5 ms·
Be careful extrapolating based on China's current population and demographics. Too much of our armchair assessments of China's velocity is based on their meteor
by lolinder 2y ago
Be careful extrapolating based on China's current population and demographics. Too much of our armchair assessments of China's velocity is based on their meteoric rise on the backs of a historically large working-age population—a population that is now rapidly aging out of the workforce with nothing to replace it thanks to the one child policy. The US's demographics aren't stellar, but they're a lot better off than most of the developed world.
It remains to be seen how different 2010's China—with 90% of the population being under 60—is from 2050's China—with only 69% of the population being under 60.
https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2050/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2050/
- peterfirefly 2y agoThe one-child policy didn't play as large a role as people in the West think. Chinese fertility rates had already fallen drastically before that policy. (It was also not as absolute as people in the West think. There were exceptions for rural China and minorities.)
- spaceman_2020 2y agoIt’s a little more nuanced than that. Western demographics are largely propped up by immigration, which brings with it its own sociopolitical challenges. What you gain in demographics, you might lose in social cohesion and political stability.
- lolinder 2y agoIt's a lot more nuanced than that. China's internal diversity is much higher than Westerners typically understand, and their social cohesion and political stability are less well maintained than their external-facing image would lead you to believe.
- spaceman_2020 2y agoYeah, but that’s not the same level of diversity as an atheist Frenchman and a muslim Algerian and a Christian Ivorian. The Sichuanese might not get along with the Cantonese, but they’re ethnically the same people with a shared culture
- lolinder 2y agoNo, they're not. The Chinese have never been especially unified until very recently and they're internally quite diverse on all the key measures of ethnicity: their languages are mutually unintelligible, their religious belief systems span the entire breadth of world religions plus a wide spectrum of home grown ones, and their value systems are very different. One China is a convenient fiction invented by an authoritarian regime, not a day to day reality on the ground. Westerners buy into it through some combination of propaganda (coming from the Chinese state and our own, both of which benefit from an exaggerated sense of Chinese unity) and our inability to distinguish the various ethnic groups because we're overly fixated on skin color as the primary physical marker of ethnicity.
- Workaccount2 2y agoI can't help but feel that this can be said for any country anywhere. Compare New Englanders to Southerners in the US. They are totally different, but they are still wayyy more similar than Southerners are to Cantonese. It's easy to track differences between people around you, in your country, and very hard to track difference between people in other countries. This creates an illusion of "We are very different, and they are all the same".
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- anonfordays 2y agoChina is over 90% ethnically Han Chinese. Compared to the US it is practically a homogeneous country. The language diversity is greater in China, but the racial/ethnic diversity is lesser. China is more comparable to Europe than the US.
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- lolinder 2y ago
- forgotoldacc 2y agoIndia has a bigger population but they haven't risen anywhere near the way China has. China's rise was due to smart planning and investment in their people and infrastructure. The country went from peasant farmers to the manufacturing hub of the world in a generation. Now they're in the process of becoming a major hub of knowledge workers while keeping a strong manufacturing backbone. And one thing I rarely see mentioned is that the Chinese government keeps its currency artificially devalued in order to sell their products cheaply and undercut competition. Looking at their economy purely on a GDP basis really underestimates how big their economy is. GDP by PPP is more accurate. If China ever decides to stop loosely pegging its currency and let the value naturally rise, their GDP will very likely swell, since GDP is measured in US dollars.
- throwaway2037 2y agoI am genuinely curious about what would happen if China allowed their currency (RMB/CNY) to float. The most obvious thing I can see that would put tremendous downward pressure on the currency would be capital flight from China to more politically predictable/safe places. Currently, normies are limited to 50K USD per year. (Of course, there is a large grey market to move more money.)
- anticodon 2y agoIndia has no energy. It imports most of its energy. While China has lots of coal and burns it to provide energy for its industries.
- vixen99 2y ago'India imports most of its energy'. So what's happened to the extremely abundant 'free energy' available from the sum in India. They have the expertise, they could make the funding available. What is missing in their thought processes or is there something wrong with the premise?
- dartharva 2y ago> So what's happened to the extremely abundant 'free energy' available from the sum in India Where did you get this from? I am Indian and this is the first time I'm hearing of it.
- newuser94303 2y agoChina installed more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined. https://ifr.org/downloads/press2018/2024-SEP-24_IFR_press_release_World_Robotics_2024_-_global_market.pdf https://ifr.org/downloads/press2018/2024-SEP-24_IFR_press_re... https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/global-robotics-race-korea-singapore-and-germany-in-the-lead https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/global-robotics-race...