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 Chinas demographic structure will implode long before the great mass of Chinas 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 Americas 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 Chinas 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.
Chinas 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 Chinas new ascendancy.
Muslim polygamy promotes war because you are left with lots of men with no sex partners, poor possibility of getting wives, so they go to war for booty and the enemy's women
"In 2000, I went to a village. As I passed a narrow lane, I heard a child shouting, "Mama, come down; mama, come down." When I went into the house, I saw the childs mother had hanged herself. The little child did not know his mother had already died; he was pulling her foot and kept calling his mother to come down from where she was. The mother found out she was HIV-positive not long before; her husband had previously died of AIDS and they have wasted all their money to fake doctors. This kind of story is everywhere in all the AIDS villages in Henan province."
A family in our church went to China and adopted one of those little girls.
Evans-Pritchard is correct. "Successful" population control programs, such as China's one-child policy, lead to an aging of the population. All these zero population zealots who have been warning the world about the so-called population explosion are really promoting a kind of demographic suicide. Nations that refuse to accept children are doomed.
The sad thing is that all of this population control madness has been forced on the Chinese people. Women who become pregnant a second time are forced to undergo abortions. Population officials in towns and villages monitor women's menstrual cycles. What a great loss of personal freedom. Now the whole concept of the extended family is dying out in China. Young people don't have brothers and sisters. All in the name of population control.
China is a classic example of how a "right" to practice birth control and to choose abortion has been turned into a state-imposed duty.
"America's space monopoly?" I thought the Russians had more satellites in orbit, and most of them were for military purposes. What's more, even before the Columbia tragedy, they were able to get a Soyuz spacecraft off the ground more often than we could launch a space shuttle.
No. "This, too, shall pass."
According to this article, Russia has only 96 total satellites of which 40 are purely military and 18 are dual use. They once had 186 satellites. Many of their remaining satellites are beyond their designed life span.
I'm guessing that we have many times this number of satellites. IIRC the GPS system alone has 24 satellites. The article includes the following quote from a Russian general: Only one Russian satellite is currently over the continental United States compared to 12 or 13 U.S. spy satellites, which are constantly monitoring Russia,
Communism carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction and that of the society in which it resides.
Sounds a lot similar to all the global warming fear mongering I hear. It assumes current trends will continue forever. More boys than girls in China? Soon girls will become more valuable, families will begin having more girls, etc.
Chinese development will continue. Our best bet is to help and encourage it to continue in positive humanistic fashion.
Both the poster (me) and, I'm sure, the postee (Evans-Pritchard) don't need any instruction on what Davos is ... and isn't.
But perhaps you were directing your comments at "all". ;-)
[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.]
LOL.
I can hardly wait for 2080 when we can see the aftermath.....
...what?....I'm taking my vitamins!
Me thinks there will be several world catastrophies before China's population management problem comes home to roost.
The party has decided that rapid increases in population leads to violent revolt. It is far easier to kill the babies before they are born, than to fight the adults once they have grown up. That's all there is to it.
If this was true, each remaining woman would have to have an average of at least 20 children just to maintain the population.
That's the plan. Seems to be working so far.
Sorry to say you are probably right.
"The Chinese have been steadily REDUCING their total military troop strength for many years now"
Source, please?
Thanks
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