest army of industrialists. China has 17 million university and advanced vocational students (up more than threefold in five years), the majority of whom are in science and engineering. China will produce 325,000 engineers this year. That's five times as many as in the U.S., where the number of engineering graduates has been declining since the early 1980's. It is hard to imagine Americans' enthusiasm for engineering sinking lower. Forty percent of all students who enter universities on the engineering track change their minds.
Last year, China spent $60 billion on research and development. The only countries that spent more were the U.S and Japan, which spent $282 billion and $104 billion respectively. But again, China forces you to do the math: China's engineers and scientists usually make between one-sixth and one-tenth what Americans do, which means that the wide gaps in financing do not necessarily result in equally wide gaps in manpower or results. The U.S. spent nearly five times what China did, but had less than two times as many researchers (1.3 million to 743,000).
In all, foreign companies have been involved in establishing between 200 and 400 of their own research centers in China since 1990. China's People's Daily has reported that 400 of the world's transnational corporations have set up research and development projects in China. In part, tax incentives attract such financing. But the biggest incentive of all, of course, is access to China's consumers. The Chinese government knows that foreign tech companies can be coaxed into sharing technology and training in exchange for easier access to the Chinese marketplace. The World Trade Organization forbids formal bargains that demand international tech transfers, but it does not police winks and nudges.
The China Price
China now offers the world a labor supply with depth unlike anything ever seen. In a recent policy brief for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Sandra Polaski, a former State Department special representative for international labor affairs, writes that to put things in perspective, ''if all U.S. jobs were moved to China, there would still be surplus labor in China.'' That fact highlights what is most sobering about China's booming economy: it can force down the value of work in any job that is at all transferable.
In American business this is called the ''China price.'' It is the price American suppliers to other American businesses have to match to keep their customers. It is the price at which Chinese manufacturers can deliver the same goods and services. Last November, the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank noted the complaints that ''automakers have reportedly been asking suppliers for the 'China price' on their purchases.'' It also observed that U.S. suppliers had been asked by their big customers to relocate production to China, or to find subcontractors there.
American firms can find it hard to compete. ''China hits domestic U.S. manufacturers twice,'' Oded Shenkar says. ''They drive down the price of goods, but they drive up the price of raw materials. It's a wholly different environment.''
Ted C. Fishman, a contributing editor for Harper's Magazine, is writing a book about China's place in the world. This is his first cover article for The Times Magazine.
Posted by Pacific Village at July 4, 2004 01:23 PM Comments
http://www.pacificvillage.org/villagevoices/derryfield/archives/000314.html 
And it regularly grows 3-4% per year, that is an annual increment of $330 to $440 billion in GNP. Call it $350 billion. That is not new wealth, it is a measure of acceleration - the increase in wealth per year, achieved each year. China's is not $11 trillion but $1.5. Growing 6-7%, that is around $100 billion as an annual increment. The absolute gap in economic size between the US and China is widening, not narrowing. By large amounts - $250 billion per year, per year.
It is normal for less developed economies to show rapid growth in percentage terms, as they transition from an agricultural to an urban-industrial society. The output per person in the later can easily run 10 times what it is in the former. As a society moves from 80% agriculture to 20%, the output of 60% of the population rises 10-fold, and the overall economy may grow 4-6 fold. Technology transfer also helps.
But once a society has joined the industial league, its growth typically slows to the rates regularly seen in the industrial league - which for most means 2-3% per year. The US has actually been somewhat higher than average within that group. Societies that are already fully industrialized do not experience double digit real economic growth.
An example is Japan. Japan's GNP grew at very rapid rates from well before WW II until the late 1980s. Without quite catching the US in productivity, it got close. They have stalled in the last 15 years with no growth to speak of. Anyone who projected continuing exponential growth at transition rates beyond the point of similar productivity would have been grossly wrong about the trajectory of the Japanese economy.
I looks like China has been watching the US Military closely – and reading our Lessons Learned papers. Instead of shrugging them off they have been taking it to heart.
assuming you don't know where they are ;)
I agree that although China's growth represents a phenomenon not yet seen except as a parallel to our own, a nuclear power with 1.5B people, who are vacuuming the world's raw materials and oil while setting the world standard as the 'China Price' through a manufacturing cornucopia, can be a fearful military and geopolitical adversary, even while they are 'only' number 2.
OK
"In a few years China's economy will eclipse ours."
Playing Chicken Little, announcing that the sky is falling in a "few years" rather than soberly realizing that any meaningful economic challenge will takes *decades*, is the mark of hack writers. Such fear-inducing writing is designed to pump up adrenaline in the vain hope that overnight revolutions will change American political realities.
Don't be that Chicken Little coward, screaming that the sky is falling. Be a man. Soberly analyze reality. Don't claim that China is overtaking the U.S. in a "few years" when they won't even move into 2nd place until 2030.
In short, grow up.
By 2030, India will have more people, and possibly even a larger economy, than China.
China is currently competing for regional domination. Its success in that endeavor is not insured, either. China is surrounded by such nuclear powers as Taiwan, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Russia. China's air force, even with its large numbers, is viewed as unable to dominate all but Pakistan and North Korea (and Pakistan is adding 100 or more F-16's that may change even that equation).
It is no certain thing that China can conquer Taiwan, much less maintain its Kashmir occupation in the face of an enraged or opportunistic India. Militarily and politically, China hasn't even demonstrated that it can reign in little Kim Il in tiny North Korea, a mandatory step that it must climb before Taiwan grows bolder and more loudly demands its independence.
China is fighting a broad Islamic insurrection in its remote Xinjiang province, too. Will China attempt Russia's Afghanistan/Chechnya strategy, or will China pursue the U.S. and Israel's Iraq/Palestinian tactics for that region?
Will China stab its largest trading partner in the back, choosing regional wars with uncertain outcomes over profitable alliances?
Will China engage in regional wars that may cause it to lose face (e.g. a loss to Japan, Taiwan, or India such as China suffered in its last land war against Vietnam in 1979)?
Or will China choose peaceful trade and economic leverage as its route to global influence?
The plain truth is that while China does pose a regional threat, she also offers the potential of a global ally. She simply hasn't chosen yet.
But she will.
it is very easy to sprint off to a strong start. it is far less easy to sustain it for the long haul, and the bills are yet to come due in china.
one of the problems is that the enormous amount of investment capital that is sloshing around in china puts in question many of the new startup factories that have been built in the last few years... like the US dot-com bubble, many of these factories are still running on their seed corn and, while the technological base which was used to build the factory may have been sound (imported from the west, japan or taiwan most likely), the management to run the factory efficiently and at a profit may be sorely lacking. at some point, this will become crucial to the survival of the factory.
check the number of steel mills that have sprung up in china -- many more than are likely to be needed, or supplied with raw material, even if they *ALL* underbid the rest of the world...
II. High Technology And "Assassin’s Mace" Weapons
In the mid-1990s former president Jiang Zemin re-popularized an ancient Chinese term, "Shashaojian," translated most frequently as "Assassin’s Mace," which is to say "silver bullet" weapons, having novel characteristics, intended to be unanticipated, and thus potentially decisive when used with surprise.[2] The intent, as has been outlined in Chinese military classics for two millennia, is to catch the adversary by surprise and defeat him before he is even aware an attack has begun.
In short, grow up."
Listen, those remarks are ad hominem, gratuitous, and beneath you. They are certainly beneath me so I am not going to respond.
And who exactly made that prophecy?
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