[miguelazo]

Yeah, I’ve seen these stories before. And all from the usual suspects. Quick, someone find the tweet with the 10 Economist magazine covers about China collapsing. You know, the ones that used to come out every 5 years and now come out every year.

Someone could easily cherry pick stories about the US and make the same argument. Unsustainable debt, rampant homelessness and addiction, lifespan and healthspan plummeting, birth rates dropping, etc.

[Animats]

There's an observation in "How Asia Works", by Joe Studwell that all the successful Asian countries grew at about 10% per year as they industrialized, because you can do that by copying the developed world and exporting while paying low wages. Once they caught up, growth dropped to about 5%, because then you have to do something new and pay people more. Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, etc. all followed that path. Countries can screw up and do much worse - Cambodia, North Korea, etc. China is now about at the point where the growth rate drops to 5%. This is not a disaster.

[AstralStorm]

It is a disaster but not for the Chinese. The capitalists elsewhere won't have such cheap labor that's passably educated and has ready access to infrastructure.

Africa and South America would take major investing to bring up to that point.