Question

how do you think about China ???

Answer 1

HOW? I use my brain to think.

Answer 2

Churchill famously commented on the eve of the Second World War that Russia was a "riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." The Soviet Union loomed large and strange in the minds of the West in those days. China has taken its place for the 21st century West. We are mystfied by it, alarmed by it, and contemptuous of it, in turn.

There are several striking facts about modern China:

1. It has become much wealthier than it used to be, very fast. In the 1960s and early 70s, China was essentially a Third World country, with a moribund general economy, dominated at the top by a very small wealthy and powerful in group. After Mao died Deng Xiapoing committed the country to a schizophrenic form of "communism" in which political and social authority is still central and near-absolute, but economic authority has been ceded back to the market. China has one of the freest markets in the world now, freer generally than the United States even, BUT the political and social structure is still very rigid and centrally-controlled. This has brought the country enormous wealth.

2. However, what remains to be seen is whether the citizens of China will continue to put up with the severe social and political controls under which they live, given their new wealth. Historically, people do not, but you never know.

3. China has an outrageious sex imbalance, the result of 40 years of the One Child Policy and selective abortion of girls. In the younger, marriage and child-bearing age, generation, there are something like 120 men for every 100 women, meaning 20 men cannot marry or have legitimate children. Generally, this is seen as an extremely destabilizing factor in China's immediate future.

4. China is aging very rapidly, again because of the drastic population curtailment taking in the 70s and 80s. The younger generations, in their 20s, are much smaller than the older, in their 60s, and as a consequence China has an enormous bulge of very productive older workers just about to retire. It's like the problems the US has with Baby Boomer retirements and Social Security -- only squared. This, too, is seen as a very destabilizing factor in Chinese future history.

My one feeling is that in the next 20 years China will either radically change, explode violently on the Far East, or implode. It is not likely to be able to continue the path of smooth wealth gathering that has characterized it for the last 40 years.