[natechols]

One thing that has been constant for at least a decade or more is that every time a lab in China publishes even an incremental advance, a legion of internet commenters descends to declare the end of US hegemony because Americans didn't discover it first.

[lost_tourist]

Yep "it's the end of science in the barbaric Western nations" crowd.

[andrepd]

Which is not to say that science in the capitalist western nations is not going through rough times, because it is?

[CPLX]

Is your argument that China’s increasing technical prowess will not inevitably result in the US hegemony ending?

[ajuc]

Japanese and South Korean increasing technical prowess didn't, why would Chinese be any different?

China has serious fundamental problems and if you account for its gigantic population - it's seriously underachieving not only compared to US, but even compared to the rest of the developed world.

It's fashionable to talk about China taking over, but it's far from guaranteed. China is pretty much confirmed to be falsifying its economic stats for example [1] [2] but people just take them at face value anyway. I don't understand why.

[1] https://www.voanews.com/a/satellites-shed-light-on-dictators... [2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-forensic-examination-of...

[birdyrooster]

> It's fashionable to talk about China taking over

It's not so much fashionable as it is literally state propaganda used to try and shoulder its way into the South China Sea and the Pacific by claiming it is so prosperous and populous that it is entitled to increasingly large sphere of influence and direct control.

[birdyrooster]

apologies for abusing the pronoun it

[whimsicalism]

> it's seriously underachieving not only compared to US, but even compared to the rest of the developed world.

This statement would have been viewed as absolutely obvious and ridiculous 2 decades ago. The fact that it even needs to be said now is indicating how fast they are advancing.

[ajuc]

They were underachieving for 2 centuries, ceasing to kill their own citizens by millions and imprisoning anybody who tried to think for themselves is enough to grow if you did so for a long time. But it does not make you a new hegemon.

I highly doubt they can preserve their pace of growth for next few decades without significant changes to the regime and liberalization.

Once they return to the mean - they will very likely slow down. Arguably they already did (3% official growth last year + people accusing them of falsifying data for 1-2 percentage points of growth each year would make them already grow slower than some western countries, including the US).

[scrlk]

> I highly doubt they can preserve their pace of growth for next few decades without significant changes to the regime and liberalization.

"Demographics is destiny" also comes to mind.

Note how the era of "Japan Inc." during the 1980s was also the time when the post-war baby boom population were in their 30s-40s (i.e. peak productive worker population). As this cohort has aged and are now in retirement, Japan's economic performance has tailed off.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#/media/F...

If you look at the Chinese population pyramid, we could already be at the point of maximum Chinese economic growth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#/media/F...

From the geopolitical standpoint, this may also explain why China and Russia have become more belligerent - they will lack sufficient numbers of young fighting aged men in the next few decades.

[whimsicalism]

The difference with the Japan case is that China is going to have a larger base of young, very well educated people than the US for at least the next century unless something changes dramatically with either birth rates or immigration.

[whimsicalism]

They do not need that many years of large growth to overtake the US in terms of size. Technologically they are pivoting to AI and the service economy much better than Japan, southeast Asia, etc.

[dingnuts]

No, it's evidence of how fast they advanced under Deng. It is unclear that the advancement is continuing / has continued into Xi's reign, especially since the beginning of his third term.

[whimsicalism]

It sorta sounds like you have no clue when Deng died.

[CPLX]

Those countries are allies.

China doesn’t believe in western democracy and has as a stated goal ending American hegemony.

It’s not even slightly confusing or subtle, not sure why American elitist types like to just handwave it away.

Actually I am sure. Everyone is making too much money. Until they aren’t.

[Dalewyn]

>Japanese and South Korean increasing technical prowess didn't, why would Chinese be any different?

Because while Japan and South Korea are the 51st and 52nd US states, China is a superpower vying to usurp the US as the preeminent world superpower.

[ajuc]

That just means China has it harder and is more likely to fail. Access to global markets is a critical factor in growth of Japan, South Korea and China. USA controls that.

[whimsicalism]

Internal markets in China are becoming increasingly robust and the US does not have control over global markets, that is nonsense.

[Dalewyn]

>Internal markets in China are becoming increasingly robust

I think this fact is being severely understated, perhaps even denied by almost everyone in the west.

The way the US-China cold war has been playing out, the US and friends keeps closing doors only for China to go "Go right ahead, I don't have to play ball." and just succeed even harder on their own. Adding insult to injury is they then take that success and just wholesale buy the doors the US keeps closing.

A surefire way to lose Pax Americana is to become delusional that Pax Americana is winning when by all accounts it's losing and losing hard. I think this ship can still have its course corrected, because Pax Americana is better for us than Pax China, but not if we just keep up this kabuki theatre.

[ajuc]

Access to global markets. I.e. oceans.

[yafbum]

Japan and South Korea are allies of the US. They are also much too small in population and resources to reach a level of economic power that would allow them to do anything on their own.

The Chinese Communist party has the resources, people and determination to follow a different course. It might underperform relative to its size, and the one-child policy is going to cause a disastrous demographic situation, but even if you consider just coastal, urban China, that's getting pretty close to US in terms of people and economic power. The communist party is developing its military capabilities at a fast clip, and fusing its military and civilian economies to accelerate its technical development. Where almost every other government has been unable to wrestle control of Internet information, the Chinese Communist party has successfully turned its version of the Internet into an effective tool of govt propaganda and social control.

In other words, there are lots and lots of very concrete reasons to believe that the post-development trajectory of China can be very different from Japan's or South Korea's.

[dirtyid]

Geopolitical competition is driven by absolute advantage not relative. At PRC scale, activing fraction of population to high skill is enough to compete with US+co, and PRC's fraction of that high skill talent is set to increase multiple times over coming decades. There's a reason why PRC moving from ~2M STEM to ~20M STEM grew economy from 1T to 19T and is at close to parity / at parity / even leading in full spectrum of industrial sectors whereas "small" countries like JP and SKR has to pick and choose where to compete. With PRC population they can do everything, and in fact can't not considering they're graduating ~5M STEM per year and will add more STEM (50-100M) than US will add population in next 30 years. PRC is not JP and SKR, and TW, it's on trend to be 4-6x JP+SKR+TW without the geopolitical constraints that prevent US partners from full competition against US in critical strategic industries.

>comfirmed falsifying

Here's a more rigours NBER light study on PRC GDP being underestimated by much more accomplished economists aka not retarded like Martinez study.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w23323

Here's a more comprehensive GDP resconstruction by Rhodium, leading economic search group that focus on PRC that also reports underestimation, ~10% by 2014. Including work by David Dollar, one of the more competent PRC economic analyst at Brookings that also led discussion of your second link, noting it had 2 models of over estimation and went with the much higher overestimation model vs the lower (basically marginal amount) one that was probably more correct.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/broken-abacus

No one takes PRC GDP reporting at face value, but anyone with half a brain can see PRC climbing western science and innovation indexes (controlled for quality), moving up global value chain, displacing other advanced economies in increasing amount of intermediate and final goods and doing all that rapidly in last 10 years that US basically needs to go full spectrum containment beyond what they did for USSR while acknowledge PRC is greater challenge then USSR ever was. Anyone with half a brain can also napkin math future skilled workforce between US @35M STEM + ~600K per year, vs PRC @20M STEM ~5M (M as in million) per year and understand PRC will have more STEM workforce than US in a few years, and possibly 2-3x more STEM by 2050 even factoring in PRC demographics. Cut that in half and PRC's future potential is still outrageous.

E: over post limit

E2: removed reply to deleted comment

[bobthepanda]

People said the same about Japan. The '80s and '90s was a bunch of media-fueled "the Japanese will run the world" hysteria.

Japan is a technical powerhouse but that doesn't inevitably lead to ending hegemony. It requires a lot of other work too.

[whimsicalism]

China has 1.2 billion people, I feel like it is basically an inevitability at this point.

[evgen]

1.2 billion _old_ people. While quantity has a quality all its own, in this case the demographics are not what you want to see if you are predicting long-term Chinese growth just based on population.

[missedthecue]

Median age China, 2022: 38.5

Median age USA, 2022: 38.9

[pizzalife]

Look at the actual age distributions rather than collapsing the data into a single number.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...

[natechols]

The only argument I'm making is that it's insane to draw sweeping geopolitical conclusions from the fact that Chinese scientists posted their attempts at reproducing a Korean lab's result on Twitter before the Americans did.

[ChatGTP]

I guess this is what happened after "the bomb" was developed ? The US could hold the world at ransom.