Orrin, never use the verb "to figure out" in the same sentence as "the French".

"The China card" is going to be about as substantial as the paper from last night's fortune cookie.

OJ, whether China is doomed or not, I don't know. what I do know is that China and France are in a military alliance against Taiwan (and its only friend, the United States).

The current China might be doomed, but that's not to say that whatever replaces it won't have a bright future.

Also, they may yet pull it off.
You never know. It's not like they're North Korea.

Michael:

Yes, the splinters of China will do okay, as some European states could survive, though they won't if Union occurs.

Where do you get this "China is doomed" fantasy from? China will be a major player in this century. What are your top five "China is doomed" causal factors?

More to the point, US-China trade is orders of magnitude larger than France China trade. And it will always will be. When push comes to plotz, what will the chinese do?

Robert:

I'll pick just five problems.

1. Demographic: As a result of forcing a one-child policy on the people they rule, the Communist Party of China has now guaranteed there will be enormous social tensions for at least the next two generations as young males come to outnumber young females. As we know from America's own social history, the greatest number of violent crimes are typically carried out by young men. Because of all the females who were never born or who were allowed to die out of a preference for male children, China will have far too many young men, and there will be no young women to put the brakes on their asocial behavior. The coming effect of this on Chinese society will be staggering.

2. Economic inequality: As the economy has grown, so too has inequality between the coastal areas and the interior, between the cities and the countryside, and between the rich folks and the have-nots. The great irony is that "socialist" China will have far more social inequity and economic inequality than "capitalist" Taiwan and Hong Kong, which enjoy among the most economically equitable economies in the world. More and more, China will come to look like Brazil. Brazil is often called "the country of the future." The problem is that it might always be "the country of the future." Does anyone think that a Chinese economy that might look like today's Brazil will be a great power of the coming century?

3. Economic obsolescence: True to the old Marxist-Leninist obsession with building infrastructure and heavy industry, the Communist Party basically chose to carry out a 20th century model of economic development. The problem is, this model might not be the economic winner of the 21st century. Many of those new office skyscrapers in Shangahi that so impressed foreign jounalists, tourists, and politicians are now running at 1/3 occupany. In contrast, India's private sector has de facto chosen to move into the 21st century by investing in IT. Which model will be better, China's old industrial model or India's new IT one? No one knows. But it would be foolish to assume China's way is better. Indeed, it could well be that Communist China's way gave good early returns in the short term, but is saddling it in the long term with what will turn out to be an obsolete economy.

4. The Nationalist Burden: Regardless of their personal economic circumstance, as ordinary Chinese perceive their country is becoming militarily stronger and feared, Chinese nationalism will become more powerful and more strident. In a nation with a reasonable form of government, this wouldn't be a problem. Under Communist rule, it is a tremendous burden. Since Marxism-Leninism is now a joke in China, the only claim the Party has to power is that it pretends to speak for the nationalist aspirations of the Chinese people. In trying to uphold this claim, the Party has encouraged the most xenophobic and narrow-minded forms of Chinese nationalism. Nationalism can be liberating, but it can also be self-deluding and self-destructive. Because China has been poor and weak internationally for so long, the world has only really known the "good" side of Chinese political culture. But once China feels it has real military muscles to flex, the world will begin to find out the other side of China's political heritage in international affairs which has been hidden for the past two centuries, the "bad" side, the side that is intolerant of rivals to its power, the side that feels it has strike down its outside enemies, whether those enemies are real or not. The Party will find out it is riding a tiger, and the rise of this ugly nationalism will bode ill both for China and the world.

5. The Political Bottleneck: Last but not least, the Party hasn't been able to solve the most basic problem of China: Why is a country of 1.4 billion people controlled by a self-appointed and self-anointed group of dictators? Even if this group was made up of the wisest people in China, why should China's citizens consent to being ruled by them at a time when, in spite of the Islamic terrorist threat, more and more countries that were once authoritarian are democratizing? And if this group of self-chosen dictators isn't made up of the wisest individuals in China, what and who gives them the right to run the country? Why shouldn't there by any political voices other than the Communist Party? Frightened of the people it rules and obsessed with power, the Party hasn't made any effort to move China past this great political bottleneck, this huge problem that threatens to strangle any promise the country might have. Politically, the Party is sitting on a gigantic pressure cooker. For now, the use of force by the military and the police has made it seem to the outside world that things are under control. But enormous pressure is still building up insider the cooker. Anyone who has lived in China knows how much tension there is in Chinese society and politics. Is this a China that will inevitably play a major role on the world stage?

These are just five problems, each of which alone dwarves any internal problems that a democratic country such as the United States has. This doesn't mean that China is "doomed," but it does mean that China's rise to great power is hardly inevitable.

I feel like I just watched Larry Holmes vs. Marvis Frazier...again.

X:

A wonderful mountain of information, and I believe that earlier you said that you've lived in China, and are Chinese ?

On point number three, however, although China's IT development doesn't get the press that India's does, aren't there a tremendous number of world-class Chinese engineers and scientists ?
China's best selling personal computer is manufactured in China, although it's an IBM PC knock-off...
Also, the Chinese government has committed to running most of the government's computers on a homebrewed version of Linux.

It seems to me that although the Sino-IT sector doesn't make up a huge part of the economy, it's still quite large compared to most other countries', and might grow rapidly if encouraged.

Michael:

Yes, I'm Chinese, and have lived in Taiwan as well as Hong Kong. It is true that China has many top engineers and scientists. I believe, however, that what will prevent China from taking the best advantage of this resource is that it fundamentally remains a closed society. For all its flaws, by comparison with China, India is a truly free country. This means that India's IT sector will be able to move in directions and explore possibilities that China, under its current regime, cannot. Remember the case of the Soviet Union. It wasn't so long ago that it was common for Western commentators to lament how superior Soviet engineers and scientists were and how many more there were of them compared with, say, their American counterparts. But we all know what happened. America won, because the open society that rewarded quality and initiative won over the closed society that valued quantity and control. It is clear that China benefits from having access to some of the best managerial and technical talent from Taiwan and Hong Kong. But that talent comes from societies which are far more open than China's. What is less clear is how capable the Communist regime itself is of generating a pool of technical innovators in the long term. Given the example of the Soviet Union, my guess is that China wouldn't be able to.

X

You've given an accounting of massive social problems, but you look at any nation or empire from the past on a trajectory to world power status and you will find many such problems. Look at the US with the Civil War, the massive inequities of the Gilded Age, the squalor of immigrant ghettoes in the major industrial cities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Just look at where China was 30 years ago, and the horrors that it went through during the Cultural Revolution. Who could have imagined then that it could achieve what it has over that period? Great powers are not created from social peace and prosperity. I'd say that the opposite is true. Our current prosperity has bred complacency and arrogance, and we've hocked our future for cheap consumer baubles. This time we are the Indians, selling Manhattan island for trinkets. China just bought a major Canadian mining company. They'll use their dollar reserves to secure the resources they'll need to continue their growth. Our growth will be stagnant for the next several decades, as we pay off our debts and deal with the Boomer pig passing through the entitlements python.

Robert:

Yes, look at past Empires. They broke.

Robert:

You asked for five causal factors. I gave you five. I could have listed many more. In your earlier post, you said that the idea China was doomed was a fantasy. Now we see it isn't just a fantasy. In fact, China does face massive problems, which are individually and collectively on a much larger scale than anything 19th century America faced. A century and a half ago, America had the great advantage of being heir to a political system that was incredibly flexible and adaptable. China doesn't have such a system. Now you're saying something different, which is what is now commonly called "moving the goalpost." You are now basically acknowleding that it isn't a fantasy to say China has problems. So you now say all empires had problems too. This isn't what you were saying before. But to argue that previous empires and nations had problems doesn't necessarily lead to the conclusion that all empires and nations will be able to deal with them successfully and prosper. Some nations were able to handle their problems. Some couldn't, and no longer exist. Does Burgundy, one of the great medieval kingdoms in Europe, still exist? Does ancient Rome or Byzantium or Cordoba? You have to give a persuasive argument, rather than simply assert an opinion and give the odd fact, that Communist China will be able to fact its problems and survive, and on top of that prosper. Also implicit in your assertion is that China is on the rise and the United States is in decline. I should note that this kind of thinking has been in vogue since the Imperial Japanese and German Nazis thought Americans were decadent and weak. America has many strengths. Being underestimated by its potential enemies is one of them.

X,
I am not moving goalposts. I never stated that China does not have serious problems, I just stated that I don't think that China is doomed. China may be doomed, who knows, but the facile way in which Orrin uses any negative report coming from China as proof of his theory that China is doomed convinces me that he is dealing with a fantasy with regards to China and not reality.

There is one reality about China with two faces: it is a fast growing economic force that is having a major impact on the world economy, and it is a society with massive political and social hurdles to clear. My question to you is, what is the wiser attitude to take regarding China? To dismiss it, or to take it's rise in the Global marketplace seriously?

America of course has great advantages, both cultural and political. But we are not immune from economic disaster, especially if we take the attitude that somehow our past successes and our political and economic institutions make us immune. Orrin has a complacent, devil-may-care attitude towards deficits, which is shared by a majority nowadays. We're not going to maintain our superiority to Asia by resting on our laurels.

Robert:

No nation with a declining population has ever suystained a growing economy--China will be there sooner than most.

It's debt to GDP ratio is already at that of a 1st world nation, before it even starts funding a mature societyy's social safety net.

OJ:

Excellent point! Yet another demographic disaster waiting in the wing for China's Party hacks to solve.

Robert:

Of course, it's not inevitable American will be able to maintain its superiority. But it has a much better chance than China does. Why? Because America allows many different voices to speak out. Even after decades of so-called reform, China doesn't.

I agree with you that we have to take China seriously. We, however, have to understand not only its potential, but its many problems as well, because too much analysis of China's potential has been colored by an incredibly naive form of "China fever." This isn't being negative. It's being realistic about China's potential.

For example, consider that a great part of this potential has actually been tapped, mobilized, and developed not from within China but from without, and I'm not talking about such multi-national companies as Motorola and Ford.

Some 800,000 (!) citizens of Taiwan are currently living on the mainland with their families, working as managers and technical experts in businesses funded by 100 billion dollars invested from Taiwan. The numbers and scale of capital investments of Hong Kong Chinese in China has been no less impressive.

Once we understand the implications of this, it becomes clear it is misleading to depict China's economic growth as a "Chinese" success story. In short, it has not been China's own homegrown entrepreneurs, but those of Chinese ancestry from outside the Chinese mainland who have been disproportionately responsible for much of China's economic growth. China's inherent economic strength, therefore, is in many ways an illusion.

Unfortunately, I don't see much evidence this is really understood by the Communist Party and China's growing ranks of rabid nationalists.

As I said earlier, don't underestimate the role of human stupidity.

"As I said earlier, don't underestimate the role of human stupidity."

I never do that X.