Posted on 01/26/2007 8:42:42 PM PST by aculeus
There is almost no chance that China will become the world's hegemonic superpower, or that the Chinese yuan will dislodge the US dollar as the key reserve currency in our life-times.
It is ageing faster than any nation in history. Indeed, there is a risk that China’s demographic structure will implode long before the great mass of China’s interior ever become rich. This was more or less the conclusion of a closed-door session of Chinese experts at the Davos gathering, regrettably on “Chatham House” rules so none can be named.
Those who fret about Chinese chauvinist-militarism certainly have a point. The Chinese navy now has 50 state-of-the-art attack submarines, the spearhead of an offensive maritime force.
Beijing has just smashed an old weather satellite with a highly accurate kinetic missile, mounting an implicit challenge to America’s space monopoly. It has whipped up anti-Japanese feeling, and indoctrinated a whole generation of school children with revanchist beliefs.
The central bank commands reserves of over $1,000bn, the greatest ever seen. It could soon be in a position to trigger a US financial crisis by off-loading its vast holding of US bonds, though that would rebound violently against China herself.
Veiled threats might achieve some purpose, however, and that is how successful superpowers operate.
Yet, as soon as you crunch the demographics you can see that all this is never really going to amount to much. The one child policy has doomed China’s imperial dream. The ratio of males to females born in China in 2005 was 118.6 to 100.
The experts warned that the policy is already creating a huge cohort of unmarried men, a tinderbox for social conflict. The extended family structure has broken down because scarcely any Chinese now have cousins.
The country will catch the European disease of worker shortages within a decade, and then slither even faster down the demographic curve. By 2050, 31pc will be aged over 65.
There is no social security system worth the name. Its funding is just $40bn, a pittance. The state will have to step in to prevent social protest, causing the national debt to mushroom.
China’s surplus will vanish in no time.
In the end, there will be a “suicide epidemic” as the older generation carries out a heroic sacrifice, like the proverbial Eskimos on the ice.
Such are the predictions of those who have explored the theme, not mine. A useful antidote to all the hyper-ventilating we hear these days over China’s new ascendancy.
The Chinese are simultaneously INCREASING their military spending and REDUCING the total manpower of their military -is that hard to fathom or something?
They've recognized that cannon fodder is irrelevant. Rather than having a vast poorly trained and poorly equipped military they're going for a smaller military that's better trained and better equipped, largely in emulation of the United States.
My basic point is the idea that the one-child policy was part of some grand evil long-term plot to create hordes of family-less men for gigantic invasion forces is idiotic.
As it is, the rather large body of newly unemployed former military men in China because of their strength reductions is a serious problem.
No, it's not hard to fathom, as usual, the Chinese are copying the US. LOL.
We should be nice and ship them the hemlock.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/26/60minutes/main595875.shtml
The World's Greatest Fakes
Chinese Copies Are Making Their Way Back To U.S.
IMHO, that title say it all. You would think that China would have been able to come up with something original in the last few centuries to influence and enhance society. No, the greatest art, architecture, engineering, scientific advances, yada, yada, yada, have come from Western society. The industrial revolution (which has enabled everything from flight to the internet) is a product of the West.
In much the same way the West hopped on the Chinese bandwagon before Chinese power and creativity went into eclipse a few centuries ago. You think the civil service that replaced aristocracies in the West is a Western invention? You think paper money is a Western invention? And yet I would say that the average Westerner wouldn't consider himself sinified, would he?
The Chinese are borrowing Western technologies in the same way that Westerners who were running around in animal skins a couple of thousand years ago borrowed Asian* technologies. But look at it this way - a few centuries ago, the Chinese were saying "alrighty then" to the Western upstarts who were starting to show up in their neck of the woods**. They're not saying that any more. And in time, you won't be saying "alrighty then", as the Chinese and the Indians begin to regain their former importance in the world (perhaps coming to blows in a contest for pre-eminence), and Europe fades into irrelevance. Besides, it's not just China that is right in rejecting welfare statism - if we follow the European example and descend further into welfare statism, we, too, will follow the EUropeans into the dustbin of history.
* I use "Asian" not in a coherent geographic, cultural or ethnic sense, but in the sense the Greeks used it - not Europe and not Africa.
** Note also that Western pre-eminence isn't what it used to be. At their zenith, the Chinese thought they had reached the end of history - from then on, every development of consequence was pre-ordained to happen in China. They paid for it dearly in the succeeding centuries. If you think that we are somehow at the end of history with the West on top, you need to re-evaluate your premises. EUrope is destined to become an open-air museum, as it descends deeper and deeper into a welfare statism that simultaneously subsidizes the high fertility rates of its non-productive and seditious Islamic hordes and drives its economy into the ground. Whether we follow in their footsteps depends on whether the American voter, in his wisdom, ultimately rejects welfare statism and open borders.
But this is guessing and wishing. I wouldn't attach much importance to it.
I have to agree. However, some of the foundations of Western technology and sciences have come from the East.* But you're missing the point. It doesn't matter who claims credit. The wheel turns. The complacent are routed. People who think they have a monopoly on good ideas are eventually disabused of that notion by reality. Did anyone think the British empire would be reduced to its current shell two centuries ago? But here we are. Did anyone think the non-Communist East Asian economies would eclipse Latin America and Africa and catch up to Europe, just a few short decades ago? No. But here we are.
* I don't see how you get to computers without the Indian numbering system. I don't see how you develop an advanced financial system without first getting to paper money. The West has imported a large number of game-changing technologies and concepts from the East. Without them, the West would not be where it is today.
The moral is that whatever you develop, you'd better continue coming up with new stuff. The minute somebody else figures out how to do the same thing, your advantage is gone. You may think only you have the right to your inventions, and that it's a disgrace that somebody copied your invention, but the reality is that once the secret is out, you have lost your edge. The Chinese tried to hoard their paper-, porcelain- and silk-making techniques, but it was all ripped off by foreigners. It's in the nature of things for inventions to be ripped off. Don't be deluded by the illusion that everything good in the world originated in the West. That is not only absurd on its face - it is false.
Actually it could be their plan.. the removal(liquidation) of large chunks of undesireables.. Looking like that is the plan for socialism for the future anyway.. American socialists are right on track too.. Not just socialism but global socialism... Only thing in the way is a nationistic America.. Americas Nationism is being diluted even as we post by millions and millions of LEGAL and Illegal aliens (that will soon be legal).. You know voters that could care LESS about Americas Nationalism..
BRILLIANT REALLY.. you got to give to "them"..
Very few Americans are even aware of this plan..
The Chinese never got past the Japanese atrocities in Nanking. And of course, Japan refuses to apologize (not that it would make much difference in my opinion). China is biding it's time. They have every intention of taking vengeance on Japan for what they did.
If I was living in Japan right now, I would be VERY nervous.
They have two other major problems:
1. Water. Not enough.
2. Bureaucrats - 48 million of them.
I think the female shortage will be a growing crisis for them, but America and Europe are sliding downhill fast, too.
My fellow Baby Boomers have screwed up America so badly that I wonder if we can recover. Bush is busy nailing the final corner of the coffin shut.
Actually, the Japanese have apologized dozens of times. But the Chinese have repeatedly questioned the sincerity of these apologies, typically linking the degree of sincerity to Japan's willingness to send more monetary reparations to China. Japan has spent tens of billions of dollars in direct and indirect reparations. But China has never acknowledged them as sincere enough. I think the Japanese are at the point where they're done apologizing, and aptly so. Chinese empire-builders have, in their time, carried out atrocities every bit as brutal as the Japanese, for thousands of years. The only difference is that the Japanese carried them out in the 20th century. Note that the Rape of Nanking is only one of perhaps half a dozen such sackings (involving large-scale massacres) in Nanking. The previous ones involved Chinese contenders competing for the throne.
And HIV. The HIV rate in China is skyrocketing. Wonder why?!
The last population crisis in the mid-1800s led to a collapse of imperial government.
Another thing they could do would be to shut down some of the adoption agencies that are sending so many of the unwanted little girl babies out to American families.
Wow, when those worker shortages occur, they will need to bump up the price of labor up to a dollar an hour.
You're not exaggerating. The minimum wage in the *booming* coastal areas is about $0.50 an hour. In the interior, it's lower.
Because foreign NGO's want more funding? If there were as many HIV cases in Africa as they claim, Africa's population should have dropped in half by now. If you think Africa's population is going down, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I might be willing to sell to you, cheap. The reality is that NGO's manufacture crises where they don't exist in order to generate donations from governments so they can pay themselves handsome wages off the taxpayer's dime. (The word "profiteer" comes to mind).
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