Quote: (12-22-2013 07:49 PM)Cattle Rustler Wrote:
China doesn't have anything of value, they just build stuff. In fact, wages have risen so fat that clothing has moved to thailand, pakistan, and vietnam. Many Chinese kids are graduating from college and can't find good jobs either. Long story short, there's not enough good to spread around and it will cause issues with the gubbmint.
Unhealthy cities
Shortage of women
Population imbalance (too few young people, too many old people)
High cost of living
lack of "upward" jobs
increase in manufacturing costs
All the above are going to cause trouble for the Chinese government. They can't keep people suppressed forever.
I mostly agree with this view. However, I do think China will surpass the US in GDP, but that's only due to their huge population. They still have a long way to go to become a world power in all facets. Leaving aside their poorly-equipped military and poor diplomacy skills (look at Diaoyu and South China Sea issues for examples), they just have a lot of internal issues.
They still have about half the population who are peasants, and it's going to be a long and expensive path to get them (equivalent to about twice the US population) to a higher standard of living.
Then there's the effects of this rapid industrialization, in the form of pollution. They've now committed $1
trillion in upcoming years to battling this, and even that won't be enough because of the rapid urbanization. There's even been talk of moving the capital out of Beijing because there may be no way to tackle pollution there other than moving some of the population out of there.
Yes, they have spent a lot of money on infrastructure and I'm in awe of the progress and scale of it every time I visit China. But actually, they've spent too much on this type of capital, and not enough on human capital (partly because most of the leaders in China are engineers by training). The productivity and output numbers attest to this. We do see some innovation coming out of China for sure, but not at the rate it should be given their population and scale.
In manufacturing, rising labor costs will continue to bite China in the long-term. By some estimates, 2015 is when they'll really hit the inflection point where for most products, it's cheaper to make them in the US (or Mexico) for the US market, instead of making them in China and shipping them here. I've already started to notice this, since I really pay attention to labels when I buy products. The $1 plastic coat hangers from Target? Made in USA. The $5 chintzy picture frame? Made in USA. What's happening is that US companies are quite good at automation and efficiency and the Chinese are not (because they had cheap labor to rely on). Yes, I bet that plastic coat hanger manufacturer in the US employs just a handful of people, who just watch the machines that make the product, while in China the same factory has people doing a lot of it by hand. Guess which one can scale up and be more productive?
Talking about the decline of the US is nearly as old as the US itself. I view it as a zero-sum game for the most part. If the US is going to lose its leadership position on the world stage, then who will take over?
Certainly not Europe. The competing interests of each EU country means they can rarely act -- look at their inaction in Ukraine the last few weeks as one example. (Yes, the US didn't do much either, but what's going on in Ukraine is primarily a European issue.) On top of that, the EU overall is facing a demographic crisis that many other countries also face -- aging population and declining birthrates. If you look at a list of
countries by fertility rate, the bottom of the list is dominated by EU countries.
So who's left to be a world power? Not Russia, not Japan, not Brazil, and I don't think it will be China.
I suppose you could say the US is in decline, but with the caveat that its decline still leaves it in a dominant position relative to any other contenders.