[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.

[robot_no_421]

China is facing severe demographic issues for the next 20-30 years due to their terribly short sighted one-child policy and their poor immigration rates. Literally the opposite of what you're saying. Where on earth did you get your facts from?

[whimsicalism]

With the population edge they have, they will still have more young people than us. More of their output will have to go for caring for the elderly, but that will scale with technology.

[dirtyid]

Not Zeihan tier demographic analysis which is a start.

PRC currently generating ~5m STEM per year, aka OECD combined, multiple times more than US has ability to train or brain drain. And relatively proven ability to coordinate talent. Project that out next 20-30s from previous 20-30 years of birth rate and PRC on trend to add 50M-100M STEM to workforce, just STEM, not including other skilled workers, which is the greatest high skill demographic divident in recorded history. Literally no country in the world, at any time in the past or projected future has better demographics for actual global competition than PRC in the next 30 years. Including India who will have more people, but have all the issues you noted that will likely prevent them from actually coordinating human capita enmass successfully in the time it takes their youth demographic divident to expire.

Contrary to naive PRC demographic pyramid bomb arguments that doesn't address what you correctly note below - quality of human capita. By 2050, PRC is going to add more STEM talent than US is projected to increase population. All the news of PRC climbing up value chains, leading in science and innovation indexes from last few years? Or moving from 1T to 18T economy. Done by growing STEM from ~2M to ~17M STEM exploited via industrial policy that west is now copying. PRC is moving from workforce with 25% skilled talent to 60/70/80 of modern economies with 60% and increasing tertiary education rate that biases towards science will look weak on per capita stats due to huge existing cohort of old / undereducated, but it absolute terms it's a demographic advantage no country currently has conditions to remotely rival. Then note how net population decline will reduce resource dependency and you basically have the most optimal mix of demographic trend for PRC with respect to geopolitical competition.

Are those demographic issues difficult to govern/manage? Yes, but they're also close to ideal conditions for improving comprehensive national power within PRC's constraints. PRC's big population = with big demographic curse but also big demographic divident post 2050s. But they don't cancel each other out. Likelt follow JP/SKR trend where TFR collapsed in the 80s/90s but GDP increased 500% because workforce was net gaining skilled/productive people, while losing unskilled. JP (and later SKR) are/will only entering process of real stagnation when TFR cannot replace level of skilled labour at parity. Which for PRC is a post 2050 problem and even then countries will be competing with a PRC roughly 3-5x larger than now.

On the actual demographic curse of aging, the blessings of huge segment of PRC old getting old before they get rich is there simply isn't going to be high expectations for advanced economy levels of welfare and social support. There's a reason PRC has 90% (96% in rural where poor concentrates) home ownership and very high household savings rate. Old expects to weather most of retirement without substantial state support and increasingly family support since they don't want to burden future gens. If you look at JP, old are basically rotting/dying alone, unceremoniously. In JP it's called Kodokushi, in SKR, it's godoksa, it's happening in HK as well. In households that pressure young for support, you know what the east-asian human response to that is? Being miserable whiel working even harder. Half the reason JP/SKR/TW lead in high end industries they currently dominate is because those societies have resigned to working 100% harder for 10% competitve advantage.

[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.

[whimsicalism]

The US' stated policy is global freedom of navigation and that has been the primary policy aim that they enforce since UNCLOS in 1982.

So no, they do not control access to the 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