We like to believe that we are light years ahead of the Chinese in innovation but many factors suggest that is an attitude that we maintain at our peril. The Chinese are graduating far more stem candidates that we are. Their recent advancements in hypersonic missiles illustrates their competency and an unrecognized ability to innovate. Their growth over the last 20 years has been astonishing. We are entering an age of robots when assembly-line workers will be less and less needed.
A smaller population does of course mean fewer consumers but it also means fewer jobs that the Chinese central committee has to fill and fewer mouths to feed, water, house and medicate. Consumers will be continue to be found abroad, as always.
The next war with a country like China will be fought in outer space, cyberspace, by drones, robots and satellites and not by masses of humans in uniform who, in the missile age, are more and more to be considered by military planners not to be an asset but to be targets
