Political & Economic Lessons from China

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http://econintersect.com/b2evolution/bl ... from-china

This is a great articale which sheds some light on the China is a threat myth most americans believe.

Good articale sis the West can learn a lot from China to bad america hates smart people.

I understand that China is starting to export jobs to Vietnam.

people overestimate the threat of China.

yes they have a huge work force of a billion people, because of the large population growth in the mid to late 20th century, but laws have been enacted to reduce population growth.

so this large population will eventually go from work force to retired. and to support the large amount of retired people is a smaller reduced population.

so china is a ticking time bomb, but then again so is the US

i think you are confusing japan with china,
japan has a huge issue with different generations, china not so much (still happens like in the rest of the industrialized world)

while japan has that problem, china does also.

keep in mind comparing china's large population growth compared to its reduced population growth by the one-child policy.

a billion people working will turn to a billion people retiring eventually.

i did point out it still happens,

in countries like japan and to some extent denmark there is a current problem, not a future one.

any industrializing society will have to contend with these issues at one point as fertility rates are dramatically lower in industrialized countries.

the one child policy is also far from an absolute in china.

The article is rubbish.

China has been able to grow an impressive amount in percentage terms over the last couple of decades not because it discovered some fantastic system but because it was starting out from a very low position left over from the policy of agrarian communism.

It also gave up that agrarian ideology and converted to a mercantilist position at exactly the right time to benefit from two extraordinary gifts.

The first was demographics, it had at the time a big pool of reasonably educated and young workers being under exploited.
A developed world willing to destroy it's own manufacturing base and relocate for short term profit.

The demographic gift will end by 2015 and China will find itself having to support more and more unproductive and expensive elderly citizens with a shrinking pool of workers.

There is not a great deal left in the developed world that hasn't already been exported or stolen (Intellectual Property), so fairly soon China will have to start generating it's own growth.

So lets look at this quote from the article:


China is heading into quite a few problems, not just the demographic one, the Chinese people have been willing to accept the current hardships on the promise that things will improve quickly, if the Chinese leadership can not deliver this growth social unrest will get worse.

I assume you did realise that there was quite a lot of rioting in China?

Tens of thousands of riots per year?
Government buildings getting burned to the ground?
Disgruntled ex workers blowing up factories or the spate of attacking schools and murdering children?
The army killing hundreds to suppress riots?

And then of course there is the debt, if you think China is stuffed full of prosperous wealthy people you may be in for a shock. The average one bed apartment in Beijing is 31 times the average salary in Beijing, you thought you had a bad property bubble?

And of course government debt.

Did you think the Chinese had no debt and an endless sovereign wealth fund? Think again. If you take just a single layer, local government debt it is likely that there is over 1-1.5 trillion US dollars worth of bad debt swilling around the system. Nobody quite knows how much, which is exactly the way the Chinese government like it, corruption, secrecy and calming promises that the problem doesn't exist.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/ ... 1L20111010


Anyway, back to the article:



So having derided democracy and bigged up autocracy, the author finishes up with a quote from Cicero claiming 'the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered'.

How exactly is autocracy a tempering of officialdom? Autocracy is handing over all rights to an unaccountable officialdom ffs!

Cicero never said that. Despite that being a widely circulated quote, there is no legitimate documentation or historical evidence attributing that to him.

China is a threat. They are an enviromental threat.



http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/world ... wanted=all


The U.S. and many other industrialized countries finally saw the terrible dangers of letting businesses do whatever was best for their bottom line and enacted enviromental regulations. Hopefully this isn't too little too late but it is something. China allows industry to do literally whatever it wants to the enviroment. This allows for fast economic growth but at a price that is paid by the entire planet, not just the increasingly poisoned Chinese. I know it's hypocritical for the West to point fingers at China after over a century of enviromental degradation done before regulations (and the degradations in the West continue even if greatly slowed because corporations always try to figure ways to weasel around the regulations). But even so, I don't think it's ok for them to pollute such a hefty chunk of the planet in the name of fairness and having their turn.

Their economic "miracle" is a lot like our own past. It's built on uncontrolled and unsustainable growth that trashes the enviroment in the name of progress. We did that too and are trying very hard to pull back from it because it's such a bad idea even if it leads to fast economic growth. It's also similar to our own past because- like DC points out- they are just closing the gap that comes by industrializing an agrarian economy. If you go from agrarian to heavy industry, then of course you get fast growth- especially if that industry is unregulated. We did that too and enjoyed fast growth but it is unsutainable and it destroys the enviroment. In order to be just like China, we would have to trash quite a lot of regulations. We would speed up growth, but we would pay the same price that they are paying: poisoning and death. We already are paying that because of our industrialization but we have put the brakes on it to some extent.

People always overestimate Chinas growth potential. They may be around 1.2 billion people, but only 10% of those are up to southern European standard. That's maby, tops, 140 Million people.

Europe is +450 Million people, at least half of those have above decent living conditions, The us is +400(?) millions, same goes there. Chinas "greatness" is severely overrated.

However, they are willing to do things that the west wont which gives them growth potential. They probably would strike a deal with the Talibans for mineral rights in Afghanistan while supporting their extremist ideology as long as there were "stability". They would probably make a similar deal for oil in Africa with similar totalitarian states.

This is what makes China a problem - their total lack of respect for human rights.

Americans benefited from moving away from manufacturing, primarily because we no longer have to work in manufacturing. I don't think that most of you kids realize just how much that kind of work sucks. The way you are treated is abysmal, and safety standards are generally treated as a joke if they even exist. Those kinds of jobs sucked so much egg that some of the bloodiest revolutions in history were fought over them.

But something the Chinese know because they have enough intelligence to read the handwriting on the wall is that, if they keep manufacturing there long enough, they'll eventually have everything mechanized. What they don't have mechanized, they can just out-source. Then they can become spoiled and fat, like the Americans, which doesn't seem like such a bad idea when you have to work in horrible manufacturing jobs.

If enough people make fun of the Chinese over their environmental problems, they'll catch on eventually and start doing some reforms.

It does nothing of the sort. This is nothing more than an encomium to the "trickle down" myth.

If the choice is between the US system and the Chinese system, then I say, "A plague 'a both your houses!"