Wow, we have some angry wumao in the chat today, huh?
For my money, by far the biggest question is how the CCP will handle the rapidly-unfolding demographic crisis. Pretty much everything else stems from this. It poses serious threats to the CCP's ability to continue plowing huge amounts of money into military modernization and foreign projects, and also undercuts the overall narrative of a rising, vitalist China vs. an enervated West; China is about to become a far older society than the US even as it potentially surpasses the US economically.
In the short term, I imagine Beijing is also rather uneasy right now due to the COVID outbreak in India, specifically in how it mirrors the CCP's COVID strategy in terms of India having sent large quantities of vaccine abroad. I don't expect that the CCP will have any similar issues at home, as their ability to snuff out any outbreaks before they balloon out of control is pretty robust (and I certainly hope that they're able to keep it under control!) but given the huge quantities of vaccines they've sent abroad, they really cannot afford any kind of outbreak domestically.
I think, honestly, the demographic problem won't hit them for another 2-3 decades. The Chinese are so far from the Tech frontier in so many sectors and only about 33% as productive as the OECD average (with an even greater lag in the Services sector), that they have quite a few low-hanging fruits left to pick. A few careful reforms surrounding Hukou (already steadily occurring), education (Scott Rozelle did amazing research on the urban-rural education divide) and the high-tech sector (institutional reform and not simply throwing money) alone could bring substantial long-term benefits which will outweigh any drag from demographic problems.
A 600 million strong labour force with 300 million educated professionals is infinitely more useful and productive than a 750 million strong labour force with only 100 million such professionals.
There has been no shortage of criticism of the BRI from the beginning. Too many mediocre projects have been funded. Nationally many Chinese wonder why China should fund poor countries when there is no shortage of domestic problems.
Now with BRI losing momentum, this may be the perfect time for other Eurasian actors (like India, EU, ASEAN, Russia, Japan) to join and shape the BRI, somewhat on the model of the AIIB.
Let's not forget how badly their one child policy and the large, lonely male populous is going to hurt them in the long run. They're going to be a noticeable source of instability.
Huge numbers of people everywhere are choosing to live alone these days. Could be a result of overcrowding on the planet; certainly many women are choosing careers over making babies.
1. Biodiversity loss and ecological pollution are related to population pressures.
2. If you understand how money is created (in treasuries and CBs of sovereign governments) you will know how living standards can rise despite falling working age populations and rising retired populations (which together have a smaller demand on resources), including in China given the now massive productive capacity of that nation which is increasingly turning to AI enabled production.
But they failed because living standards are still much poorer than nations with higher living standards ie South Korea, Taiwan who also have low birth rates
Raising the living standards of 1.4 billion people at the fastest rate in history is not failure. Population changes need not hinder continuation of that outcome. See MMT.
Yes. The one child policy was misguided, to say the least. Still the fertility rate in China, while low, is higher than the neighbours without that policy.
The issue isn't so much the aging population. That's an issue, but an issue lots of places have. It's the population pagoda. A look at China's population pyramid shows how extreme it is
I'd say the real issue is China is rapidly aging (and possibly soon shrinking) DESPITE THE FACT THAT IT'S NOT YET A HIGH INCOME COUNTRY.
Japan, Italy, and other rich countries will muddle through because they possess considerable resources (relative to the overall size of the population) with which to meet the challenge of caring for a large numbers of old people. China? Not so much.
(a) BRI problems due ot over-confidence and inexperience. Pettis compares US experience of lending to South America long ago. The Brtish had learned how to do it. Basically what Noah says.
(b) G DP is an input figure. The CCP sets it and local governments and SOEs do what is needed to meet it. But much is just wasted infrastructure investment and house building. GDP goes up (for that year) but debt is increased while the wasteful investments do not increase debt servicing capacity. Does this matter? Chinese seem to think so because they are trying to constrain debt. What happens, though, if they just keep going? Pettis is rather coy here. You can mention the Japanese experience, decades of lower growth, but actually Japan seems to be doing OK.
The question for me is what happens in a closed economy when the government prints money to fund various favoured projects, taxing as need be to control inflation. Perhaps you cease to have a market economy and instead have a command economy as in the old Soviet Union?
The modes of failure of a debt driven Chinese economy are in the end a mystery to me.
Didn't see it mentioned - perhaps it's implicit - but the biggest risk I see for their government is managing the labor share of income falling to their middle class (such as it is). Their export dominance (which they're trying to solidify through belt and road) depends upon keeping wages down. History shows us that labor can only tolerate this for so long once they get a taste of rising standards of living. That class / labor challenge will define their political and economic challenges going forward. It either ends in political change or rising labor / middle class share of income and a shift away from an export-driven economy.
At least, that's what I've picked up so far from Trade Wars are Class Wars. Would love your take on that book's thesis if you've heard of it @Noah.
If you include the environmental devastation (not accounted for in GDP of course... where it perversely generates more GDP as you pay to fix it) properly, i.e. account for depreciation in natural assets, then the screw ups date back much longer. If you don't bother measuring depreciation in your capital stock, then profits can look very high...until they don't.
When 70% of your groundwater is unsafe due to pollution and toxins, plus top-soil, plus the loss of wealth due to air-pollution related sickness and costs, it doesn't look quite so omnipotent in the first place. The inequality caused by the pro-producer policy legacy, etc. Although I agree that there is a bizarre acceptance of some kind of China-rise inevitability around much of the world, and that the SARS2 / Vaccine Fail / BRI issues have dented this odd belief.
But for natural capital etc, counter-factuals should be kept in mind as money is spent fixing these problems. GDP doesn't equal wealth sometimes. Not to mention the spiralling credit-to-GDP rates that are needed to keep growing.
On the BRI, the "miracle" of no strings attached investment (actually a lot of strings, just not the "western" ones of transparency/anti-corruption/AML/HR) that pre-dated BRI in Africa, has partially dissolved. Venezuela (China development bank anyone?..loans backed up with crude!!!, Egypt, Libya etc are all examples). Would love to see CDB's TCFD disclosures! Political risk and the dangers of propping up or doing massive investment deals with unstable regimes under poor governance will inevitably be coming home to roost in some cases. Is Myanmar in the BRI?
As an addition, so much of China's FDI loans are backed by carbon intensive resources (crude, mining output, etc). Much covered by TCFD or other disclosure standards. I wonder what a carbon price of $100 does to their risk profile? Or a requirement to account for TCFD style transition risks looks like? I don't think China can adopt TCFD given how much it would expose the economy to potential downgrades etc. But if the US does, or HK (like the UK already has announced), then Chinese banks and other big SOEs will be scrambling.
China still has a long way to grow if it is to provide most of its citizens with the lifestyle of a typical developed country. Whether or not it gets there is probably of more importance than any particular screw ups along the way. That said, a major screw up would probably remove the rose-tint from some observers glasses. The big potential screw-up with BRI seems to me to be the potential for forgein entanglements when the investments sour. Military misadventure in the middle east is a traditional route to screw up that China will soon have the opportunity to partake in as the US pulls back.
Please stop shitposting about China. Your knowledge about east Asia is so weird, according to your past posts. In particular, the post that claims Taiwan is a civilization, which is the most laughable post I have ever seen.
Chinese vaccine is bad. So what? The U.S blocks its vaccine exports for the American first ideology as well as your fellow west friends who also block vaccine exports and hoard vaccines. So why does vaccine diplomacy fail when China exports a lot of vaccines while the U.S. is hoarding more than it needs? And don't you know the key of a vaccine is to prevent severe symptoms instead of preventing all new cases? The Chinese vaccine has the same level of efficacy level as the normal flu vaccine.
Claiming the one belt one road initiative has failed is also a bizarre point. CCP has successfully expanded its political influence and exported its overcapacity to foreign countries. You should write a serious academic paper to say the initiative does not affect the local economy instead of using a handful of examples. I think a lot of journals will be highly interested in this topic.
Most importantly, an advice form a Chinabro if you want to write something seriously about East Asia and China. Stop being brainwashed by your domestic propaganda media and read some serious books about what is going on. Sincerely, you look like a reverse-engineered wumao to just say "China bad". I think CCP propaganda should learn something from American media like CNN and fox news about how brainwashing its own people and even intellectuals.
Whilst Noah actually supplied citations and examples, you're unable to even cite examples, just simple denial. Seems like major cope, especially on asserting that BRI has been "successful". By what metric? What evidence?
Citations and examples? Noah did notice that China has raised the living standards of more people than any country in history. The only negatives he could find were the BRI and the vaccines (while the murderous "freedom loving" US neoliberal economic regime has cost over half a million lives so far in the pandemic) and the debt nonsense followed by the mainstream, including by the US puppet the IMF aka "Instant Misery Fund".
If the US regime is "murderous" how would you characterize a political regime which starved literally tens of millions of its own citizens to death & ordered regular duty military troops to open fire on peaceful protestors?
I don’t know whether you know or not, the GDP of China surpassing the USA has been discussed since early 2000s (sorry I don’t remember precise date), and it was 2020 that the original reports predicted at the time. But you know it didn’t happened by the time
Now in pre-COVID 2019, it was before about 2035, and then now because of COVID, the prediction is adjusted to 2028.
Is this an internal or external perception of omnipotence? As far back as I remember, China’s government comes across in the news as pretty jacked up, with pervasive corruption, lots of unrest, and bad environmental problems. I’d compare to US government, which has also been pretty jacked up for most of its history. Apparently municipal corruption was massive in the 1800s — and America grew rapidly in wealth, power, and population at that same time. Some failures called out here seem to be pretty ordinary failures of government: every state goes in for big investments and often fails.
Fundamentals like an overaged population seem important, though. On the other side, a huge population could be a big advantage.
And, of course, if results stop being so good, internal perceptions will change. I think it’s very likely. It’s easier to catch up, so gains will probably slow over time. Prosperity will probably shift values from survival to self-expression, giving people more scope to criticize and debate. I think approval ratings are really high only when the state can control the narrative.
There is an opportunity for China, though. US-type government is obsolescent, as will be the Chinese government of China reaches a similar wealth level. So, having a different, newer, less old-regime-encrusted government, China might more successfully adapt to present conditions and leapfrog electoral democracy. And that might even be what US government needs, a spur to innovate and perform.
I think this is a good, thought-provoking piece from Noah. But its a realization which hit many/most of us in the China-watching community as far back as c.2015, with the epic stock market meltdown AND the ensuing RMB devaluation crisis.
Is it possible that with Belt & Road there will be a round 2 and they will take all these lessons and do much better the next time…kind of like when Amazon launched the Fire Phone and though it flopped, it derived a lot of important lessons that made the failure (likely) value accretive
There's two kinds of believing-your-own-propaganda failures in Belt and Road. One is that international development banks are imperialist tools for imposing control over local policy. They're not actually very useful for that, and when attempted tends to attract take-the-money-and-runners. The other is that China has a glorious history as architect of the Silk Road. Really that was an Iranian network built on the old Achaemenid and before that Iraqi empires' networks of royal stations, where provinces were required to provide markets to marching imperial armies instead of having them plunder the provinces every time they came through. Later the Mongolian empire mimicked this opening another more northern route. China's silk was the most famous product traded, but China had nearly nothing to do with creating the routes.
This might be a very dumb question but wasn't the point (or, at least, the conspiracy theory) behind a lot of BRI projects that the borrowing governments would have to default on them, allowing Chinese officials to repossess the projects, run them directly and gain even stronger leverage over the borrowing countries? If BRI sputters out but ends up with a vast chain of African and Asian countries in a forced debt alliance with China, that might be harsh but it doesn't strike me as necessarily a bad thing for Beijing.
That angle is a little overhyped in the MSM. Informed expert consensus appears to be rather that most (all?) of the projects are intended as legitimate ventures and the defaults are simply due to the fact that, CCP and Chinese banks/lenders being relatively new to this type of work at this scale, they just weren't very good at picking projects; apparently the same has happened to other countries (like the US) making their first big forays into major international development.
BRI funding is no worse than the West's terrible record of resource transference from Africa while leaving the host countries in poverty. eg IMF policies: Instant Misery Fund. Whereas China is building real infrastructure like ports, rail, and road. etc
Vaccines: so China's are not as good as the West's? Maybe so. And China is quick to lock-down?
Yes, and in 2020 its economy grew by c.2%, with less than 5K covid deaths in total; while the US economy contracted by 3.5%. and I don't need to mention the quantum of the unnecessary sacrifice of American lives in the name of economic efficiency.
Re the aging population: China will soon be investing more in AI than the US, so an aging workforce will decrease in significance as the nation's productivity increases regardless of population. And re your concerns about government debt..... well you reject MMT ... so good luck with Biden's spending proposals.
So you are among the few Westerners who are prepared to accept on its merit the Chinese assertion that the Xinjiang "genocide" narrative is nonsense. Well done.
Another out of turn assumption. Also, if there are no human rights violations of the people of Xinjiang, why is China so focused on ensuring zero transparency? Allow independent investigations to happen if they have nothing to hide. Stop trolling 'Neil Halliday'
China has invited anyone who doesn't want to claim, for ideological reasons, re-education camps in Xinjiang are human rights abusers. God knows backward Islamist fundamentalists need re-education...and employment to lift them out of poverty.
Islamist fundamentalists - like all religious fundamentalists - harbor terrorists among their ranks. The US solution - bomb them into submission - failed in Afghanistan; the Chinese re-education camps will have more success and save lives at the same time. The Xinjiang "genocide" narrative is nonsense designed to contain China's inexorable rise. Interestingly a decade ago the US was willing to designate Uighur extremists as terrorists along with all other extremist Muslim groups. But now that has changed because China is threatening US global hegemony, simply because China's economy is on the way to surpassing the US. The US cannot stop that process, the sooner they face that, the better for all of us.
A "distinct people" among whom are some who hold fundamentalist religious beliefs which engender terrorism. Re-education is the only realistic solution to that problem.
btw, Xi is not Josef who was attempting to run an economy via state planning alone. Xi is much smarter, allowing as much private enterprise as is necessary to incentivize the population, while still intervening on behalf of intelligent state development goals, something free markets by themselves frequently fail to achieve.
The Wuhan death toll was certainly underestimated, as can be seen from the spike in deaths last spring, but outside Hubei the death toll has been very low. And it is not like the death toll hasn't been underestimated in other countries either.
Sounds like somebody didn't read China Beige Book's reporting on what the "growth" in China in 2020 actually was, i.e. government-directed spending to artificially inflate GDP and reach positive growth (while ballooning debt) even as consumption remained below pre-pandemic levels.
Sounds like you haven't read the latest report from British economists who say China is now set to surpass the US in 2028, five years earlier than previously estimated, due to coid. Not long to wait now...
Er... so you are claiming China went backwards in 2020, like every other major economy? OK. yet the British economists I mentioned brought forward their estimate of when China surpasses the US, BECAUSE of the pandemic. Oh wait, those economists are fake news, I get it... well, not long to find out if they are...
Wow, we have some angry wumao in the chat today, huh?
For my money, by far the biggest question is how the CCP will handle the rapidly-unfolding demographic crisis. Pretty much everything else stems from this. It poses serious threats to the CCP's ability to continue plowing huge amounts of money into military modernization and foreign projects, and also undercuts the overall narrative of a rising, vitalist China vs. an enervated West; China is about to become a far older society than the US even as it potentially surpasses the US economically.
In the short term, I imagine Beijing is also rather uneasy right now due to the COVID outbreak in India, specifically in how it mirrors the CCP's COVID strategy in terms of India having sent large quantities of vaccine abroad. I don't expect that the CCP will have any similar issues at home, as their ability to snuff out any outbreaks before they balloon out of control is pretty robust (and I certainly hope that they're able to keep it under control!) but given the huge quantities of vaccines they've sent abroad, they really cannot afford any kind of outbreak domestically.
I think, honestly, the demographic problem won't hit them for another 2-3 decades. The Chinese are so far from the Tech frontier in so many sectors and only about 33% as productive as the OECD average (with an even greater lag in the Services sector), that they have quite a few low-hanging fruits left to pick. A few careful reforms surrounding Hukou (already steadily occurring), education (Scott Rozelle did amazing research on the urban-rural education divide) and the high-tech sector (institutional reform and not simply throwing money) alone could bring substantial long-term benefits which will outweigh any drag from demographic problems.
A 600 million strong labour force with 300 million educated professionals is infinitely more useful and productive than a 750 million strong labour force with only 100 million such professionals.
There has been no shortage of criticism of the BRI from the beginning. Too many mediocre projects have been funded. Nationally many Chinese wonder why China should fund poor countries when there is no shortage of domestic problems.
Now with BRI losing momentum, this may be the perfect time for other Eurasian actors (like India, EU, ASEAN, Russia, Japan) to join and shape the BRI, somewhat on the model of the AIIB.
Let's not forget how badly their one child policy and the large, lonely male populous is going to hurt them in the long run. They're going to be a noticeable source of instability.
Huge numbers of people everywhere are choosing to live alone these days. Could be a result of overcrowding on the planet; certainly many women are choosing careers over making babies.
"Could be a result of overcrowding on the planet"
Alright, you're an idiot, I get it.
What you don't get is that women have fewer babies as living standards rise. China had to short-circuit that process.
Generally, you want a gradual population pyramid with slowing growth.
China atm has a population pagoda. It's a legitimately big issue.
Also, "overcrowding on the planet" isn't a thing, at least not atm
1. Biodiversity loss and ecological pollution are related to population pressures.
2. If you understand how money is created (in treasuries and CBs of sovereign governments) you will know how living standards can rise despite falling working age populations and rising retired populations (which together have a smaller demand on resources), including in China given the now massive productive capacity of that nation which is increasingly turning to AI enabled production.
Malthusian/ Keynesian / MMT Fantasies
" China had to short-circuit that process."
But they failed because living standards are still much poorer than nations with higher living standards ie South Korea, Taiwan who also have low birth rates
Raising the living standards of 1.4 billion people at the fastest rate in history is not failure. Population changes need not hinder continuation of that outcome. See MMT.
sounds like you haven’t noticed any discussions in Chinese in respect of China‘s shrinking birth rate yet, weird that you put China in your bio
Yes. The one child policy was misguided, to say the least. Still the fertility rate in China, while low, is higher than the neighbours without that policy.
The issue isn't so much the aging population. That's an issue, but an issue lots of places have. It's the population pagoda. A look at China's population pyramid shows how extreme it is
I'd say the real issue is China is rapidly aging (and possibly soon shrinking) DESPITE THE FACT THAT IT'S NOT YET A HIGH INCOME COUNTRY.
Japan, Italy, and other rich countries will muddle through because they possess considerable resources (relative to the overall size of the population) with which to meet the challenge of caring for a large numbers of old people. China? Not so much.
A couple of points made my Michael Pettis:
(a) BRI problems due ot over-confidence and inexperience. Pettis compares US experience of lending to South America long ago. The Brtish had learned how to do it. Basically what Noah says.
(b) G DP is an input figure. The CCP sets it and local governments and SOEs do what is needed to meet it. But much is just wasted infrastructure investment and house building. GDP goes up (for that year) but debt is increased while the wasteful investments do not increase debt servicing capacity. Does this matter? Chinese seem to think so because they are trying to constrain debt. What happens, though, if they just keep going? Pettis is rather coy here. You can mention the Japanese experience, decades of lower growth, but actually Japan seems to be doing OK.
The question for me is what happens in a closed economy when the government prints money to fund various favoured projects, taxing as need be to control inflation. Perhaps you cease to have a market economy and instead have a command economy as in the old Soviet Union?
The modes of failure of a debt driven Chinese economy are in the end a mystery to me.
Ah - look at this from Pettis just now: https://twitter.com/michaelxpettis/status/1386973424988344320?s=20
Didn't see it mentioned - perhaps it's implicit - but the biggest risk I see for their government is managing the labor share of income falling to their middle class (such as it is). Their export dominance (which they're trying to solidify through belt and road) depends upon keeping wages down. History shows us that labor can only tolerate this for so long once they get a taste of rising standards of living. That class / labor challenge will define their political and economic challenges going forward. It either ends in political change or rising labor / middle class share of income and a shift away from an export-driven economy.
At least, that's what I've picked up so far from Trade Wars are Class Wars. Would love your take on that book's thesis if you've heard of it @Noah.
If you include the environmental devastation (not accounted for in GDP of course... where it perversely generates more GDP as you pay to fix it) properly, i.e. account for depreciation in natural assets, then the screw ups date back much longer. If you don't bother measuring depreciation in your capital stock, then profits can look very high...until they don't.
When 70% of your groundwater is unsafe due to pollution and toxins, plus top-soil, plus the loss of wealth due to air-pollution related sickness and costs, it doesn't look quite so omnipotent in the first place. The inequality caused by the pro-producer policy legacy, etc. Although I agree that there is a bizarre acceptance of some kind of China-rise inevitability around much of the world, and that the SARS2 / Vaccine Fail / BRI issues have dented this odd belief.
But for natural capital etc, counter-factuals should be kept in mind as money is spent fixing these problems. GDP doesn't equal wealth sometimes. Not to mention the spiralling credit-to-GDP rates that are needed to keep growing.
On the BRI, the "miracle" of no strings attached investment (actually a lot of strings, just not the "western" ones of transparency/anti-corruption/AML/HR) that pre-dated BRI in Africa, has partially dissolved. Venezuela (China development bank anyone?..loans backed up with crude!!!, Egypt, Libya etc are all examples). Would love to see CDB's TCFD disclosures! Political risk and the dangers of propping up or doing massive investment deals with unstable regimes under poor governance will inevitably be coming home to roost in some cases. Is Myanmar in the BRI?
As an addition, so much of China's FDI loans are backed by carbon intensive resources (crude, mining output, etc). Much covered by TCFD or other disclosure standards. I wonder what a carbon price of $100 does to their risk profile? Or a requirement to account for TCFD style transition risks looks like? I don't think China can adopt TCFD given how much it would expose the economy to potential downgrades etc. But if the US does, or HK (like the UK already has announced), then Chinese banks and other big SOEs will be scrambling.
China still has a long way to grow if it is to provide most of its citizens with the lifestyle of a typical developed country. Whether or not it gets there is probably of more importance than any particular screw ups along the way. That said, a major screw up would probably remove the rose-tint from some observers glasses. The big potential screw-up with BRI seems to me to be the potential for forgein entanglements when the investments sour. Military misadventure in the middle east is a traditional route to screw up that China will soon have the opportunity to partake in as the US pulls back.
An epic weird post.
Please stop shitposting about China. Your knowledge about east Asia is so weird, according to your past posts. In particular, the post that claims Taiwan is a civilization, which is the most laughable post I have ever seen.
Chinese vaccine is bad. So what? The U.S blocks its vaccine exports for the American first ideology as well as your fellow west friends who also block vaccine exports and hoard vaccines. So why does vaccine diplomacy fail when China exports a lot of vaccines while the U.S. is hoarding more than it needs? And don't you know the key of a vaccine is to prevent severe symptoms instead of preventing all new cases? The Chinese vaccine has the same level of efficacy level as the normal flu vaccine.
Claiming the one belt one road initiative has failed is also a bizarre point. CCP has successfully expanded its political influence and exported its overcapacity to foreign countries. You should write a serious academic paper to say the initiative does not affect the local economy instead of using a handful of examples. I think a lot of journals will be highly interested in this topic.
Most importantly, an advice form a Chinabro if you want to write something seriously about East Asia and China. Stop being brainwashed by your domestic propaganda media and read some serious books about what is going on. Sincerely, you look like a reverse-engineered wumao to just say "China bad". I think CCP propaganda should learn something from American media like CNN and fox news about how brainwashing its own people and even intellectuals.
Whilst Noah actually supplied citations and examples, you're unable to even cite examples, just simple denial. Seems like major cope, especially on asserting that BRI has been "successful". By what metric? What evidence?
Citations and examples? Noah did notice that China has raised the living standards of more people than any country in history. The only negatives he could find were the BRI and the vaccines (while the murderous "freedom loving" US neoliberal economic regime has cost over half a million lives so far in the pandemic) and the debt nonsense followed by the mainstream, including by the US puppet the IMF aka "Instant Misery Fund".
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=47328
'The IMF is all at sea, stuck in its ways, and sending conflicting signals'.
"Noah did notice that China has raised the living standards of more people than any country in history."
How is this at all relevant to the BRI?
"while the murderous "freedom loving" US neoliberal economic regime has cost over half a million lives so far in the pandemic"
How exactly did the US "murder" these people? This is just a bunch of whatboutisms. The US is leading the world in vaccinations.
Yet again, you didn't cite anything here regarding the BRI being a success, actually try and not be an idiot.
If the US regime is "murderous" how would you characterize a political regime which starved literally tens of millions of its own citizens to death & ordered regular duty military troops to open fire on peaceful protestors?
30 years ago. Let's look at the present, with China's economy set to overtake the US in 2028 (google it).
Pro tip, don't keep going back to your 2028 talking point, it outs you as a really obvious wumao.
Its from a British economic think tank not pro chinese; I suggest you dont keep looking back 3 decades.
Uigur/Tibet genocide?
Uighur Islamist fundamentalist terrorists? Ancient poverty culture in Tibet?
I don’t know whether you know or not, the GDP of China surpassing the USA has been discussed since early 2000s (sorry I don’t remember precise date), and it was 2020 that the original reports predicted at the time. But you know it didn’t happened by the time
Now in pre-COVID 2019, it was before about 2035, and then now because of COVID, the prediction is adjusted to 2028.
But, recently, China’s rapidly declining, thus accordingly ageing population, been reported.
So, for certain, it will surpass, but the prediction is hard question answer as well.
You sound like a CCP troll.
What sectors could stimulus have gone in that is more productive? tech and semiconductors?? if so, then isn't that their aim now?
Is this an internal or external perception of omnipotence? As far back as I remember, China’s government comes across in the news as pretty jacked up, with pervasive corruption, lots of unrest, and bad environmental problems. I’d compare to US government, which has also been pretty jacked up for most of its history. Apparently municipal corruption was massive in the 1800s — and America grew rapidly in wealth, power, and population at that same time. Some failures called out here seem to be pretty ordinary failures of government: every state goes in for big investments and often fails.
Fundamentals like an overaged population seem important, though. On the other side, a huge population could be a big advantage.
And, of course, if results stop being so good, internal perceptions will change. I think it’s very likely. It’s easier to catch up, so gains will probably slow over time. Prosperity will probably shift values from survival to self-expression, giving people more scope to criticize and debate. I think approval ratings are really high only when the state can control the narrative.
There is an opportunity for China, though. US-type government is obsolescent, as will be the Chinese government of China reaches a similar wealth level. So, having a different, newer, less old-regime-encrusted government, China might more successfully adapt to present conditions and leapfrog electoral democracy. And that might even be what US government needs, a spur to innovate and perform.
I think this is a good, thought-provoking piece from Noah. But its a realization which hit many/most of us in the China-watching community as far back as c.2015, with the epic stock market meltdown AND the ensuing RMB devaluation crisis.
Ultimately, no government is omnipotent.
China: Italy's demographics, Mexico's wealth.
Seems bad.
Is it possible that with Belt & Road there will be a round 2 and they will take all these lessons and do much better the next time…kind of like when Amazon launched the Fire Phone and though it flopped, it derived a lot of important lessons that made the failure (likely) value accretive
There's two kinds of believing-your-own-propaganda failures in Belt and Road. One is that international development banks are imperialist tools for imposing control over local policy. They're not actually very useful for that, and when attempted tends to attract take-the-money-and-runners. The other is that China has a glorious history as architect of the Silk Road. Really that was an Iranian network built on the old Achaemenid and before that Iraqi empires' networks of royal stations, where provinces were required to provide markets to marching imperial armies instead of having them plunder the provinces every time they came through. Later the Mongolian empire mimicked this opening another more northern route. China's silk was the most famous product traded, but China had nearly nothing to do with creating the routes.
This might be a very dumb question but wasn't the point (or, at least, the conspiracy theory) behind a lot of BRI projects that the borrowing governments would have to default on them, allowing Chinese officials to repossess the projects, run them directly and gain even stronger leverage over the borrowing countries? If BRI sputters out but ends up with a vast chain of African and Asian countries in a forced debt alliance with China, that might be harsh but it doesn't strike me as necessarily a bad thing for Beijing.
That angle is a little overhyped in the MSM. Informed expert consensus appears to be rather that most (all?) of the projects are intended as legitimate ventures and the defaults are simply due to the fact that, CCP and Chinese banks/lenders being relatively new to this type of work at this scale, they just weren't very good at picking projects; apparently the same has happened to other countries (like the US) making their first big forays into major international development.
Wishful thinking.
BRI funding is no worse than the West's terrible record of resource transference from Africa while leaving the host countries in poverty. eg IMF policies: Instant Misery Fund. Whereas China is building real infrastructure like ports, rail, and road. etc
Vaccines: so China's are not as good as the West's? Maybe so. And China is quick to lock-down?
Yes, and in 2020 its economy grew by c.2%, with less than 5K covid deaths in total; while the US economy contracted by 3.5%. and I don't need to mention the quantum of the unnecessary sacrifice of American lives in the name of economic efficiency.
Re the aging population: China will soon be investing more in AI than the US, so an aging workforce will decrease in significance as the nation's productivity increases regardless of population. And re your concerns about government debt..... well you reject MMT ... so good luck with Biden's spending proposals.
You seem to have an unusually high confidence of China's covid reporting
Yes ....no doubt as much confidence as you have in the West's "genocide" narrative in Xinjiang....
Cheerlead China all you want, but at least don't make out of turn assumptions.
So you are among the few Westerners who are prepared to accept on its merit the Chinese assertion that the Xinjiang "genocide" narrative is nonsense. Well done.
Another out of turn assumption. Also, if there are no human rights violations of the people of Xinjiang, why is China so focused on ensuring zero transparency? Allow independent investigations to happen if they have nothing to hide. Stop trolling 'Neil Halliday'
China has invited anyone who doesn't want to claim, for ideological reasons, re-education camps in Xinjiang are human rights abusers. God knows backward Islamist fundamentalists need re-education...and employment to lift them out of poverty.
Islamist fundamentalists - like all religious fundamentalists - harbor terrorists among their ranks. The US solution - bomb them into submission - failed in Afghanistan; the Chinese re-education camps will have more success and save lives at the same time. The Xinjiang "genocide" narrative is nonsense designed to contain China's inexorable rise. Interestingly a decade ago the US was willing to designate Uighur extremists as terrorists along with all other extremist Muslim groups. But now that has changed because China is threatening US global hegemony, simply because China's economy is on the way to surpassing the US. The US cannot stop that process, the sooner they face that, the better for all of us.
A "distinct people" among whom are some who hold fundamentalist religious beliefs which engender terrorism. Re-education is the only realistic solution to that problem.
btw, Xi is not Josef who was attempting to run an economy via state planning alone. Xi is much smarter, allowing as much private enterprise as is necessary to incentivize the population, while still intervening on behalf of intelligent state development goals, something free markets by themselves frequently fail to achieve.
The Wuhan death toll was certainly underestimated, as can be seen from the spike in deaths last spring, but outside Hubei the death toll has been very low. And it is not like the death toll hasn't been underestimated in other countries either.
Sounds like somebody didn't read China Beige Book's reporting on what the "growth" in China in 2020 actually was, i.e. government-directed spending to artificially inflate GDP and reach positive growth (while ballooning debt) even as consumption remained below pre-pandemic levels.
Sounds like you haven't read the latest report from British economists who say China is now set to surpass the US in 2028, five years earlier than previously estimated, due to coid. Not long to wait now...
Yes, and? We’re talking about your blind belief in the 2020 growth stats, which are not reflected by the actual reality on the ground.
Er... so you are claiming China went backwards in 2020, like every other major economy? OK. yet the British economists I mentioned brought forward their estimate of when China surpasses the US, BECAUSE of the pandemic. Oh wait, those economists are fake news, I get it... well, not long to find out if they are...
Hello wumao!
You know you won the argument when your conversant brings out the "wumao" comment.