You are consistent, Jay, in presenting the glass half empty view: >>Its existence for the past 4000 plus years is an accident, due to its stupid people and their inability to learn, innovate, work, save, and learn some more<<
>>Bottom line, China will fall apart due to its own weight, and all the terrible leadership mistakes made since 1982, or 1482, or 982, or 482, or gad, BC 1482<<
Bottom line, China is struggling with a very difficult transition from a command economy to a capitalist economy, but all is not as dark as you suggest. China is in fact not one country, but two or three or more. A vast hinterland exists in medieval feudalism while on the coast, in two largely separate regions with proximity to Hong Kong and Shanghai, entrepreneurs are creating countless small to mid-size manufacturing entities that are supplying the globe with low value-added manufactured products. Large numbers of state-owned enterprises exist as a huge money-losing, drag-inducing economic sea-anchor, sustained by oceans of non-performing politically-driven loans from insolvent banks.
The truth, then, is more like this: Some regions and areas of economic activity are producing very real rapid growth, while at the same time the state-owned enterprises are largely in a state of collapse. The rural provinces will feed the coastal industrial areas with unlimited supplies of low-cost labor and Chinese entrepreneurs will continue to work around the corruption and the ideological dogma of Communism for the foreseeable future.
>>Bottom line, China will fall apart due to its own weight<<
Will China, in fact, collapse? China is arguably in much better shape than the former Soviet Union post-1989. A country facing both political transition and economic transition does much better when the economic transition comes first, as in China, than when the political transition comes first, as with the USSR. So at some point China will "collapse" as did the USSR, but less so, as, unlike the USSR, there are a couple of hundred million Chinese who will know exactly what to do post-Chinese Communism. |
