vetiarvind said:
I don't think that China will be as big a superpower. For one, 50% of their current GDP is export-driven, with most of their assets being in the form of US dollars. If the US economy sinks, China will be hit so badly it would not be able to recover for a long time. So, China will have to keep investing the dollars they have into the US economy to make sure that the US does not slump. They're doing this currently by buying trillions of dollars worth US treasury bonds.
Rather than sole dominance by China, my guess is that in fifty years, you would have 4 super-powerful economic blocs - China, US, India and EU.
This is the reason that a very deep recession is likely to happen soon in china.
They already produced way too much before the financial crisis hit here. and the government is overspending to compensate for the loss of export revenues.
But china has a greater potential to recover economically than the U.S.
In the past decade the chinese GDP has grown from around 1000 billion dollars to 5500 billion dollars, while the USA has grown from around 10.000 billion to around 14.500 billion while the EU has grown from 12.000 billion to around 17.000 billion.
The EU, the USA and canada, japan and the chinese internal market itself have enough size for china to grow a lot more. There will be a tipping point when the internal market will have grown enough for china to be less dependant on export, while it still may be only 10% of the chinese people who have decent incomes.
At the same time, the economies of the west and japan, will be less able to grow because eventually also high-skilled labour will be done cheaper in china.
Most economic models assume that if jobs vanish in the develloped world to underdevelloped countries, this creates space for new technologies and therefore new markets and new jobs to grow. I find this model naively optimistic, since it assumes A-that there always will come new technologies that can replace the place old technologies took in our economy and i don't see any new sector that could replace for instance the automotive industry soon and B- i don't see why china couldn't be creating those new jobs as well.
Why would the west always be technologically superiour?
China is already much more advanced than the west in many fields of technology.
The thing is: chinese leaders have no moral objections standing in their way and no democratic corrective measures, to organize their economy to become the largest economy in the world. Even if there still would be millions of people living in extreme poverty and slavery.
If the USA doesn't care if 20% of it's population lives in poverty, why would a regime like the chinese care if 80% of it's population would live in even worse conditions if the 20% rich chinese people would give anough economic mass to have a functioning internal market?
I hope we would have these 4 economic bloc's AND i hope that the west would firstly become more united and secondly would form alliances with countries that might devellop into decent democracies like india.
A powerfull india would be a very desireable thing: a 4-bloc's scenarion would prevent a bipolar coldwar-like world order, and it could help tame as well western as chinese imperialism. It could also help establish a new world order where things like peacekeeping are organized more efficiently.
In the past ten years though, the indian economy has grown only from around 900 billion dollars to around 1400 billion dollars. India is economically still a dwarf next to china. It would, depending on how you measure just fall ouside or inside the top ten of largest economies in the world.
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