How Long Until China is World's #1 Superpower?

[David]

Started this in the "US in Decline" thread. Deserves its own thread.
Wall Street Journal Poll says Americans expect China to be number one economic super power in 20 years. Now a Gallup Poll says more Americans feel they are already there. SOURCE

Question becomes how devastating a revelation is this? Do you agree they are on top? I think the average American lives better than the average Chinese citizen. However, when you factor in the future there certainly is more optimism to be found in China. Their institutions seem better situated to clean our clock. Their educational system in particular should be looked at with envy. We still destroy them with traditional University educations. However, their ability in math and the hard sciences should give us pause. Engineering? Thank goodness for foreign students.SOURCE

Military might? They are on their way to being able to challenge us on many fronts. Pacific Rim? Scary. SOURCE Think of whay they can do with all that foreign debt rolling in while not bogged down anywhere in prolonged conflict.

[David]

The Yellow man's Burden?

[David]

Nothing we do rather well is sacred.


Zhang, Cal's 7-3 Chinese center, finds room to grow in Berkeley

SOURCE

[David]

More neat news.

BEIJING: China has signaled it wants to go the US way and set up military bases in overseas locations that would possibly include Pakistan. The
obvious purpose would be to exert pressure on India as well as counter US influence in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

SOURCE

[David]

Be worried.

In 2009, after having done prolonged anti-piracy deployments in the Gulf of Aden for a year, a retired Chinese Admiral publicly propounded the need for the Chinese Navy to acquire a base near this strategic region so as to overcome numerous logistics-cum-maintenance problems and also allow some rest to its sailors. At present Chinese warships operating over 4,500 nautical miles (nm) from their home bases are deployed for four to six months in the Gulf of Aden, without access to ports. Given the international concern about China seeking bases in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR), the Chinese government distanced itself from the retired admiral’s proposal. However, the fact is that the farsighted Chinese already have a suitable base available (Gwadar port they built in Pakistan), and will soon have another one in Sri Lanka (Hambantota port, which they are building), even as media reports hint at another Chinese-built port that is to come up in Burma.

SOURCE

[David]

Will Obama meet with the Dalai Lama? What would China do in retaliation? They hold nearly all the cards.

In the past two weeks, Chinese leaders have tangled with the United States over the following issues: Iran sanctions, climate change, arms sales to Taiwan, the Dalai Lama, cyberattacks, military modernization and exchange rates.

A single sentence in the Pentagon's 105-page Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) this week even elicited a Chinese reaction. The QDR report said China's military development raises "legitimate questions" about its future conduct and intentions. Pentagon planners have regularly made that point in the past, but Beijing immediately announced its "dissatisfaction" with the comment.

SOURCE

[David]

I saw Glen Beck Tuesday say. "we are slaves to China." He went on to question my premise that China wishes us no harm because they need our markets. I still believe that is the correct assumption. We still are the world's largest consumers. Why would they want to see a crippled US?

[David]

While the struggle between China and Google appears, on the surface, to be about Internet freedom, beneath the surface is a much deeper problem. As this newspaper reported last week, 34 American corporations have recently been targets of hacking attacks traceable to China. The C.E.O. of one of the technology companies that was hit, who asked not to be identified because he is still debating whether to keep doing business in China, said that in his case the attacks involved attempts to vacuum up source codes, designs, business plans, and anything else they could get their hands on. This industrial espionage emanating from China, the C.E.O. told me, “was the worst we have seen in 25 years.” As one U.S. official described it: “The penetration was very extensive and deeply troubling.”

Memo to China: You are playing with fire. Sure, the U.S. also has its hackers, but industrial espionage on this scale is not coming out of the U.S. If this continues, China will see more than Google pull up stakes. And how many U.S. companies in the future will ever want to buy Chinese-made software or computer systems, which might only make it easier for Beijing to penetrate their businesses? This hacking story is huge and brewing. If it explodes, at a time of rising tensions over U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, fasten your seat belts.

SOURCE

[jtdc]

We don't need China, they need us. However as they finance us they feel they own us. The longer this goes on the more problems will arise. If they decide to foreclose what will we do? Have another war of liberation? I don't believe in dependence on free trade. Unfortunately we are so entrenched that to pull out now will hurt many of our businesses. But just like our depending on foreign oil we are helpless if we are suddenly cut off.

Obama depends on borrowed money. So there isn't much hope of him protecting us. We are Dooooomed!

[David]

Originally Posted by jtdc

We don't need China, they need us. However as they finance us they feel they own us. The longer this goes on the more problems will arise. If they decide to foreclose what will we do? Have another war of liberation? I don't believe in dependence on free trade. Unfortunately we are so entrenched that to pull out now will hurt many of our businesses. But just like our depending on foreign oil we are helpless if we are suddenly cut off.

Obama depends on borrowed money. So there isn't much hope of him protecting us. We are Dooooomed!

What worries me is seeing the Chinese taking their vast reserve of dollars and buying into our greatest economic asset other than our people-Real Estate. They are buying loads of foreclosed properties as we speak. Where do we have leverage?

George Will paints a disturbing picture.

A growth lesson from China
By George F. Will
Thursday, February 4, 2010; A17

On Day One of his vow to take "meaningful steps to rein in our debt," Barack Obama asked Congress to freeze portions of discretionary domestic spending. This would follow an astonishing permanent expansion: Republicans on the House Budget Committee say appropriations bills Obama has signed, along with his stimulus spending, have increased discretionary domestic spending 84 percent. He almost certainly will not keep his promise to veto spending bills when Congress, as it almost certainly will, largely disregards his request.

On Day Two, taking a break from the rigors of austerity, he was in Tampa, promising $8 billion for high-speed rail projects there and in a dozen other places. Four days later, he released a $3.8 trillion fiscal 2011 budget that would add an additional $1.3 trillion to the national debt. The budget reveals that the deficit emergency is not so great as to preclude another stimulus, a.k.a. "jobs bill."

Or to require that middle-class tax cuts enacted under The Great Alibi (George W. Bush) be allowed to expire. Or even to scrub from the budget such filigrees from olden days as $430 million for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which perhaps made some sense 42 years and 500 channels ago, when public television meant for some Americans a 33 percent increase in channels, from three to four.

The depressing minutiae of the moment pale next to two large possibilities anticipated by Robert Fogel, a Nobel Prize-winning economist. They concern the rise of American health spending and the even more dramatic rise of China's economy.

Writing last September for the online journal the American, published by the American Enterprise Institute, Fogel warned that spending on health care is going to surge, for two reasons: By living longer, Americans will become susceptible to more health problems. By becoming richer they will be able to purchase more biotechnologies that make health interventions more effective.

"The financial per capita [health care] burden at age 85 and older," Fogel wrote, "is nearly six times as high as the burden at ages 50-54" and "the financial burden of health care for ages 85 and older is over 75 percent higher per capita than at ages 75-79." A century ago, "the burden of chronic diseases among elderly Americans was not only of greater severity but began more than 10 years earlier in the life cycle than it does today."

But the severity of afflictions increases and the cost of preventing further deterioration increases with age: "Five years before the year of death, annual health cost is virtually the same as all annual Medicare costs per capita. By the second year before death the cost has risen by about 60 percent, and in the year of death the annual cost exceeds the average by more than four times. Indeed, expenditures on persons during their last two years of life account for 40 percent of all Medicare expenditures."

The 20th century radically reduced deaths due to acute infectious diseases, which were concentrated in infancy and early childhood. In 1900, more than 33 percent of all deaths were of children under 5; today they are less than 2 percent. In 1900, deaths of persons 65 and older were only 18 percent of all deaths; today they are 75 percent.

This demographic destiny might entail starving every other sector of society -- including national defense, at great cost to America's international standing. It had better not, given what Fogel argues in another essay, this one in the current issue of Foreign Policy. It carries the headline "$123,000,000,000,000." Fogel's subheadline is: "China's estimated economy by the year 2040. Be warned."

He expects that by 2040 China's GDP will be $123 trillion, or three times the entire world's economic output in 2000. He says China's per capita income will be more than double what is forecast for the European Union. China's 40 percent share of global GDP will be almost triple that of the United States' 14 percent.

Fogel finds many reasons for this, including the increased productivity of the 700 million (55 percent) rural Chinese. But he especially stresses "the enormous investment China is making in education."

While China increasingly invests in its future, America increasingly invests in its past: the elderly. China's ascent to global economic hegemony could be slowed or derailed by unforeseen scarcities or social fissures. America's destiny is demographic, and therefore is inexorable and predictable, which makes the nation's fiscal mismanagement, by both parties, especially shocking.

[David]

China's debt bomb

By ARTHUR HERMAN

Last Updated: 4:28 AM, February 8, 2010

Posted: 2:06 AM, February 8, 2010

'He who pays the piper calls the tune": That old saying captures perfectly America's growing dependence on our No. 1 creditor in the world, Communist China.

By their carelessness Congress and the Obama administration are steadily handing over control of America's economic and financial future to a handful of Chinese officials and generals in Beijing. Those who think the Chinese won't use that control if they feel they have to are ignoring history -- and the Chinese.

The ancient military strategist Sun Tzu said that the best strategy was to render an opponent's army helpless even before the battle began. America may still have the biggest and best military in the world.

But many at the Pentagon are starting to realize that, thanks to our growing fiscal irresponsibility, we may be surrendering control of America's destiny to a rival superpower -- and all without a shot being fired.

Consider the scale of the problem.

With President Obama's 2010 budget, 42 cents of every dollar the federal government spends will have to be borrowed. In the last decade, foreign investors have wound up lending us roughly half of all federal debt -- with just two countries, China and Japan, providing nearly half of that sum, or 44 percent, through the purchase of US Treasury securities.

China now tops Japan as our biggest lender by some $30 billion a year, at $789 billion. (By comparison, our No. 3 lender, Great Britain, comes in at a measly $277 billion).

But that's not all. As its booming economy becomes more global, China is also the world's largest holder of foreign-currency reserves. Most of that is in US dollars. Indeed, without most Americans realizing it, China has become the largest foreign holder of US dollars in the world. How many dollars foreign exchange traders at the Bank of China decide to sell or buy on any given day is increasingly determining whether the dollars in our purses and wallets buy a little or a lot.

Seen from one angle, this dependence on China for the value of our national currency and the funding of our debt is like our dependence on inexpensive Chinese exports for our standard of living: the inevitable fruit of today's interlocking global economies -- and poor planning on our part.

Seen from another, more strategic angle, it may spell disaster.

History shows that nations that can't control their economic fortunes don't control much else. Debt freezes destinies -- as every credit-card holder knows.

Europeans discovered that after World War II, when they lost the power to make major decisions without first checking with their lender-in-chief, the United States. At that time, we used our economic dominance to rebuild Europe, not reduce it to impotence.

On the other hand, If US-China relations continue to deteriorate -- over arms sales to Taiwan, Internet freedom issues, Chinese industrial espionage and a Chinese military build-up that looks more and more like it's directed at challenging US power in Asia -- our lenders-in-chief in Beijing may not be so scrupulous.

Indeed, back in 1999, the Chinese literally wrote the book on how to use economic asymmetries as a blunt instrument, entitled "Unrestricted Warfare."

It draws no meaningful distinction between military, economic and political force (including using cyberspace) as means to defeat an enemy. Instead, it shows how a nation can dominate its opponents not with planes, ships and soldiers, but with foreign exchange rates, trade embargoes and armies of computer hackers.

Suppose that in retaliation for some slight China decides to stop buying Treasury bonds, forcing our debt to cost us even more. A furious US Congress hits back with trade sanctions. China then responds by driving up the price of the dollar, crippling US exports -- or, alternately, it crashes the dollar by dumping its foreign reserves, even as Chinese computer hackers slow down our banks' ability to respond to the crisis.

No one will call this a war. But it will certainly fit the classic definition of war as politics by other means. And the Pentagon knows it.

Last March, the Pentagon held its first-ever economic-warfare war game, with China as the putative opponent and with economists and bankers (including from UBS) helping out.

Details of what unfolded are still classified. However, sources told Fox Business News that the scenario played out as planned. That was the good news.

The bad news is that China won.

Today, some experts argue that rational self-interest will prevent China from waging this kind of economic warfare, because crippling the US would also severely wound its own economy. However, on an issue like Taiwan or Japan, rational judgment can take a backseat to national pride, and the desire to reverse old humiliations.

That war game was almost a year ago, when the Federal deficit was half of what it is today. And China is moving out of its short-term debt positions -- although slowly enough not to roil the credit markets.

In any case, Bracken and others argue that we need more coordination between the Treasury and the Pentagon on ways to deal with a vulnerability that seemed entirely theoretical then, but now seems all too real. Still others are pushing for rules restricting the future sales of Treasury securities to foreign buyers.

All this, however, is only playing catch up. The real issue is whether we get our fiscal house in order, and realize that a $12 trillion national debt and a crippled economy could leave us as vulnerable as we once were on a December Sunday morning 69 years ago, at Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Arthur Herman's most recent book, "Gandhi and Churchill," was a Pulitzer Prize finalist last year.

SOURCE

[David]

This story contains more bad news. However, it also has a consolation prize. Eddie Leung can look forward with optimism. His family's future is bright. The people working at his watch factory look forward to brighter futures. Unlike manufacturers in this country if there are any left. These jobs aren't coming back. Forget about it.

The consolation prize? The more the Chinese export for their 9% a year GDP growth the less likely they are to provoke a war. They need us buying their stuff. Get ready for their cars coming en masse.

We are so screwed.

The World’s Watchmaker
By ROGER COHEN

NEW YORK — I’ve been thinking about Eddie Leung. He had lunch with me the other day at his factory in Dongguan, China, and appeared wearing a black yarmulke. “All my friends are Jewish,” he said.

Leung’s a good salesman, charming guy. He makes watches, about 1.5 million pieces a year. He makes sterling silver watches for the QVC home shopping network and watches with the famous crocodile emblem for Lacoste. He makes Juicy Couture’s hot young line.

Tommy Hilfiger, Jennifer Lopez, Coach, Titan, Trump — name the brand and Leung is manufacturing their watches in China’s southern Guangdong Province, the place that is now the world’s factory.

Leung was wearing a great hulk of a watch called a Bonja. It’s big in Gulf states, where it retails for about $4,000. Leung told me he’s paid $200 for this model and that leaves him a comfortable margin. For Juicy Couture watches that retail in New York for $95, he gets eight dollars. He’s still making money on that. In general he receives about 8 percent of the retail price, or about 40 bucks for a $495 Lacoste watch.

That’s called working the nuts and bolts of the high end. His company, Dailywin Watch Products, has been doing that since 1978.

Interesting work, Leung’s, for several reasons, one being how it illustrates the power of branding. Develop a cool brand and you can charge a crazy mark-up. Even for a product like a watch that nobody needs any more. Every electronic device from a basic cellphone up tells the time. So a watch is now redundant, no more than a fashion accessory.

It’s thriving in that role. You can be all-American like Hilfiger, or very French like Lacoste. Then you get China to develop that image at low cost. Authenticity is fungible in a world where Chinese men wear yarmulkes. (An affectation that Leung said draws a laugh from his New York clients.)

The quality here is not Swiss, but it’s high — “we are at 85 to 90 percent of the quality of Swiss made,” said Matthew She, the general manager. As a longtime U.S. resident of southern China put it: “Does America have a choice of a cheaper place for a quality product?”

Short answer: nope. China has the United States about where it wants it. You can make your own calculation of President Obama’s leverage over Beijing — and it’s heading south.

The average worker at Dailywin earns about $150 to $200 a month, before overtime, ranging higher for supervisors. About 70 percent of the more than 400 workers are women, many from inland provinces, living six to a room in on-premise dormitories and sending their earnings home.

I found conditions in the factory good — clean, a groomed garden, a large canteen. I also found Leung, for all his bonhomie, in a pensive mood. It’s been a rough 18 months in Dongguan since the Great Recession began. About two million jobs have been lost in the region, including a few hundred at Dailywin. Countless factories have closed.

Leung said his sales last year were down more than 20 percent over 2008, with the sharpest drop (over 40 percent) in January 2009. After a decade of smooth expansion, this was a shock. He’s had to slash costs. Labor and raw materials are becoming more expensive. Above all, Western consumers have taken a deep breath: “Now, you don’t just buy, you are looking for quality or real necessity, or you won’t spend.”

So, I asked Leung, given all these difficulties, what do you think of Obama’s demands that China revalue its currency, the renminbi, or yuan, which America thinks is undervalued, placing the United States, in the president’s words, “at a huge competitive disadvantage?”

Leung laughed. He’s a friend of Obama’s half-brother, who lives nearby, and he wishes the president well. But business is business. “Look,” he said. “Too much of that and we lose. Even a 3 percent appreciation is not good for me. Nations act in their self-interest. If President Hu Jintao told Obama to adjust the dollar because it would be good for the world, would he do that?”

The low renminbi rate is about growth, jobs and exports. That’s the fundamental underpinning of the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power. China came through the downturn but, as Dailywin’s difficulties suggest, it did not come through unscathed. Jobs were lost, painful adjustments made. I don’t see China risking its renewed growth to cool U.S. Congressional ire over high American unemployment.

Leung’s got to sell his watches. All the ships carrying America’s toilet paper and aluminum foil and disposable razor blades through the Pearl River Delta — Guangdong Province alone accounts for over a third of U.S.-China trade — have to keep sailing or there will be unacceptable political risk. Exports still drive 9 percent annual growth, whatever the development of the domestic market.

A dollar at 6.83 yuan keeps Chinese-made global brands with their colossal mark-ups in the global mall. That’s an imperative even mighty America battles in vain. Which is why Eddie Leung’s time is not about to run out.

SOURCE

[Rafael]

There are "advantages" to a command and control economy - and, yes - superpower status is based on economy, ultimately. However, I'm a believer in freedom by a long-shot.

It's true that Obama, supported by the likes of Bill Ungaro and Irish Flu, is trying to destroy our freedom. Here's betting that freedom is too strong to lose to Obama, and too strong to lose to the Chinese.

[Rifleman]

The only thing in our favor is that the Chinese economy is still basically based upon Socilaism, and I have heard of serious problems as a result that are hidden in the facade they put on it. Additionally, like happened with Japan, at some point while they would be doing well as compared to the rest of the world, and with rising transportation costs, it becomes very difficult to maintain low labor and overhead costs. I would love to be a bilingual fly in the China government's offices as they come to realize that they are financing Obama's irresponsible governmental expansion.

[David]

latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-china-analysts17-2010feb17,0,6151314.story
latimes.com

China won't bow down
The West was fooling itself if it expected Beijing to do its bidding, analysts say.

By Barbara Demick

8:40 PM PST, February 16, 2010

Reporting from Beijing
China and the United States have been referred to as global partners, strategic competitors, outright rivals and "frenemies" -- friends who secretly hate each other's guts.

In recent months, a pretense of cordiality has given way to unusually public squabbling. China is threatening to boycott U.S. defense contractors over arms sales to Taiwan and is loudly protesting President Obama's meeting this week with the Dalai Lama. The United States and its European allies are angry about what they regard as China's obstructionist behavior on issues such as global warming and Iran's nuclear program.

Foreign businesses complain of anti-competitive behavior. Google's revelations about Chinese cyber-hacking unleashed an angry exchange over Internet freedom. China has been meting out prison sentences to those who have challenged one-party rule.

Has something fundamentally changed in China, or is this merely one of those bumpy patches? Is it just coincidence that so many irritating issues are coming up?

The last year has produced a bumper crop of books addressing the China question. Here is what some top China hands had to say. Their remarks are taken from interviews with The Times and from recent writings.

Martin Jacques acknowledges picking the title of his new book with the goal of being provocative -- and boosting sales. It's called "When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New World Order."

"China is becoming a global power, while America no longer has the same authority that it used to have," he says.

As China becomes a bigger player, Jacques says, there will be more potential for discord on issues such as global finances, climate change or Iran.

A Marxist scholar whose book is also popular among Chinese, Jacques doesn't blame China as much for the recent rough patch as he does scholars who predicted that China would become more like a Western democracy as it prospered.

"The expectation of China being a Western country, or being prepared to do the West's bidding, is false," Jacques says. "We've got to go back to the drawing board and make a serious effort to understand China, so we are not always surprised and upset."

d

In "The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression," James Mann also scorns the Washington think tanks (one of which he works for).

But he hints that free trade advocates who pushed for China's admission to the World Trade Organization in 2000 misled the public.

"Across the United States, factories have closed and millions of Americans have been put out of work as the result of our decision to keep our markets open to Chinese goods. Meanwhile, the American people have been informed repeatedly that the reasons for our policy were not merely economic -- helping American companies that do business with or in China -- but political. Free trade was going to lead to political liberalization," he writes.

A former columnist and Beijing correspondent for The Times, Mann says it's too late to undo what was done.

"We need to stop assuming that we are going to integrate China into an American-led community," says Mann. But that doesn't mean that the United States has to quietly accept China's system of government.

"The United States ought to take a strong and forthright stand on human rights," says Mann.

d

As the title of "China: Fragile Superpower" makes clear, Susan Shirk believes that China isn't as strong as people think.

With bemusement, Shirk cites a poll released in December by the Pew Center for People and the Press in which 44% of respondents said they thought China had the world's largest economy, as opposed to 27% who correctly picked the United States. (The U.S. economy is roughly three times the size of China's.)

"The failures of the American financial system and the fact that the Chinese recovered first from the global financial crisis has led to some misperceptions," Shirk says.

With its rampant poverty, pollution and ethnic rifts, China remains far behind the United States in almost all measures. But Shirk cautions that political leaders who are overconfident externally and vulnerable internally historically are most apt to stir up nationalism (or even start wars).

To Shirk, there is no doubt that China has become more truculent toward the United States.

Shirk is most worried about China's economic policies: keeping its currency artificially low despite the obvious damage to other nations' economies and measures to strengthen state-owned enterprises.

"It certainly doesn't look like the heyday of market reform, throwing lawyers into jail, tightening controls on the media. It all reflects great anxiety about challenges to the Communist Party," she says.

d

If anything, the view from within China is even worse, according to James McGregor, longtime consultant to foreign businesses in China and author of "One Billion Customers: Lessons from the Front Lines of Doing Business in China."

McGregor says that the expatriate business community is more discouraged than at any time in more than 20 years.

"Among the long-term foreign businesspeople I know here, it is unanimous that there is a significant shift in attitude by the Chinese," McGregor says. "You've got young officials who are saying to them, 'You are just here to exploit the Chinese. This is our market. We don't owe you anything.' "

McGregor says the Chinese have moved too quickly from feeling inferior to the West, the legacy of the humiliations of the 19th century, to feeling superior.

"They have a big pile of cash. Everybody is telling them they are great," says McGregor. "Now they have to learn to be equal, to do good, to play fair."

d

Kenneth Lieberthal, a former Clinton administration official and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, also chalks up the recent rough patch to growing pains.

"The Chinese have been catapulted more rapidly than they had anticipated into a more prominent global role. At the beginning of 2010, they are in a position they did not expect to be for some years," Lieberthal says. "It has affected their style. They are being at least rhetorically more assertive than they've been before, and their confidence might be affecting their calculations about whether they can change the trajectory on some big issues."

But Lieberthal is optimistic that the Chinese leadership will not allow relations to seriously deteriorate.

"If they think they will be able to change our policy, say on Taiwan arms sales, they will get a lot of push back and I think they will adjust their policy and rhetoric accordingly."

d

Zachary Karabell, economist, historian and author of "Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World's Prosperity Depends on It," says it is impossible to contemplate a breakup.

China needs the United States as a market for its exports. And as the holder of more than $1 trillion in U.S. assets, mostly Treasury bills, China has a stake in helping the U.S. recover from the financial crisis. In his book, Karabell cites the well-known adage about the relationship between lenders and debtors: When you owe the bank $100,000, you've got a problem; when you owe $1 trillion, it's the bank that has a problem.

"There is a restlessness in China about its dependence on the United States, but there is no choice," says Karabell. "If it's a marriage, it's a 19th century marriage -- a marriage of convenience for which there is no easy way out.

"We can be miserable and we can have affairs, but at the end of the day, this is where we make our bed."

[David]

I have no doubt China aims to be a dominant super power. I don't believe they want thermo nuclear war. They certainly desire hegemony in the Pacific. They want naval presence as I said before to keep the merchant ships out of harm's way. No doubt this is unsettling.

Marching to world domination: Why the West should be worried about China

China today celebrated its wealth and rising might with a show of goose-stepping troops, gaudy floats and nuclear-capable missiles in Beijing, 60 years after Mao Zedong proclaimed its embrace of communism.

Tiananmen Square became a hi-tech stage to celebrate the birth of the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949, with President Hu Jintao, wearing a slate grey 'Mao' suit, and the Communist Party leadership watching the meticulously disciplined show from the Gate of Heavenly Peace over the Square. Here DOMINIC SANDBROOK explains why the West should be so wary of the new superpower.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worl...#ixzz0g6cSOk6X

[David]

Originally Posted by Rifleman

The only thing in our favor is that the Chinese economy is still basically based upon Socilaism, and I have heard of serious problems as a result that are hidden in the facade they put on it. Additionally, like happened with Japan, at some point while they would be doing well as compared to the rest of the world, and with rising transportation costs, it becomes very difficult to maintain low labor and overhead costs. I would love to be a bilingual fly in the China government's offices as they come to realize that they are financing Obama's irresponsible governmental expansion.

There biggest problems

1) Restive ethnic groups. Regions in rebellion.

2)Believe it or not low birth rates. One child policy won't be able to take care of older Chinese.

3)Environmental degradation. The country is just plane dirty. Not about GW. Just about day to day health problems.

[David]

Are Americans too pessimistic?

Poll shows concern about American influence waning as China's grows

SOURCE

[jtdc]

I feel vindicated!

[Rifleman]

You should! China is in a way better position than we are, but they will be in as big trouble as former Soviet "States", if when the US and EURO-peon economies crash. Their "wealth is based upon exports, and with no one to buy, they will suffer, but depending upon the level of indoctrination of the leadership there, they could suffer less than us.