Jon, my former virtual landlord, sent me this link to an article on the inevitable rise of China and matching inevitable decline of the United States:
The senior leadership of the Chinese government increasingly views the competition between the United States and China as a zero-sum game, with China the likely long-range winner if the American economy and domestic political system continue to stumble, according to an influential Chinese policy analyst.
China views the United States as a declining power, but at the same time believes that Washington is trying to fight back to undermine, and even disrupt, the economic and military growth that point to China’s becoming the world’s most powerful country, according to the analyst, Wang Jisi, the co-author of “Addressing U.S.-China Strategic Distrust,” a monograph published this week by the Brookings Institution in Washington and the Institute for International and Strategic Studies at Peking University.
[. . .]
The United States is no longer seen as “that awesome, nor is it trustworthy, and its example to the world and admonitions to China should therefore be much discounted,” Mr. Wang writes of the general view of China’s leadership.
In contrast, China has mounting self-confidence in its own economic and military strides, particularly the closing power gap since the start of the Iraq war. In 2003, he argues, America’s gross domestic product was eight times as large as China’s, but today it is less than three times larger.
[. . .]
Mr. Wang writes that the Chinese leadership, backed by the domestic news media and the education system, believes that China’s turn in the world has arrived, and that it is the United States that is “on the wrong side of history.” The period of “keeping a low profile,” a dictum coined by the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1989, and continued until now by the departing president, Hu Jintao, is over, Mr. Wang warns.
“It is now a question of how many years, rather than how many decades, before China replaces the United States as the largest economy in the world,” he adds.
“It is now a question of how many years, rather than how many decades, before China replaces the United States as the largest economy in the world,” he adds.
I’ll take a horde of decentralized Westerners over centralized planning from Beijing.
Okay, sure, if things go on as they are now, with inept crats in D.C. trying to badly centrally manage ‘everything’ versus engineers in China who _know_ how to run an economy like it’s just a really big factory, they’ll clean our clocks.
I have faith that, long run, Our Leaders will let us do the right thing, if only by omission. China will suffer the inevitable problems of a centrally managed enterprise and not do as well as they could.
Comment by Brian Dunbar — April 3, 2012 @ 10:29
To borrow from Churchill, you think that western democratic leaders will eventually do the right thing, after trying everything else first? 😉
As you’ll recall from my many, many posts on the topic, I don’t believe that China is poised to take over top spot in the world’s economy any time soon, but that task is being made relatively easier by bone-headed and ham-fisted attempts by western governments to “fix” their economic problems by fiat.
Comment by Nicholas — April 3, 2012 @ 10:40