Many writers are saying that the threat from China is so great that we have to abandon Europe and count on Europeans to defend it from Russia. Aside from the question of where the Hell we'd base all the stuff we're supposed to jam into the western Pacific--and Europe is obviously a lesser threat--aren't we assuming too much about China's future power?
China is going to change after the end of the engine of its four decades of high GDP growth:
Deng Xiaoping's economy, which turned subsistence farmers into semi-skilled industrial workers, surely has peaked. The great migration from country to city is slowing, and China's workforce is slowly shrinking.
I've noted that path as I expressed skepticism about the quality of the growth:
Until now, much of China's growth has been based on the "Lewis turning point" that reflects direct inputs of new workers rather than more efficient use of existing workers. Once the direct input slows, wages rise and the comparative production advantage erodes. As I liked to say, take the most efficient peasant and take him from a farm and put him in the most inefficient factory and the GDP he produces goes up.
The author says China will adapt to a smaller workforce with artificial intelligence and automation:
But China is building a new digital economy powered by AI and high-speed broadband, with 2.3 million of the world's 3 million 5G base stations and download speeds double ours. It has automated ports that can empty a container ship in 45 minutes rather than the 48 hours required at our port of Long Beach. It's also automated mines where no worker goes underground, factories controlled by AI, and warehouses in which robots do the sorting and packaging.
Maybe. The author points to Japan and South Korea that adapted to shrinking workforces to move beyond the simple input of farm-to-factory. But the USSR failed to make that leap. Is China more likely to follow the successful nations or the large failed empire?
And I wonder if the educational achievements of China are paper statistics based on measurable inputs rather than results. Is a Communist state really going to do a great job? Maybe. But I have doubts.
On the other hand, this author says China is over as a rising power:
Since Deng Xiaoping began the “reform and opening” of China’s economy in the late 1970s, the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party deliberately resisted the impulse to interfere in the private sector for far longer than most authoritarian regimes have. But under Xi, and especially since the pandemic began, the CCP has reverted toward the authoritarian mean. In China’s case, the virus is not the main cause of the country’s economic long COVID: the chief culprit is the general public’s immune response to extreme intervention, which has produced a less dynamic economy.
Even before the pandemic, it looked like the China Miracle was ending. So we have to debate the future of China. Again.
I have no idea which is correct. But I'll ask again, in a country the size of a continent, isn't one possible future "all of the above"?
NOTE: The image was made from DALL-E.
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
