[Kholo]

I found this talk with Niall Ferguson and Samantha Power pretty fascinating about the US - China power balance changing. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8yghOc-lMIM

Just one mindblowing fact from the talk - China has poured more concrete in the last two years than the US in the last hundred.

[iiiggglll]

It's like everything in Dan Ligon's satirical video from 10 years ago came true:

http://cargocollective.com/danligon/filter/current-tv/Ha-Ha-...

[Cyph0n]

Thank you for the link; Harvard Kennedy School talks and guest lectures are almost always a fascinating watch.

Shameless plug: the former president of Tunisia (my country) was invited for a talk there around a month ago[1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1aviBRogZY

[agumonkey]

China is a hot mass, people look at it as valuable energy, but it seems it lacks structure to be able to handle itself without risk of collapse. I don't wish them to fail, I just wish things to evolve smoothly and peacefully.

[thablackbull]

> it seems it lacks structure to be able to handle itself without risk of collapse.

Could you clarify? China was stable for like a millennium while Europe was fighting each other to no end.

[agumonkey]

I meant as internal structure, not international stability.

[ori_b]

I don't know what that means.

[awkwardtortoise]

China has 1.1 billion more people than the US. They have bet big on megalopolis ( the bejing centered, shanghai centered and the chonging centered ). Combined, these 3 megalopolis will have a population larger than the US. China has 110 cities with 1 million people. The US has 10. And china is at 55% urbanization while the US is 80%+ urban so china still has hundreds of millions of people to urbanize.

Also, some economists say that data is the new "resource" of wealth ( the next oil ). If that is true, then china is the saudi arabia of data. Given their smartphone penetration and the size of the population and the continued urbanization.

Also, china is now building a hundred colleges every year. This is reminiscent of the US in the 1850-1900 when we went on a college building spree ( stanford, MIT, stevens, purdue, michigan state, cornell, UC, UT, endless list ) as a result of our economic growth. And it wasn't too long before we outstripped the british empire as the largest economy in the world and kept growing.

There are tons of reasons to expect that china will continue to grow and outstrip the US in the near future. But there are stark differences as well. China's growth isn't in a "asian-centric" world like the US growth was in a "western-centric" world. US overtaking britain wasn't as traumatic and/nor resisted event. The US has the most farmland, diverse territories stretching from the arctic to the caribbean to the western pacific. We had allies/etc that china lacks. We had the resources/oil/etc that china doesn't. So there are a lot of headwinds for china.

It should be interesting how things pan out. Considering our position in the western pacific ( a bazillion bases surrounding china ), I don't see how eventually, there won't be a war between china and the US. I don't see how china doesn't push us out of their 'backyard' sooner or later.

[cinquemb]

The thing is, I don't think this will end well for the US as long as its politically feasible to maintain the huge "investment" (political/economic) in military infrastructure that will provide nothing that will look like returns compared to a huge economic push would.

I'd say China benefits the longer the US is "forced" to spend what amounts a little more than half of this infrastructure project every year.

At best, I think the military expenditures the US puts out is good for protecting economic assets for all interested parties in/through volatility high areas, but it's not exactly something that all parties contribute to maintaining in proportion of the benefits they receive from it.

I don't really know what war in the 21st century will look like (I have some ideas), but so far it doesn't seem like its benefiting many people outside of those who get the contracts to enable such war making. So it seems like in stalemate that's present now, and arguably has been in place since ww2, it seems like non-state actors have more to gain.