Hacker News Reader

Comment by anon8418 | Hacker News Reader

Naysayers have been predicting the demise of China for the past thirty years. See Gordon Chang, idiot extraordinaire.

The reality is that growth, in the long-run, is now in Asia (think of the hundreds of millions of Chinese still living in the countryside...).

This round of modernization (the third wave, after England, America+Western Europe) involves 4BN people led by India and China and they're just getting started. Take a pause and think of what that means. Four billion. BILLION.

We're entering the age of Asia. Just wait and see.

I think the bigger fear in China (at least amongst the leadership) is some crazy environmental disaster. Think of the hundreds of millions that live on the Yangtze... a massive flooding event that wipes up power/clean water is much more likely cause of revolution than an economic meltdown.

The US can barely handle Katrina... China is 10x more dense. Something like that would be death knell for CCP control.

View on HN

Naysayers have been predicting the demise of everything for the whole of human history. They've been almost entirely wrong, because even when they happen to be correct about the date they're almost always wrong about the specific details.

Nevertheless, most institutions that have existed through human history no longer exist.

Naysayers being wrong isn't a data point. It's barely even noise.

There's no realistic world where China rises smoothly with no setbacks along the way. It's all but mathematically impossible by the nature of complex systems. It is reasonable to be concerned that their rise up to this point has also been unrealistically smooth. Communism has a track record of producing this apparent growth curve, after all.

> Nevertheless, most institutions that have existed through human history no longer exist.

Interesting that you say that. I believe the China is the longest surviving political entity. It's been around for two thousand years...

>There's no realistic world where China rises smoothly with no setbacks along the way. It's all but mathematically impossible by the nature of complex systems. It is reasonable to be concerned that their rise up to this point has also been unrealistically smooth. Communism has a track record of producing this apparent growth curve, after all.

Very true. My point is simply that growth is now in Asia. This is merely a bump in the road. The economic tide has changed in favor of the east. As an American its sad to state this, but its the truth.

Just look at tech. China has caught up in many many ways and starting to out innovate even the US. And they're just getting started.

"I believe the China is the longest surviving political entity."

By my standards, what we today call China dates to the 1949 Communist revolution. For China to be able to claim continuity, the other side would have had to have won. "Polities located vaguely in the Chinese landmass area" is not an institution.

"China has caught up in many many ways and starting to out innovate even the US. And they're just getting started."

I'm not seeing a lot of evidence of innovation. What I see is a Communist country doing what Communist countries do, living off of the innovation of others while pouring a lot of effort into PR that confuses credulous Westerners who really want to believe. I believe the Chinese people are capable of innovating, but until they structure their society differently, it isn't going to happen. It is an interesting question as to whether the Chinese people could tolerate and/or adjust to a truly high-innovation culture, but that's a PhD-thesis-sized topic.

Correct me if I'm wrong, and not to downplay China's incredible advances in the last few decades or so but hasn't a lot of China's "tech advancement" been copying, sending their citizens abroad to learn and hoping they come back, and in many instances down right espionage?

To be fair, whenever I try to learn something new, I generally have to do a decent amount of "copying" in a sense to get started before I can improve and make my own contributions to whatever it is that I'm doing and learning so I suppose that's to be expected and is even a sensical approach at a societal level. Why invent a touch screen when several implementations exist? Reverse engineer or find research papers and build the same one. From there you can have the experience to tweak and make your own contributions to the touch screen world, etc, etc, etc ad nauseum until you're making contributions all over the place.

Don't worry, Americans will make sure to get a piece of the pie. Either that or we will find a way to screw the country unti they will let us have a piece of the pie.

They're living the environmental disaster every day by the looks of the air pollution in their cities (and also soil contamination). I really hope they sort that out quickly or it could have seriously far reaching effects globally.

Why are s-curves so hard for people to understand? Growth can slow. This addiction to perpetual exponential growth worldwide is unsustainable!

http://freakonomics.com/2014/01/24/can-economic-growth-conti...

Well, 1999 just called, and wants its New Economy religion back.

Most economists have never placed a foot inside a datacenter. It's easy to understand how they imagine music (or books, software, etc) does not involve a physical process.

Do you think its more likely that all economists are shills who don't understand that datacenters consume power, or that economists model things on a shorter time scale than physicists?

By this time, the current relevance of those inputs they ignore is big enough that their predictions' time horizon is somewhere on the last decades of the last century.

China is not likely to experience "demise" because it is a huge region of the world, an ethnicity, and a culture all at once.

However, its path toward growth can be interrupted and slowed. It has happened at least twice in the few hundred years: first by the late Qing dynasty, and then again in the Great Leap Forward.

That's what people are worried about with China: that the tension between its "communist" government and its growth-pacified population will not be resolved without serious interruption to its progress.

In the U.S. there are mechanisms to relieve such tension. George W Bush mismanaged Katrina and Iraq, and the Republicans got booted from office shortly thereafter. If the Chinese leadership starts to lose the populations' confidence, how do the people pick new leadership?

"You're doing a heckuva job, Brownie!"

As for booting the Republicans, the American people have now happily elected the GOP into power in both houses of Congress, and they've sent a bill to the White House repealing ObamaCara/ACA. Of course, it was vetoed by Obama, but given that the GOP controls most state legislatures and governorships and Congress, I fully expect a Republican to win in the 2016 election, so we can look forward to more Bush-style mismanagement.

Over 200%. That number is China's debt relative to its GDP, and its an unsustainably high number. In 10 to 15 years China's debt will be insurmountable unless painful steps are taken now to rebalance the Chinese economy. The possibility of demise for China is the intersection between those painful steps, and the CCP's fear those steps will threaten its hold on power - the entire political system actually. Great disparity in China has always led to great upheaval, which I suppose is what is really meant when people use the word "Demise".

Source: http://blog.mpettis.com/2015/11/chinas-rebalancing-timetable...

Is that debt mostly owed to itself?

If it is then it doesn't matter much. Especially given their authoritarian political and economic model.

> Naysayers have been predicting the demise of China for the past thirty years.

Yes. They even use the same sentence and arguments every six months since 30 years. I live in China and keep my eyes open, and what I see here is that people go to work, big trucks deliver bunches of new cars from the factories to the cities, universities produce an increasing number of highly skilled engineers, et cetera.

Might I suggest looking at this book[1]:

http://www.amazon.com/Dow-36-000-Strategy-Profiting/dp/08129...

What is especially interesting is the publication date.

Additionally, remember when everybody in Europe and the U.S. seemed to be buying property? When was that? Oh, 2006.

But, the point without the snark is that none of the BRICs have a "golden ticket". What they do have, is a large trade surplus and murky leveraging.

___

[1] - Or even better: http://www.amazon.com/Dow-2008-Different-This-Time/dp/189395...

I've yet to not be astonished by the pace of development and change in China, despite my frequent trips there since the mid-90s.

Especially in the hinterland... it's really night and day. Literally in a year you go from farms to skyscrapers. Crazy fast development.

The world is starting to notice though... now you see more Chinese middle-class tourists, more Chinese students (not the smart ones who just goto the ivies, but the rich mediocre students in community / for-profit / tertiary colleges), and real estate investors (which is starting to be a huge problem in Cali, PNW, etc.).

This is nothing but a road bump for China. The Chinese are hungry as hell. I don't really think the west fully appreciates their cultural drive.

The bigger story I don't see much mention of in the press is the growing dilemma facing Europe. Do they ally themselves with America or the growing East. This will grow to become a key political concern for the EU in the next 10-20-30 years.

Yes it's a road bump, yes China is back in the front row, yes they're hungry. But once the U.S. has accepted this reality that its not a solo play anymore, there should be no need for Europe to choose, because the battle we will have to fight is against a big chunk of the planet sinking back in the dark, and we can win this battle only if we go together, U.S., Europe and China.

Expanding on the battle we civilized humans (US + EU + China) need to fight together: this is not a battle for tanks, drones and helicopters (if it was, the US would do it well enopugh), it is a fight where the weapons are words, values and time.

>The bigger story I don't see much mention of in the press is the growing dilemma facing Europe. Do they ally themselves with America or the growing East.

From what I see, it looks like they're going to ally themselves with the middle east/north Africa and adopt the culture from there.

You took Houellebecq too seriously.

So you are saying that this time things really are different? I would be surprised if it really is. USA couldn't prevent a crash what makes you think China can?

Much much longer experience?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com