China’s economy has been far more broken than right now, to the point millions starved to death, and no one dared to challenge to party. That’s before the CCP had automated surveillance everywhere.
So no, I don’t think the people will rise up. I think a broke up is much more likely when regional leaders feel the central government is robbing them of money that should’ve been theirs, and they have enough troops willing to listen to them.
No its broken. Their model is based on labor. how does that work when there is no more labor?
Manufacturing has been moved to the US and Mexico for years now. We just getting started.
People can feel how they want. We don’t want it to rain but here you go…there are external forces that dont affect us.
China has an empire yes…but WHY? How can it afford an “empire?” I’ll give you some hints: Made up metrics and momentum.
Vassal states? Which ones/. How do they import? Belt and road flopped.
It just isn’t. When did you last go to China? They have a highly advanced economy; China ceased being a sweatshop around the turn of the century. That doesn’t mean there aren’t still crappy parts of the country blighted by poverty, ignorance, corruption etc - but as a nation, China is perfectly capable of looking after itself. If there were an international blockade tomorrow, a shitload of export-oriented companies would evaporate and everyone would take a big hit in living standards. But the Chinese are used to that. They can remember what life-threatening poverty looks like. It won’t faze them. Westerners, in contrast, will retreat to the corner of their bedrooms and curl up in the fetal position when they realise that Amazon isn’t going to be bringing them any more cheap goodies.
TBH I think this idea of China as a fragile country perennially on the verge of collapse is just wishful thinking, seasoned with a bit of racism. Whatever you might think of their political system, their competence is absolutely fearsome.
Well yeah. Fact remains that they have one.
ah facts - lets see some.
I could easily see the wealthiest parts of China go off on their own. The western edges would go as well. Beijing would do what it could to keep the rest of the Mainland together.
So, as described in this map, half of “The Frontier” would depart like @hansioux said. “The Metropolis” (Yangtze River Delta = Shanghai + Jiangsu + Zhejiang) and “The Backdoor” (Pearl River Delta = Guangzhou + HK) would be highly motivated to establish themselves as major global economies, which they already are. Could Taiwan and Fujian move closer to each other?
Archive link of the original article from The Atlantic (2009)
https://archive.is/q1mva
And here is the US inspiration of that 2009 article
Plus a more recent update
What do you think of this?
Interesting.
I can imagine the KMT controlling the Straights - which is what it was originally I believe.
Yeah, but realistically, Mongolia, East Turkestan, and Tibet will never be a single nation. Buddhists and Muslims living together, mass hysteria and all that.
Probably not on its own. But there are weird instances of nations like Nigeria with different groups of people put into a country after western powers made it so.
I think maybe it would be better for everyone if China breaks up. It’s becoming more obvious the central government’s efforts to keep the entire country together is not paying off. They did amazing work in the rail system for example and tier 2 cities made a lot of effort to improve their infrastructure to attract more businesses. But I think all that spending is not a net positive going forward now it’s done and had its GDP boosts China boasted in the 2010s
Different regions can pursue their own goals and perhaps less focus on Taiwan being part of the their great empire again as the Middle Kingdom.
Regionally yes. But a lot of it has been propped up with subsidies that overestimate the real demand and sustainability of the industry. The solar panels industry for example collapse after China wanted to be the world leader and they were at once. EV they’re just as advanced as any country with subsidies poured into it but you see the empty lots of EVs dumped into random lots?
It’s a strange hybrid capitalist communist central planning economy. It’s very artificial. You can say similar things about other countries but economies are fragile in general as they get more complex as we’ve seen during Covid.
Idk. Spoiled single children had their living standards substantially raised. Their youth are not happy, can say that about other places as well. But I’m not sure if it’s as you said.
You need to stop watching / reading wherever you’re getting that perception from. People are, of course, by and large focused on their work and families, and their lives in general. Like they always have.
What things?
Foreign debt owed to China: about US$400 billion (those numbers may be understated by half
Foreign debt owed by China: US 2.4 trillion (Official Chinese stats, probably understated)_
Yes and no. The woke nonsense subtly affects the way you behave if you know that the city down the road had BLM types or Hamas supporters going on the rampage yesterday, or if your local supermarket is putting locks on things to prevent shoplifting, or if you’re worried about whether you might say the wrong word in a meeting. These little issues all add up to a problem. They’re grit in the bearings of society. They prevent stuff happening smoothly.
The endpoint of this sort of thing is a society like Iran, where - yes - people get on with the everyday business of earning a crust and looking after their families. Of course they do. The alternative is to crawl into a corner and starve. But it’s an uphill struggle. You’re always looking over your shoulder when you really shouldn’t need to, so societies like Iran, despite being generally well-educated and with fairly strong economic fundamentals, and nevertheless mired in a twilight zone of semi-failure.
The best-case outcome is that people start pushing back and prevent that endpoint from occurring, as is now happening in Europe (and to a lesser extent in the US). But to do that people have to divert a lot of their time, energy and money into something they shouldn’t need to do - and that’s time, energy and money they’re not spending on productive tasks.
Good grief, where to even start? The short answer is “things that other countries have but the US does not have”. The US tax and business-regulation regime, for example, is one of the most convoluted on the planet. It makes it hard (depending on which State you’re in) to set up and run a business, while also encouraging dysfunctional behaviour if you have access to good lawyers and accountants. US labour laws are just … weird. They’re good for neither the employer nor the employee. The US education system is, not to put too fine a point on it, fucked. It’s currently churning out one of the most entitled, messed-up, and ignorant bunch of 18-year-olds in the country’s history. General state of health (physical and mental) is disastrous, which means there’s a far more limited pool of capable employees than you might expect.
The bottom line is that the US has a whole bunch of subtle problems that - in and of themselves - might not be a big deal. Put them all together and you find that the US simply cannot compete with China in manufacturing.
Have a think about it. Let’s say you wanted to “bring back” manufacturing of, I dunno, power tools to the US. AFAIK they’re now mostly made in the Far East. How exactly would you do that, while keeping your price point at the expected level? How much money would you have to invest? How long would it take you? It’d be years. Possibly a decade or more. And you’d still never be able to achieve the China price, because … well, China. So the only way you could possibly be successful is if you had a protectionist trade environment, which brings its own problems.
Ha. Or they make stuff work more smoothly. The other day, in a PI planning session, a developer.staryed talking about how it had to be better than Obamacare I til his St Manager shut him up. Would have been smoother if he worried a bit more about not saying the wrong things and behaved like a professional. In most things, moderation, be appropriate, and don’t swing too far to the extremes (seriously,.it’s 2024. let it go.)
But seriously, normal people aren’t worried about woke. We doing our thing.
Probably doable - DeWalt and Milwaukee did until recently, and still have a limited selection ofade in USA tools…
I mean, I haven’t exactly tly scoped out and priced a power tool plant before, so that’s a tough ask. 
But if you’ve got investors and are gonna be a big player, for initial investments,.I would guess it wouldn’t have to be too much more - cut a sweetheart deal someplace cheap, get subsidized land, and a nice tax credit for 10-20 years.
Hyundai is knocking out a $5.5B plant out here in 2 years. My old city in CA brought in a manufacturing company that knocked out a plant in a year, with a sweetheart deal for some 60 acres of land for a little over $1M (in LA county!). There are some nightmare stories on the bureaucracy, but you hear about them because they’re the crazy ones.
If China falls from its current economic ranking, India is most likely to take its place. The CCP isn’t relinquishing power in our lifetimes, and if they did it wouldn’t be the KMT taking their place. The KMT can’t even take back Taiwan, let alone China.
China would be split up into pieces but the supply chain powerhouse will probably remain partly in the Former PRC Area. Western Powers would make a leadership grab for one of the pieces — U.S. gets Shenzhen, Britain gets Hong Kong and Shanghai again, France gets etc etc. the West would have its vassal factory states.
The rest would apply to Russia, North Korea, Iran and other Chinese puppet states which would collapse after the fall of China. (Since they are all economically propped up by China)
Slightly off topic I know
If this unlikely scenario happens, well… we are not in the 19th/20th century situation anymore I hardly see a country like France taking any significant part in this “leadership grab”. (Maybe the EU but only in name and more as a puppet mask for the US)
We would be happy to offer these new countries some very nice submarines though (very new, very never used, very big discount !)
I for one did not know that. A quick search reveals Mexico was some 0.2% above Canada for the first four months of 2023, but that abnormality may have been corrected by now. Feel free to post the latest figures (and pass them on to the Wiki editors). 
