China’s share of global GDP has increased from 3.6% in 2000 to 17.8% in 2019 and will continue to grow, the CEBR said. It would pass the per capita threshold of $12,536 (£9,215) to become a high-income country by 2023.
absolutely insane
I mean, never say never, but I don't see America wanting to start a war with China. Oh, they'll ramp up efforts to cause internal divisions to 11; but I don't know if war is realistically on the table ever
Dude, every single US think tank has been saying "war with China" day-in and day-out since Obama's "Pivot to Asia"
But it's like as Cuttlefish said:
If that war ever does happen, it’ll absolutely annihilate the US economy for good.
So if it's obviously suicidal to even us internet posters, the ruling class have to know this too. And if it's obviously suicidal with no hope of success, why do it?
Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan both launched their wars because they calculated that they were currently at their peak and every month they waited they would give their enemies time to leverage their superior economy to rearm and overtake.
A similar logic might also take hold in US policy circles.
That is a possibility, but the US will have to slide into fascism further for that to happen I think, looking at the US wars on Vietnam, Iraq and the existence of nuclear deterrence I think circumstances are absolutely different.
The existence of Nukes is a big differentiator, true.
However, that doesn't rule out the possibility of a grave miscalculation. Both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan thought that the USSR and US would kneel over and give up if they were hit hard enough and fast enough, which absolutely turned out to be untrue.
I wouldn't want to put it past some idiot Hawk to think that "the Chinese people will greet us as liberators" or some shit.
that's a possibility for sure, americans on reddit love advocating for nuking shit
I bet they think US missile defenses actually work.
Boy, are they in for about 300 mushroom cloud shaped surprises.
The US could use conventional weapons against key Chinese infrastructure like the 3 gorges dam. War with China means a lot of people die needless deaths, but I doubt the US can pull it off after making such a mess with COVID. They are now having their own citizens bomb telephone hubs. There is too much domestic strife to launch a war, Japan is too old to go into war, Taiwan is small, Vietnam has no power projection and South Korea has no interest in starting a fight with China. We are probably just going to see an escalation of a trade war to try and curb Chinese growth till the population curve from the one child policy catches up and puts China into Japan’s current situation and everyone pivots towards the emerging African powers threatening Europe and the new power player Indonesia.
Destroying infrastructure like the dam is a war crime and it would be realy stupid to go down that path because of examples like this. The US is one hacking campaign away from losing most of its modern infrastructure.
And ww2 taught us that no one gives a shit about war crimes once the war is relatively far along. They don’t start out doing them because that would be dishonorable but by the end everyone was doing absolutely horrible things to each other.
China could theoretically bring in as many immigrants as it wants to solve the age issue.
I really don’t think they will. They have expressed a negative interest in immigration making it a harder country to move to than Switzerland or Japan.
Yeah but nukes didn't exist back then. And the US can't realistically nuke China without Russia firing back at the US. They're not allies, but nuking nearby would provoke a retaliation.
I mean, China has enough of its own nukes that they could wipe out the US Western Seaboard, SK, Japan, The Pacific bases, and probably Australia if they were stupid enough to join the US.
China would need Russian nukes to also fire in order to successfully penetrate US missile defense.
I don't think that's even theoretically true (meaning all the defenses work) now that China has MIRVs
It's all theoretically. None of this stuff has actually been tested on a real target. The pendulum may swing back in China's favor in this aspect once they develop the necessary tech
just wanted a shorthand way to say "if all the defenses work", probably wasn't the best choice
I doubt US missile defence's ability to shoot down a single rusty R7, let alone a modern ICBM. They no longer have the nuclear-tipped ABMs and there's maybe 15 GMDs and an Aegis system or two in the flightpath at best.
China could probably launch ~30-50 nukes immediately, and more with an hour's notice which is more than enough to wipe out SF, LA and Seattle even with current ABM systems warned and ready.
And of course they're about to roll out their new MIRV system which will really fuck the US.
successfully penetrate US missile defense.
Has US Missile Defense ever successfully defended against a missile?
I've always heard the tech described as "shooting a bullet with a bullet from the back of another bullet". And the number of "failed test" stories dotted the news for decades.
That's before we get into the fact that we've never really been in a shooting war with another high tech state.
The beginning of the end for American Empire will be the day we lose an aircraft carrier.
Why is it insane that the country with the most people has the biggest economy?
Yeah if all I knew about China was everything up until 1950 and you asked me what it would look like 70 years later, I'd probably say "Sad, poor backwater" not "Leading industrial power"
I wonder what China's population would be if it weren't for Mao... I'm thinking 10 billion.
Probably in an India-style situation where food security is tenuous for many people.
And it wouldn’t even be just for the one-child policy, which IIRC didn’t necessarily correlate with a lower birth rate, but rather for the phenomenon of high living standards = less kids.
If anyone ever asks why there's suddenly so much anti-chinese sentiment in the news, this is why. 2017 is when the US realized this and a year later the Hong Kong thing started.
Haha, I am sure the USA is going to take losing its global hegemony well, and will surely not do something wacky and unexpected in desperation !
No, just the normal, expected thing that happens with an established power in decline and a rising competitor to hegemony.
I don't think the US will go down anywhere near as "Quietly" (ie. not very quiet at all) as the British and French Empires. It's amazing the USSR just gave up like that.
they kinda already are, but due to how GDP is calculated, all the consumer merchandise they build for us counts towards our GDP
I was with you right up until your conclusion.
It sounds like ‘developing the productive forces’ is exactly what happened, with the corruption and other excesses to boot. Now Xi’s reigning those excesses in, like you’ve pointed out.
The big next step is ‘demand side reforms’, meaning reducing inequality. We’ll see how it goes, but if it’s anything like the poverty elimination programme, there’s reason to be hopeful.
Regarding housing, you’re right. It’s one of the reasons Shenzhen is moving to the Singaporean housing model and ditching the Hong Kong one. This seems to be the outcome of Xi’s previous statement that houses should be for living in, not speculation.
No one’s saying China’s a utopia. But it’s going in the right direction, which is a hell of a lot better than most other nations right now.
The neoclassical economists (neoliberals) delivered the results that China wanted
Just wanna point out that China definitely didn't follow the neoliberal model, otherwise they would have privatized literally everything. China kept control of the commanding heights of the economy with the state.
Neoliberalism has a much more strict definition than "privatizing parts of the economy". It means privatizing the majority of the economy, inclusing the commanding heights. Also using the state to enforce private property and crush labor is not a neoliberal policy, it is a universal phenomenon. Neoliberalism upholds that private ownership and markets are always better than state ownership. China had a huge amount of state ownership of assets and state control of the commanding heights throughout its fastest growing years. The SOEs were less profitable than private enterprises, inspite of that China's economy grew rapidly. If China truly was neoliberal, it would have privatized all SOEs from the start. And if neoliberal logic was true, China's economy should have suffered due to SOEs, rather than SOEs being one of the biggest reasons for it's rapid and consistent growth.
You're not getting my point. China is much closer to Keynesianism, Scandinavian-style social democracy than neoliberalism. Neoliberalism = USA, South Africa, Peru, Hong Kong etc. Keynesianism/socdem = Norway, Finland, Denmark etc. China is closer to the second group of nations than the first. Both Keynesians and Neoliberals would argue for privatization of the economy, but the extent of privatization is different. Keynesians call for the commanding heights of the economy to be controlled by the state, which is what China does. So it is quite categorically wrong to call China neoliberal. Like just ask any actual neoliberals if they think China is a neoliberal state.
You sound like someone who's well-read about the Chinese economy. Are there any books you would advise me to read on that subject?
I’ve mostly picked this up from following knowledgable folks like Michael Pettis on Twitter, and reading SCMP. Bloomberg China also occasionally has good coverage.
I’ve got a list of books I’ve been intending to read, so I’ll put those down here.
- China’s Gilded Age: the paradox of economic boom and vast corruption
- Red Capitalism
- The Dragon’s gift: the real story of China in Africa
- The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy
- When China Rules the World
- Chen village: revolution to globalisation
- The Morning Deluge
- Inside the Mind of Xi Jinping
Another option is podcasts. David Harvey has a good episode on the economic situation in China.
Not all of these call China ‘socialist’, but that’s really secondary to the point of understanding the system. They’ll help with that.
Of course, you can also go right back to the source and just read Deng.
Thanks! I already knew David harvey's China episodes in his podcast, but but I'm very happy with the suggested reading list Thank you very much!
depends on how you define downtown i guess. might still work for some village out in the sticks of pudong but ain't no one affording anything in lujiazui just on salary and relatives' money anymore unless you already stacked
yeah, i'm not trying to debate anything either. line 10? did they give you the area of the houses they bought by chance? cheap and central housing made me think of the old one room shikumen conversions for poor people where everyone had to sleep in cupboards lol, haven't seen any of those around in dogs years.
There is a reason why Chinese youth are flocking to read Marx and Mao again.
"Again" ? You realise that marxism is a mandatory school subject right?
I have to be deeply suspicious of anyone making lofty claims stated as fact and with extreme confidence without knowing very basic facts about the country.
politics and 'marxism' as it is taught in the high schools and universities is nationalism-lite with civic-bureaucratic characteristics (not unlike the us, although there is somewhat less of an emphasis on the mythos and narrative than social studies in murica), actual marxism is more often called something like political economy and is not mandatory
politics and ‘marxism’ as it is taught in the high schools and universities is nationalism-lite with civic-bureaucratic characteristics
are you Chinese/received Chinese education? If so, could you elaborate? I'd love to know more about China's modern political education
was a bit of a hot take from me, they did used to go over the basics of LTV and things like how to understand SWCC (probably still do) but in recent years there has been a slant towards normativity (at least for the chinese equivalent of the GRE) in the framing of the CPC; less as representatives of the proletariat (because even the lumpenproles would see through any bs proclamations of a DotP in an instant) but rather as the guarantors of the continuing success of the chinese civilization and by extension the interests of all chinese people
lots of technocratic box-checking and memorization of events/dates with the corresponding 'correct answer' consequences
You sound like someone who's well-read about the Chinese economy. Are there any books you would advise me to read on that subject?
Unfortunatly I don't speak Chinese, so preferably in English. (French would also be fine.)
if we start fucking now it isn't too late to reach one billion americans
edit: actually I just looked at population statistics and we should have started years ago
aren't they already the largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity
Yes, which is more relevant than nominal GDP. Not taking PPP in to account is a similar mistake as not taking exchange rates in to account: yes the number might be bigger, but what matters is what you can actuallly buy with that number.
World's biggest isn't really an important threshold as it doesn't reflect total development. The big moment is when Chinese citizens cross over into the realm of having an average wealth that matches the west. At that point they're a fully developed modern country and the steps to kick it up into the next level begin.
They'll lead in the world by 2038 assuming China maintain 5% per year increases and the US maintain 3% increases.
Sooner if the US underperforms.
Children born into China today, which is currently poorer than Europe with an average around $11k-12k will grow up richer than Americans.
assuming China maintain 5% per year increases and the US maintain 3% increases.
I don't know if either will be able to maintain those figures. This could turn into a race to the bottom.
Perhaps, but China has achieved it year on year for 20 years. There is no sign of it stopping. The US however? Strong signs that they're in decline.
Chinese growth is significantly lower than it enjoyed a decade ago. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-10 pts depending on who you believe.
American growth has been stagnant since the Volker Era, more or less by design.
