T. Belman. The End of the Last, Best Chance for China,
“Between rapid urbanization and the One Child Policy, birth rates in China plunged below replacement rates decades ago. The only thing preventing broad-scale population collapse is improved health care among China’s older cohorts which has extended the average Chinese citizen’s lifespan. Demographically speaking, that’s a bit of a starvation diet. Within the decade that demographic dividend will be spent, and China’s population will begin a harsh decline. The most reasonable estimates project a China with half its population in 2100 compared to 2020.
“That’s hardly the worst of it–or the part that will be felt first. The 2100 projection ignores the economic effects of today’s young (already numerically gutted) generation. Without sufficient young people, nothing about today’s China is sustainable. The young generation are the people who do work, buy goods, staff the army, and care for the old.”
Up until recently I felt that China’s economic growth was unstoppable and that it would indeed surpass the U.S. and keep going into a bright future.
However, researching more, I concluded that healthy land use for agriculture (such as organic farming) and minimizing industrial pollution are even more important than economic prosperity. China doesn’t have them; we do.
The dysfunctional running of the centralized banking system by the CCP is also major handicap for the economy.
Now, if you merely compare a dollar’s worth of the Chinese economy to that of the U.S., it seems that China is doing rather well, being second in the world, and net exporting about $400 billion a year in 2020.
IMF data from 2018 show that China’s debt to GDP ratio is 55.36%, while U.S. debt to GDP ratio is 106.7% or almost twice as large as China’s.
Total wealth in 2020 of the U.S. is $105,990 billion and China is $63,827 billion or about half that of the U.S.
However, I am beginning to feel sorry for the Chinese people who are being victimized by the corporatist or state capitalism which is rapidly turning Chinese land into a toxic cesspool, with devastating health impacts on the people.
It’s short duration profits at the expense of public health. It is no wonder that the U.S., E.U., and Japan do not allow the import of some Chinese foodstuffs which contain unhealthy additives, dangerous drug residues, and unsanitary characteristics. Crop pollution is not prominently mentioned in the news. but many Chinese citizens have little confidence in the food which they consume.
The banking sector is terribly inefficient because it is under centralized CCP control. There’s this from Foreign Policy (subscription):
State owned enterprises are inefficient financial behemoths. The large-scale privatization of state-owned enterprises is a good place to start. These inefficient behemoths control nearly $30 trillion in assets and consume roughly 80 percent of the country’s available bank credit, but they contribute only between 23 and 28 percent of GDP. The efficiency gains that would be unleashed by reining in the state’s direct role in the economy would be more than enough to compensate for the loss of the U.S. market.
There’s this, too, from The 21st Century:
China‘s Growing Agriculture Crisis
F. William Engdahl on 2020-09-07
For the past months the Peoples’ Republic of China has been subject to one after the other devastating shocks to its agriculture sector. A deadly outbreak of African Swine Fever that halved China’s huge pig herds in 2019, was followed by infestation from a plague of fall armyworms (FAW) which reached China in December, 2018 and now threaten China’s corn belt.
Now the worst floods in some 60 years is wiping out major rice and other crops in central China along the Yangtze and other rivers. Food Security is one of six national priorities for national security. President Xi Jinping has just issued a call to citizens not to waste food or face penalties, a sign that the depth of the food security threat is far worse than thought.
Not mentioned is the fact that pollution from pesticides, artificial fertilizers, and toxic runoff into rivers is making many crops not that healthy for human consumption so the long term prognosis for agriculture is not that rosy.
Perhaps half of all Chinese—a staggering 600 million people—drink water that is contaminated by human or animal waste. These people are subjected to waterborne disease and a myriad of human health concerns related to the use of polluted water.
China’s major river systems exhibit the scope of the problem. Perhaps 70 percent of their water is so polluted that it has been deemed unsafe for human contact. In addition to untreated sewage released into these waterways, high-growth industries such as textiles, paper manufacturing, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals account for a large share of this pollution.
At dumps, toxic runoff often percolates through the earth to contaminate groundwater aquife
rs. Untreated mining and industrial waste leaves some waters contaminated with such high metal content that they literally run red with rust-colored water. Lead levels have been recorded in Chinese rivers that are some 44 times greater than accepted norms.
China is paying dearly for supplying the world with low-cost manufactured goods and the long duration health of its people is in serious danger. I despise the CCP for its disregard of human rights and tyrannical rule. I now despise the CCP because it is screwing the long duration health of Chinese citizens and turning the country into a toxic cesspool. If you don’t have your health, then all the money in the world won’t buy it back. To me China’s future does not look bright at all.
@ Adam Dalgliesh:
Alex, we are at war with PR China, so it’s probably good to not rely on propaganda from either side.
The US certainly has problems: We have a government hell-bent of destroying this country, so that some individuals can make money on its demise. As long as we are socially and morally dysfunctional, and the government continues to tax and oppress our most productive people (the “Deplorables”), USS America is on its way to the bottom. A similar process is underway, as you note, in Red China.
One thing neither you nor the article mentioned, is the fundamental economic fact that China’s success has depended on international trade. By unleashing the COVID chaos on the world, China has effectively shot the goose that lays the golden eggs. Consumer countries like Australia and the US, which were showing measured opposition to China during the Trump 45 Era, are now headed for a total disconnect. Who will buy their goods? Where will their real money come from?
My family is struggling in PRC. My son-in-law’s businesses have gone belly-up some four times now. The hit from COVID has been only the latest: the others have been caused by government corruption and cronyism. The last I heard, not only had import supplies been denied to businessmen and the ports were having trouble bringing them in; but so many local stores were down from COVID that it was difficult to market goods. Meanwhile, the country continues to pump out ghost cities and bridges to nowhere, because they were dictated by central planning geared to the hot economy of yesterday, that no longer exists.
As I said, USS America is starting its slide to the bottom of the sea. Our officers and crew have torpedoed their own ship from within. If the damage isn’t quickly repaired, we can only pray for rescue helicopters to come from heaven and save the survivors. When that day comes, I believe the people of China will also be in lifeboats.
Meanwhile, Alex Jones seems to be at the top of his form. Here’s his latest:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/lwO3IM79OF5J/
Also, God bless and keep Israel in its troubles. On the lighter side, I was thinking about Netanyahu and the current situation. If he were to start his own website, as Mike Lindell has done, he could call it:
“Net.on.Yahoo.il” 🙂
Good to hear.
They’ve had a two child policy for five years now, and there is social pressure to have two thought not three children, though it’s true that the birth rate has been dropping due to unintended economic causes. But, that’s common in advanced economies. Israeli Jews, including secular, are the exception.
https://www.marketplace.org/2020/10/13/the-one-child-policy-is-history-but-rules-in-china-still-restrict-families/
However, considering China is our rival, I was going to quip that maybe the title was too optimistic.
All this is accurate. But it is not even the full story of China’s self-inflicted woes. Another major problem not even mentioned here is severe drought in Northern China, which “complements” serious flooding in the South. Attempts to alleviate the problem with major canals, dams and water pipeline projects have proved inadequate to deal with this problem. THe chronic drought has less to massive declines in wheat production, wheat being the staple in the north (noodles made from them), while rice is the staple food in the south.
Many Chinese dams, including the massive Three Gorges Dam in the central Yangzte Valley, are in very bad shape due to faulty construction and use of cheap but inferior building materials. If the Three Gorges Dam collapse, as many hydraulic experts will occur over the next ten years, the major industrial centers of Wuhan and Nanking will be utterly destroyed, millions of Chinese will be killed, and industrial production will be hard hit.
Tens of millions of ordinary Chinese are so deeply in debt that they can’t pay their rent or afford to buy food, whose price in rapidly rising.This results not only from all of the problems mentioned already by Mr. (Ms.?) Sprigs and myself, or by myself, but from the incredibly harsh lockdowns employed by the Chinese government to control the pandemic.
Many municipalities are also deeply in debt to the banks or the central government.
Many large large real estate and construction companies are heavily in debt and on the verge of collapse. The Chinese government has sponsored the building huge “ghost cities,” with hundreds of thousands of buildings, but no or very few inhabitants, because few or no people are willing to move to them. Also, miles and miles of roads leading nowhere and abandoned. THis has hit the construction and real estate firms very, very hard. Their failure will lead to mass unemployment, mass losses to investors, and the possible collapse of the banking system.
China owes a lot of money to European banks and is having trouble obtaining enough Euros and dollars to pay these debts.
Corruption is extremely pervasive in China. It is impossible to get anything done to get help from government officials or civil servants without paying bribes. The corruption begins at the top and goes all the way down to the lowest ranking civil servants.
Although few people seem to agree with my view, except fort he many Chinese political refugees in the West such as Jennifer Zeng (who publishes the “Jennifer’s World” site, demonitized by Google), I and they they believe that in the foreseeable future the Chinese peope will rise up against their oppressors in spontaneous strikes and demonstrations, as they did in 1989 during Deng Xiao-ping regime. That uprising was crushed. But the next one might not be.
China’s government seems to be planning to iniitate invasions of Taiwan and perhaps India. Certainly they have been making many noises and undertaking many military provocations directed at these two countries. THey may be doing this hoping to rebuild their popular support and supress discontent by rousing patriotic fervor. However, we should remember that when the monarchies of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia decided to go to war with each other for much the same reasons, they were all overthrown. That could happen to the CCP regime in China as well.
China has become wealthy and powerful doing what they have been doing. Given China’s wealth, population and history, if the environment gets bad enough, for them, they can and will implement massive civil works projects to mitigate them.
Chinese parents care for their children as much as other parents around the globe. Their society is collectivist so individual rights are secondary to the common good. The US civilization was based on individual rights but is rapidly changing to embrace the Chinese collectivist model. In China, the loss of a few hundred million people to clean up the environment could be viewed as the price of progress- an acceptable cost for global wealth and power. It is better for us to pay attention to it because it may well be the Dickensian ” Ghost of Christmas Future” for us.
I wouldn’t count their future, or them, out.