Yeah, plus a heap of other metrics. They were poor as fuck but now super technologically advanced and powerful.
Most of the overconfidence comes from a belief in US and Western decline, thanks to a few key events:
2008 Economic Crisis, they came out unscathed
Brexit
Trump
COVID-which they see as a victory and US shit the bed
The whole Trump insurrection stuff
BLM, US culture wars shit
From what can read, Is that they believe that their system is better for dealing with crisis and making reforms.
The government also has the advantage of a brainwashed populace who they don’t really give a fuck about. They also control all the media and there is no avenue for dissent
Right now they are telling people that they are entering a tough period but the tides are turning in their favour.
You are not able to have this conversation without getting emotional though, so it is basically pointless. You don’t want to read or acknowledge anything anyone says and are just looking for confirmation.
If you actually read what I said, you would have seen was agreeing with you, but the problem isn’t that they won’t have enough people to do jobs, rather that they won’t have enough jobs for people.
Even this doesn’t have to be disastrous, but without a social safety net, literally hundreds of millions of people are fucked. They will have to successfully make drastic changes to avert this crisis.
But this is just at the bottom end, they will still have enough talent at the top to keep competing in AI and key technologies.
I think it will tbh, right now we are seeing all the revenge spending from Covid, so it skews the numbers. People are spending more on their homes rather than travel or going out from restaurants. Manufacturing leaving China and manufacturers diversifying away from China is inevitable. Not completely, but both sides are now actively decoupling from each other and this is the greater trend.
So China’s trade surplus will increase but China is doomed to collapse within a decade? I guess they’ll get crushed by that mountain of money.
Remember, the suggestion is that China’s populatiom will decline to 750 million by 2100. So, what’s it goimg to be ten years from now?
Anybody, like Zeihan, that says China is going to collapse in the next ten years is fooling themselves. Deal with China however you want; they’re not going anywhere in the near future.
There’s a global shortage of course the surplus is large. The current trade surplus is not sustainable. Even Australia runs a surplus now. It used to be one of the largest deficit economies.
People believe China is in for a lost decade or complete collapse because the sectors that used to drive much of China’s growth - property construction and tech - are both as well as dead now. The demography (which is comically terrible for a developing country) is just icing on the cake.
Tech isnt dead at all tbh, they are just refocusing/doubling down on deep tech. They want all investment to move away from consumer tech, to things like AI, semi-conductors etc. They believe in the long-run, they can win the important tech races this way.
The thinking from what I gather, is that a lot of innovation really relies on how much money and resources you can throw at it. Beijing thing that if they restructure their economy to focus on these technologies and drive both the private and public sector(plus the education system) to also have this focus, they will win in the long-run. They are willing to deflate real-estate and consumer tech for short-term pain, as they believe that they can be the long-term winners.
I’m not saying that this is what will happen, but basically seems to be their strategy right now
