Disclaimer: I'm completely uneducated in this, so please point out my glaring flaws of logic. I have no doubt that China will be a major economic player in the

Disclaimer: I'm completely uneducated in this, so please point out my glaring flaws of logic. I have no doubt that China will be a major economic player in the coming decades. Having said that, they have major hurdles to clear, perhaps most of which is transitioning from a manufacturing to a service economy that exists outside of China. China's services-based companies that you all think of (Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, etc.) all ape on foreign services and succeed under the protection of government (via. the GFW). Meanwhile, the massive uplift of median wage and living conditions has increased the labour costs in China. I've seen it in my own work, where our 'manufacture in China' approach isn't nearly as beneficial as it was 5+ years ago, since it now costs more due to underlying wages (i.e. controlling for forex). This sort of puts a time limit on their growth at the current rate, because as it becomes more expensive, manufacturing will move (and already is) to other cheaper areas (such as Bangladesh, India and further to Africa). In other countries, that uplift has broadly aligned with a transition out of manufacturing to services due to the higher education capacities, with subsequent offshoring of said manufacturing. The problem is, those services-based companies compete on a global scale and utilise that global market size to support higher profits (since duplicating knowledge is easier than duplicating phyiscal things). I can't think of on example off my head of a Chinese services-based company that's competed on a global level yet. I think until that can happen (and I don't see how that happens, particularly but not limited to in tech, when the playing field is so distorted by government policy such as the GFW - it just encourages companies to focus domestically only), China will struggle to make that next step and continue to fuel their economic growth as manufacturing becomes too expensive with the growth of wages. The foreign influx of money from manufacturing will slowly dry up as it goes elsewhere. In turn, I think that'll lead to a stagnation unless they can transition, and I suspect that transitioning (to a level that the West operates) probably requires a ratio of market size to median wage that isn't possible by simply remaining domestic (in the most part, that is you need at least a minimum quantity of global companies to bring in overseas wealth and support the rest). Interestingly, I've seen a little example of this attempted, where China is trying to build the infrastructure for future manufacturing places, but that's sort of a one-trick operation. For example, they've invested a heap of money into building infrastructure (rail, for example) through Africa. However, it's only a subset of a truly global economy and probably has a finite life as a stop-gap. So yes, their growth is almost undoubtably going to be relentless and ongoing, but my uneducated opninion is that the pace will taper off sooner than most people expect as they struggle to convert high domestic manufacturing output to domestic knowledge and services output.