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Unless China solves for the skewed demographics in the next ten years, seems like sheep-behavior to include them in projections for the future. Has anyone seen

• baybal2 6y ago
  > Unless China solves for the skewed demographics in the next ten years, seems like sheep-behavior to include them in projections for the future. True, long term, China has sealed its future, but even if you half China's population, it will still be no. 1 in pretty much everything it is no. 1 today. Pretty much nothing aside of war, civil war, or a second cultural revolution scale political crisis can stop it overtaking USA economically in coming 1-2 decades.
  • pbourke 6y ago
    I’m genuinely curious why this comment is receiving downvotes. China becoming the world’s economic power by mid-century has been my set assumption for years. Has something changed with this expectation?
    • edoceo 6y ago
      China population is 1398 Million, india is like 1366. China in half would be 700 million. Maybe it just don't add up? IME this site downvotes bad maths.
      • bigpumpkin 6y ago
        This. China may have more factories but its focus is on industry not spirituality. India will achieve Religious Victory by 2050.
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]
        • labster 6y ago
          Either that or Ghandi will nuke us all.
  • jonathannat 6y ago
    Plenty of black swans occur when dictatorship is the regime. - assassination of dictator => internal turmoil - early death of dictator => internal turmoil - scuffle with neighboring country => economic sanctions by the free world - dictator can't lose face, does something stupid => economic sanctions by the free world - (Germany, Merkel, CDU) support for the dictator wanes and disappears => economic sanctions by the free world - local governments cover up economic losses until its too great => hyperinflation, central government collapse - triggering business defaults leading to dollar shortages leading to faster capital outflow => hyperinflation, central government collapse - made up economic numbers are exposed => foreign businesses pull out - nationalization of foreign companies assets => foreign businesses pull out - natural disasters + lack of food supply => citizen riot
    • oblio 6y ago
      Many of those things apply to democracies, too, unfortunately.
• contingencies 6y ago
  Here's an original thought. The presentation asserts that Tesla has eaten the entire auto industry, and this is because of slipping battery costs. It does not, however, correctly credit China for this change. What other changes has China recently led? Video conferencing, mass-adoption of mobile payment, death of the desktop, home food delivery (pre-COVID), online grocery, e-Health passports.
  • jonathannat 6y ago
    Wow, way to twist the history to your own narrative. Also, no, Tesla has not eaten the entire auto industry, stock market cap doesn't equal to product market share > Video conferencing Zoom (American company) launched in 2011. DingTalk started way late in 2014 and wasn't even that popular until 2017. and still playing catchup to Zoom. > mass-adoption of mobile payment Japan in the 90s. I believe Chinese citizens were still mostly riding bikes then. > death of the desktop Japan in the 90s > home food delivery (pre-COVID) Grubhub was founded in 2004. IPOed in 2014. > online grocery Tesco direct started in UK in 1997.
    • contingencies 6y ago
      Needlessly snarky response. Write to the author about the Telsa claim. Yes, there are earlier examples in each case. I personally worked in digital video in 2000. I was referring clearly to mass adoption (actual market penetration). Nothing matches China, period. Look at numbers for WeChat (video), WeChat/Alipay (mobile payment), Meituan/Eleme (delivery), etc.
  • benedictevans 6y ago
    Tesla hasn’t eaten the audio industry - that’s what investors are speculating. Battery prices are falling because of technology and (mostly) volume, not particularly because of ‘China’
    • contingencies 6y ago
      Volume is China. The same for solar.
• tpush 6y ago
  > Unless China solves for the skewed demographics in the next ten years, seems like sheep-behavior to include them in projections for the future. Has anyone seen these types of presentations but say 1980, except it says Japan instead? The presentation directly addresses this in slide 86.
  • hong_kong 6y ago
    Only superficially. Just because China's population is larger doesn't mean it won't get hit by the same forces as Japan back in the 80s. China had a demographic tailwind in the past few decades, which is reversing now as the population ages while birth rate remains low - its dependency ratio will spike and a huge amount of resources will have to be diverted to elderly care.
• jonathannat 6y ago
  These analysts who tout China live in 2008 China. And they ignore Xi Jing Ping + demographics + middle income trap + total debt as if they doesn't exist.
  • jeofken 6y ago
    For someone who only passed through a Chinese airport, what differentiates China in 2008 and 2020?
    • kortilla 6y ago
      12 years and an optimistic future of constant growth.
    • unwind 6y ago
      Or even 2021, as insanely futuristic as it may sound? :)
      • jeofken 6y ago
        Oh we recurred already!
  • barry-cotter 6y ago
    If China suffers from the Middle Income Trap it will be the first East Asian country to do so. I believe in the CPC’s potential to mismanage the economy but I don’t believe that hard. More than likely we’re talking US levels of idiocy, stopping the high productivity cities from growing, not India or Argentina levels ever you just piss away entire decades with zero or negative growth.
  • oblio 6y ago
    Why do those demographics matter, though? I can't imagine China having a strong welfare state or super expensive healthcare for the elderly. So old people won't cost China much (though they'll probably have miserable lives if they didn't save enough). Even the population going down isn't really an issue, they have more poor people to take out of poverty than the entire US population, so more than enough labor force. Plus if their population declined 50% (a super far fetched scenario that could happen over an entire century), they will still have 2x the US population. For most individuals living in China will still be mediocre to bad, but that's still enough for them to create in aggregate an economy 2x the US one. Japan just couldn't do this, they were always smaller than the US.
• eloff 6y ago
  Those demographics don't matter nearly as much over the next 10 years as they do over the next 40. But I agree with you that most predictions of China taking over the world seem to completely ignore demographics - which is dumb because it's one of the most predictable parts of a country's future.
  • jonathannat 6y ago
    Exactly. 700M Chinese citizens who live on $140/month income. 500M 65 year olds by 2050 (money flows up in Chinese society. One grandkid pays 2 parents who pays 4 grandparents, since it's a one child society) Oh and no social safety net. you think CCP members care about the plebs?
    • Udik 6y ago
      > 700M Chinese citizens who live on $140/month income. That's an incredible amount of space for internal economic growth.
      • bilbo0s 6y ago
        True. The most probable reality is that neither the bulls, nor the bears, have any clue what will come in China. They probably make less money if they admit that though. "There's too many variables to be certain." Probably sells less than, "The Secret to the Future of China!" So they have to go one way or the other to justify their paychecks maybe?
      • jonathannat 6y ago
        Nope, these people (farmers for life, migrant workers with no education, people living in abject poverty, etc) are stuck. If there were actual growth in the economy, China would not outlaw hong kong citizens from leaving to go to England, creating a wall with myanmar to prevent citizens from escaping to there, having concentration camps to force uighurs to work for free, etc.
      • hong_kong 6y ago
        You could say the same about any undeveloped country, but in reality only a small number of countries have successfully transitioned into developed status - Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, HK. It's not as straightforward a process as it would seem at first glance.
• baybal2 6y ago
  > Has anyone seen these types of presentations but say 1980, except it says Japan instead? I did read a lot of books which "Bright Heads" of US political scene wrote in nineties-eighties. US royally f..king up its ally Japan is the biggest reason why Japan did not become a counterweight to China. Basically, US assured China's victory when it both alienated, and weakened the Japan. That both lead to Japan putting big money into China (Japan is China's biggest foreign investor,) and it becoming rather passive to US calls to do anything as about China after Washington finally got hit with understanding of its blunder.
  • spideymans 6y ago
    >US royally f..king up its ally Japan is the biggest reason why Japan did not become a counterweight to China. Can you elaborate on what the United States did?
    • baybal2 6y ago
      If you did not read the books, Japan was for America a bigger boogeyman than the Union, and Ben Ladin combined by late eighties. It lead to an incredible economic, and political pressure US put on Japan, which culminated in US forcing Japan into Plaza accords, and the three Japanese lost decades which followed.
      • Clewza313 6y ago
        The Plaza Accords were a complete failure at their twin objectives of increasing US exports to Japan and decreasing Japanese exports to the US, neither of which happened. They did trigger a wave of Japanese overseas investment and Japan's own asset bubble, leading to the Lost Decade when it burst, but these were hardly planned effects.
        • raverbashing 6y ago
          Yeah the current issues with Japan are more intrinsic than anything else (inability to innovate, etc)
• dirtyid 6y ago
  The main thrust of thesis seems to be that emerging countries with improving human capita and large internal markets will probably emulate Chinese tech sovereignty model and debundle from US tech dominance. SV controlling global data is increasingly untenable, even less so with recent developments. Also Chinese demographic crisis overplayed IMO, China is not Japan. Consider China as two countries segregated by massive income disparity, one is high HDI coastal country that forms a bloc that can compete with other big players like US / EU on PPP basis (with gap that is only widening), another is low HDI interior underclass comparable to poor developing country. The competitive country is drawing talent from total population pool comparable to OECD countries combined with sufficient replacement fertility to match countries with massive immigration flow. This disparity can be arbitraged in ways high income countries like Japan, US/west can't. In terms of demographic bomb, 10% of Chinese GDP can essentially keep the bottom 50% of society running with boost in QoL. Or put it this way, 10% of US GDP is 80% of India's GDP. The Chinese demographic crisis is a manageable internal "foreign" aid / redistribution program between rich and poor. But unlike wealthy countries, the have nots do not have same expectations, they're less costly to please and simultaneously a massive source of cheap labour rich countries must import to manage aging societies, which China can also "outsource" to cheaply coordinate other sectors, i.e. infrastructure, military, healthcare. IMO rich countries with expectation of comprehensive safety nets is going to have a much more difficult time dealing with aging than China. There's a reason large segments of wealthy countries are disenfranchised and protesting even though they are and will remain significant richer per capita than China. Apart from CCP just having more tools at stability maintenance, it's basic psychology, a poor Chinese citizen life will improve compared to prior generations whereas a rich OECD citizen will not.
• tirrellp 6y ago
  Check out some of Peter Zeihan's work for some original geopolitical thinking re: US/China https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyICg5OYXvM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyICg5OYXvM
  • Fordec 6y ago
    It's easy to be original when you have a decade of being demonstrably wrong under your belt. Just say something out of the ordinary, poof, origionality. His demographic data is correct. Any extrapolations he makes based on that data are usually completely off base. I used to give him credit around 2012, but not any more.
• benedictevans 6y ago
  There are no projections about the future in this presentation. And it does very directly reference the panic about Japan and point out why China might be different.