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Comment by cbozeman | Hacker News Reader

It isn't a race. China's already lost and has no hope of winning. The reason you don't hear about it is because entirely too many people make entirely too much money pontificating over it.

China has the oldest population in the world. The highest youth unemployment rate in the developed world. Millions more men than young women to marry them to. A leader that "disappears" anyone who tells him something he doesn't want to hear.

They're done for and they've been done for, for some time. They have no chance to turn around their situation because the Chinese people are stridently - hilariously - racist and xenophobic. How could they not be? They're bombarded with propaganda nonstop from the CCP. Buying all the real estate in America they can, loading up on US Government bonds, and stealing all the IP in the world can't save them - because they don't have enough young people to keep it all going.

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> he highest youth unemployment rate in the developed world. Millions more men than young women to marry them to

This is actually the most worrisome part for me. A bunch of young unemployed men who have no prospect of marriage and no real stake in society. That's the kind of thing that leads to some guy declaring himself Jesus's brother and starting a nasty civil war that kills 10 of millions, especially if it spills over into neighboring countries.

The US does not have supply chains to to dominate anymore. Even if China's authorianship is a massive issue for everyone except CCP, they have the manufacturing base. No one can compete. It's almost twice as United States where, as the article points out, capital is allocated to inefficient stock buybacks.

Top 10 manufacturing countries in the world

China – 28.4% Global

United States – 16.6% Global Manufacturing Output

Japan – 7.5% Global Manufacturing Output

Germany – 5.8% Global

Furthermore, the life expectancy in the US is nosediving. It has massive internal problems not only on the health of its people but political coherence, which needs to be fixed before the US can get back to the growth track.

> China has the oldest population in the world.

Source for this? Monaco and Japan have the highest median age in the world, at 55.4 and 47.3 years, respectively; the United States is 62nd at 38.5 years, with China just below at 38.4. What do you mean when you say China has the oldest population in the world?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_median_ag...

The OP might be referring to the fact that there are 200+ million people in China over the age of 65, meaning they have the most seniors of any country in the world, even if this is a smaller fraction of their total population than Japan.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/250753/number-of-people-...

Although this issue is why the next five or six years is basically China's only window for trying to seize Taiwan, and its leadership is not so crazy as to not know that, but possibly crazy enough to think that acting on it is a good idea while they can.

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