Quotulatiousness

November 15, 2012

Latest advances in “trouser-cough suppression”

Filed under: Health, Japan, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:34

Lester Haines has a bit of fun with this “news” article:

Pairs of fart-absorbing underpants designed to contain the copious trouser cough output from Irritable Bowel Syndrome sufferers have proved a hit with Japanese businessmen.

Manufacturer Seiren expressed pleasant surprise that their guff-busting smalls had attracted the attention of suits more accustomed to allocating most of their underwear budget to schoolgirls’ used knickers.

Spokeswoman Nami Yoshida said: “It took us a few years to develop the first deodorant pants that are comfortable enough to wear in daily life but efficient in quickly eliminating strong smells.

September 9, 2012

Midway: the turning point of the Pacific War

Filed under: Books, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:33

An interesting sketch of the importance of the 1942 Battle of Midway in the Spectator from Richard Freeman:

For many of us the Battle of Midway is just one more Hollywood spectacular in, to paraphrase Neville Chamberlain, a far-away sea of which we know little. But having recently taken a closer look at the battle I am struck both by what was at stake and what the consequences of the American victory were for the Allies at the time and geopolitics since then.

[. . .]

Because the Americans were the victors at Midway, it is easy to forget how near they came to losing the battle. On the day of the main action they attacked the Japanese carriers from dawn until 10.20 am without inflicting any serious damage. Then, between 10.20 am and 10.25 am, the American planes caught three of the Japanese carriers without adequate fighter protection. All three were completely disabled in just five minutes in what has been called ‘the miracle of Midway’.

[. . .]

Now suppose — and it almost happened — that the Japanese carriers, with their vastly superior fighter planes, had caught the American carriers off guard. The loss of those carriers and the destruction of the Midway airbase would have compelled America to give a much higher priority to the Pacific. A direct consequence of that would have been a slower build-up of American power in, first North Africa, and then Europe.

Shortly after the North African landings, there was the other great turning point of the war: Germany’s surrender at Stalingrad. From then on one of the great questions of the war was where the Russians would meet the Allies. Had America suffered a massive defeat at Midway, the Allies advance in Europe would have been slower. (As it was, D-day strained the Allies to the limit. Even a small reduction in ships, tanks, planes or men would have forced its delay.) In these circumstances it is not inconceivable that the Soviet Union would have taken the whole of Germany

I just finished reading one of the few accounts of the battle from the Japanese perspective, Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan by Mitsuo Fuchida and Masatake Okumiya. Because I couldn’t remember Fuchida’s co-author’s name, I Google searched on the title of the book, only to find the top item after Fuchida’s Wikipedia entry was this:

The Western accounts of the Japanese side of the battle have heretofore been built around three primary sources: The after-action log of Admiral Nagumo (“The Nagumo Report”); the interviews with Japanese naval officers conducted after the war by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (“USSBS”); and Mitsuo Fuchida’s book, Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan, which was published in the United States in 1955. These three sources, augmented by fragmentary survivor accounts, have formed the backbone of the Japanese account for all Western histories up to this point.

Unfortunately, one of these sources — Fuchida’s Midway — is irretrievably flawed. Fuchida’s misstatements, which have lain undetected in the West until very recently, have had manifold negative effects on the veracity of the standard English-language battle accounts. His were not minor errors of omission that can be brushed off or explained away — they were fundamental and willful distortions of the truth that must be corrected. Intriguingly, Fuchida’s account was overturned and discredited in Japan more than twenty-five years ago. Yet in the West, he has remained as important as the day his book was first published.

September 3, 2012

Military-political jockeying in the East China Sea

Filed under: China, Japan, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:26

At sp!ked, James Woudhuysen has a long essay on the many tiny islands in the East China Sea (and South China Sea) that may feature in future shooting wars:

Outside East Asia, very few people know where the Senkaku islands are. But inside East Asia, the Senkaku prompt great bitterness between Japan, China and Taiwan. At stake is the national pride of each country, which believes that it alone owns them. At stake also are each country’s hopes that it might find oil or gas nearby, and its desire to sail round them unimpeded. But there is more. The Senkaku, and islands like them, signify how, among all the continents in the world, Asia’s past century has been the most enduringly explosive — and how its next could follow the same pattern.

Two hundred nautical miles (nm) west of the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa, 200 nm east of the province of Fujian in the People’s Republic of China, and just 120 nm north-east of Taiwan, there lies an archipelago of five uninhabited islands, covering just seven square kilometres and covered in jungle. Coming from Tokyo, a team of 25 city officials, surveyors and — inevitably — estate agents circled the islands just this weekend, hoping to reinforce Japan’s control over them. In the past, similar moves by both Japan and China have prompted fury, and not a little diplomatic concern elsewhere.

In mid-August, a group of Chinese sailed to the islands in order to uphold Beijing’s claim to them, only to meet with deportation at the hands of Japan. A little later, 150 Japanese nationalists came by in a flotilla and 10 of them swam ashore to raise the Japanese flag. Then, in the latest of a series of tit-for-tat episodes stretching back years, demonstrators in several Chinese cities insisted that Japan get out of the islands. All that’s missing now is that, on top of Tokyo’s rule over what it calls Senkaku and Beijing’s claim over what it calls Diaoyu, is a Taiwanese incursion over what they call the Diaoyutai.

What’s going on? Could all this lead to some kind of fearsome war between Japan, China and Taiwan? And why are there disputes not only in the East China Sea, but also in the South China Sea? There, south-east of Hainan Island (China) and east of Vietnam, China controls the Paracel Islands and resists the complaints of Taiwan and Vietnam about them. There, too, all three parties occupy and are in contention over the myriad Spratly islands, which, lying west of the Philippines and north of Malaysia and Brunei, are also partly controlled and certainly contested by these three nations.

September 2, 2012

The (mostly) forgotten Soviet-Japanese conflict of 1939

Filed under: China, History, Japan, Military, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:17

Japan’s conduct of the opening stages of World War 2 were literally schizophrenic: the Imperial Japanese Navy viewed their primary opponent as the United States, while the Imperial Japanese Army viewed their primary opponent as the Soviet Union. The army’s fears were based on a little-known but very significant campaign in an undeclared war fought between Japan and the Soviet Union in 1939:

In the summer of 1939, Soviet and Japanese armies clashed on the Manchurian-Mongolian frontier in a little-known conflict with far-reaching consequences. No mere border clash, this undeclared war raged from May to September 1939 embroiling over 100,000 troops and 1,000 tanks and aircraft. Some 30,000-50,000 men were killed and wounded. In the climactic battle, August 20-31, 1939, the Japanese were crushed. This coincided precisely with the conclusion of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact (August 23, 1939) — the green light for Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the outbreak of World War II one week later. These events are connected. This conflict also influenced key decisions in Tokyo and Moscow in 1941 that shaped the conduct and ultimately the outcome of the war.

This conflict (called the Nomonhan Incident by Japanese, the Battle of Khalkhin Gol by Russians) was provoked by a notorious Japanese officer named TSUJI Masanobu, ring-leader of a clique in Japan’s Kwantung Army, which occupied Manchuria. On the other side, Georgy Zhukov, who would later lead the Red Army to victory over Nazi Germany, commanded the Soviet forces. In the first large clash in May 1939, a Japanese punitive attack failed and Soviet/Mongolian forces wiped out a 200-man Japanese unit. Infuriated, Kwantung Army escalated the fighting through June and July, launching a large bombing attack deep inside Mongolian territory and attacking across the border in division strength. As successive Japanese assaults were repulsed by the Red Army, the Japanese continually upped the ante, believing they could force Moscow to back down. Stalin, however, outmaneuvered the Japanese and stunned them with a simultaneous military and diplomatic counter strike.

[. . .]

But what if there had been no Nomonhan Incident, or if it had ended differently, say in a stalemate or a Japanese victory? In that case, the Japanese decision to move south might have turned out very differently. A Japan less impressed with Soviet military capability and faced with choosing between war against the Anglo-American powers or joining Germany in finishing off the U.S.S.R., might have viewed the northern course as the best choice.

If Japan had decided to attack northward in 1941, that could well have changed the course of the war, and of history. Many believe that the Soviet Union could not have survived a two-front war in 1941-1942. The Soviet margin of victory in the Battle of Moscow, and at Stalingrad a year later, was excruciatingly thin. A determined Japanese foe in the east might have tipped the balance in Hitler’s favor. Furthermore, if Japan had moved against the Soviet Union in 1941, it could not also have attacked the United States that year. The United States might not have entered the war until a year later, under circumstances in Europe far more unfavorable than the actual grim reality in the winter of 1941. How then would Nazi domination of Europe been broken?

July 28, 2012

“Beevor’s book stinks”

Filed under: Books, History, Japan, Media, Military, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:01

Yes, the headline is taken out of context. Here’s the context:

Granted, we already knew that World War II was brutal. What, then, can Beevor add to this horridly familiar tale? Or, stated differently, do we need another history of that war? Yes, we do. While the war itself remains a constant, the way it is viewed evolves according to changing moral perceptions. In late 1945, for instance, the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal decided to suppress evidence of cannibalism in order not to traumatize the families of soldiers who died in Japanese prison camps. Beevor thinks that this once-taboo story needs now to be told. He’s probably right. His skill lies in telling it without descending into gratuitous horror.

The challenge that confronts historians is how to convey the immensity of total war without losing sight of singular torment. Too often, the grandeur of great battles smothers the suffering of the individual. Soldiers become battalions that attack on faceless flanks. “One death is a tragedy,” Stalin famously remarked. “A million deaths a statistic.” In the grand narrative, human beings disappear. War is thus sanitized; Stalingrad and Normandy are re-created without the detail of men and women screaming in agony. That is how some readers like it — war without the carnage and putrefaction, without the dismembered limbs and torn faces.

But that is chess, not war. Good military history should stink of blood, feces and fear. Beevor’s book stinks. It reconstructs the great battles but weaves in hundreds of tiny instances of immense suffering. War is presented on its most personal level. We learn not only of the vanity of Gen. Mark Clark, the cruelty of Gen. George Patton and the stupidity of Gen. Maurice Gamelin, but also of the terrible misery endured by what the poet Charles Hamilton Sorley once called “the millions of mouthless dead.” Very few heroes emerge, because heroes are too often cardboard constructs. Detail adds nuance and dimension, clouding characteristics worthy of worship. “Say not soft things as other men have said,” warned Sorley to those who wanted to remember war. Beevor constructs a true picture by avoiding soft things. The book brims with horror, but so it should.

June 28, 2012

Don’t expect Korean re-unification to follow the German script of the 1990s

Filed under: Asia, China, Japan, Media, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:03

Some potentially chilling geo-strategic news from China:

The government has had reports issued denying American and Japanese studies of the rapid expansion of Chinese military power in the last decade. The Chinese reports were issued in Chinese, English and Japanese. China’s official line is that their armed forces are only for defense and are growing at a far more modest rate than foreign analysts are claiming. The Chinese are having a hard time refuting the foreign analysts, given the availability of satellite photos and many cell phone images of new Chinese weapons. China tries to control this sort of information leak, but has been unable to do so.

Another problem for China is the fact that internal propaganda campaigns cannot be kept secret from the outside world. This was never possible, but even with a heavily censored Chinese Internet, such embarrassing news quickly gets to an international audience very quickly. The latest example of this is remarks by Chinese officials about the “Great Wall of China.” The new claims are that the wall was larger than its current official size, and incorporates parts of North Korea. This was alarming news in South Korea, which is preparing to take over North Korea when the communist dictatorship up there collapses. The collapse is expected soon. With this new “Great Wall” argument the Chinese are announcing that if the North Korean government losses control, China will reclaim some “lost provinces” and the foreigners (including South Korea, Japan and the United States) had better stay out of it.

Given the Chinese claims in the South China Sea (that is, almost all of it), it is probably no surprise to the other nations that China might also have designs on part or all of the territory of modern day North Korea. When the German Democratic Republic (aka East Germany) collapsed in the early 1990s, the Federal Republic (West Germany) was able to pick up the pieces in a relatively co-ordinated manner. China may not want South Korea doing the same thing after a North Korean collapse.

May 3, 2012

Remembering the heroism and sacrifice of the defenders at Kohima’s Garrison Hill

Filed under: Britain, History, India, Japan, Military, WW2 — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:53

A little-known battle had major consequences to the tides of Japanese expansion, and has been called “India’s Battle of the Somme“:

Nestled in the vast country’s north-eastern state of Nagaland, it is a place where two Victoria Crosses were won for outstanding bravery, where a 1,000-strong British and Indian force, outnumbered 10 to one, halted the Japanese army’s relentless march across Asia.

Blood-soaked battles in April 1944 saw the troops of the Royal West Kent Regiment, with their comrades from the Punjab Rifles and other Indian regiments, under siege on the top of Kohima’s Garrison Hill.

Troops fought hand to hand in torrential rain from rat-infested trenches dug on the then British deputy commissioner’s clay tennis court.

The two sides were so close that they could lob grenades into each other’s strongholds barely 50 feet away and, according to chroniclers of the battle, Allied troops sometimes woke in their monsoon mud trenches with Japanese troops sleeping alongside them.

When the siege of the hill was finally relieved some 45 days after it had begun, British officers were appalled at the conditions in which both Japanese and allied forces had fought and compared it to the Battle of the Somme. Some of the Japanese soldiers had died of starvation and disease. By then end, more than 4000 allied soldiers were dead, and 5764 Japanese troops had been killed.

March 22, 2012

GAO latest to attempt to shoot down the F-35

Filed under: Australia, Cancon, Japan, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

The situation is looking grimmer for all potential purchasers of the F-35, not just the RCAF:

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the supposed backbone of the Pentagon’s future air arsenal, could need additional years of work and billions of dollars in unplanned fixes, the Air Force and the Government Accountability Office revealed on Tuesday. Congressional testimony by Air Force and Navy leaders, plus a new report by the GAO, heaped bad news on a program that was already almost a decade late, hundreds of billions of dollars over its original budget and vexed by mismanagement, safety woes and rigged test results.

At an estimated $1 trillion to develop, purchase and support through 2050, the Lockheed Martin-built F-35 was already the most expensive conventional weapons program ever even before Tuesday’s bulletins. The Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps are counting on buying as many as 2,500 F-35s to replace almost every tactical jet in their current inventories. More than a dozen foreign countries are lined up to acquire the stealthy, single-engine fighter, as well.

[. . .]

If cuts do occur, the U.S. will be in good company. Australia, Canada and Japan have already begun backing away from the troubled JSF as the new plane has gradually exceeded their budgets. For these countries, alternatives include the Super Hornet and an upgraded F-15 from Boeing, Lockheed’s new F-16V and the European Typhoon, Rafale and Gripen fighters. But so far the U.S. military prefers the F-35, even if the stealthy jet is more than a decade late, twice as expensive as originally projected and available in fewer numbers. “We will remain committed to the long-term success of the F-35 program,” Air Combat Command asserted.

Update, 23 March: The summary of the GAO report with a link to the PDF version for download.

March 9, 2012

Rob Lyons on the lessons of Fukushima

Filed under: Environment, Japan, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:56

It’s almost exactly a year since the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Fukushima, and Rob Lyons summarizes the lessons we’ve learned from that disaster:

Sunday marks the first anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the east coast of Japan on 11 March 2011. The quake, measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale, was the biggest ever to hit Japan and one of the biggest anywhere in the world in the past century. The resulting tsunami caused roughly 20,000 deaths. Yet, shockingly, the biggest issue about the disaster remains the resulting inundation of a nuclear-power plant at Fukushima, which so far appears to have caused precisely zero deaths from leaking radioactivity.

There are many valuable lessons to be learned from this tragedy. One is the importance of development. The earthquake and tsunami that affected the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day 2004 were only marginally larger, yet killed well over 200,000 people. Direct damage from the Japan earthquake was relatively small thanks to high building standards. Warnings allowed many people to escape the unprecedented seawater surge that followed, though video of the wall of water hitting coastal towns is still shocking. Even so, the world’s third largest economy will take a long time to recover fully from what happened. Thankfully, Japan has the resources to do that.

This, however, is not the main lesson being drawn from events a year ago. Around the world, the conclusion many commentators and politicians have drawn is that nuclear power is inherently dangerous and that we need to stop all future nuclear development. This is a perverse conclusion, absolutely flying in the face of the facts. The reaction against nuclear power post-Fukushima reveals much about the navel-gazing, risk-averse worldview that has such a paralysing effect on life in the developed world today.

February 22, 2012

“More Americans fall off the roof installing solar panels each year than have ever been kiled by civilian nuclear power in the US”

Filed under: Environment, Japan, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:45

Tim Worstall responds to a Naomi Wolf panic-piece about the evils of nuclear power:

    Although there is a scientific consensus that no exposure is safe, no matter how brief,

No love, there isn’t a scientific consensus that says that there is no safe level of radioactivity. Forget hormesis for a moment and just concentrate on the obvious fallacy of the statement. We’re all bombarded with radiation all the time. Everything from cosmic rays through to uranium in the soil to bananas and Brazil nuts. And while we do all fall down dead eventually we’re not all falling down dead from the radiation from these sources.

[. . .]

And then we get the great one:

    Then, Japan was hit by a tsunami, and the cooling systems of the Fukushima nuclear reactor were overwhelmed, giving the world apocalyptic images of toxic floods and floating cars, of whole provinces made uninhabitable.

Well, yes, the tsunami killed lots of people, indeed. And the failure of the nuclear plant has killed no one. So we’d better abolish tsunamis then, eh?

Finally, what’s wrong with the whole piece, indeed, the basic mode of thinking behind it, is that it is looking only at absolute risk, taking no account whatsoever or relative risk. If we decide that we actually do want to have electricity then we need to look at which system of producing the electricity we desire kills the fewest of us. And in that nuclear wins hands down. More Americans fall off the roof installing solar panels each year than have ever been kiled by civilian nuclear power in the US.

Oh, and coal fired power stations distribute more radiation around the world than nuclear power plants do as well.

December 28, 2011

Going beyond merely precut lumber for homebuilding

Filed under: Japan, Technology, Woodworking — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:52

Precut – Modern Japanese Timber Construction from BAKOKO on Vimeo.

H/T to Popular Woodworking for the link.

December 27, 2011

The plight of Japan’s “herbivore men”

Filed under: Japan, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:52

Think you had it tough as a teen? It’s not a good time to be a teenage boy in Japan:

It’s not easy being a young man in Japan today. Every few months sees the release of a new set of figures, stats and stories trumpeting the same meme: today’s Japanese men are unmanly — and worse, they don’t seem bothered by it.

Tagged in the domestic media over the past few years as hikikomori (socially withdrawn boys), soshoku danshi (grass-eating/herbivore men, uninterested in meat, fleshly sex and physical or workplace competition), or just generally feckless, Japan’s Y-chromosomed youth today elicit shrugs of “why?”, followed by heaving sighs of disappointment from their postwar elders and members of the opposite sex. With the country’s economy stagnant at best, its geopolitical foothold rapidly slipping into the crevice between China and the United States, and its northeast coastline still struggling with the aftermath of disaster and an ongoing nuclear crisis, the reaction to a failure of Japan’s men to take the reins, even symbolically, has evolved from whispers of curiosity to charges of incompetence.

[. . .]

Why the generational malaise and indifference to sex? Theories abound. The most provocative to me, a Japanese-American and longtime Tokyo resident, is that Japanese women have become stronger socially and economically at the very same time that Japanese men have become more mole-ish and fully absorbed in virtual worlds, satiated by the very technological wizardry their forebears foisted upon them, and even preferring it to reality. “I don’t like real women,” one bloke superciliously sniffed on Japan’s 2channel, the world’s largest and most active internet bulletin board site. “They’re too picky nowadays. I’d much rather have a virtual girlfriend.”

[. . .]

The phrase “herbivore men” was coined by a female Japanese journalist in 2006. By 2009, the Japanese male’s lack of ambition, sexually or otherwise, had become a media meme. With the latest reports in Japan, of men who can’t get it up for real women who won’t get married or have kids, the mutual gender-chill phenomenon has become mainstream. It may be the future, but is it really Japanese?

“Maybe we’re just advanced human beings,” says a Japanese friend of mine over dinner this week in Tokyo, who won’t let me use her real name. She is an attractive, 40-something editor at one of Japan’s premier fashion magazines, and she is still single. “Maybe,” she adds, “we’ve learned how to service ourselves.”

December 13, 2011

Japan’s even-worse-than-Greek debt situation

Filed under: Economics, Japan — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

By way of Monty’s daily DOOOOOOM post, here’s some disturbing information on Japan’s eyewatering debt situation:

It seems “debt,” “Greece,” “crepe,” or any other words that might relate to the current Euro crisis prompts a flurry of activity on stocks around the world. But if you thought Greece’s and Italy’s debts were high, there exists a country with an even higher debt-to-GDP ratio. Surprisingly, it also has some of the lowest government bond rates in the world. Let’s take a look at this macro mystery.

Japan’s 2011 gross public debt as a percentage of GDP is estimated by the IMF at 234%. Compare this to down-but-not-yet-out Greece’s at 139% and Italy’s at 119%, and the United States’ at 99%. With those numbers, you may ask how Japan hums along while investors berate Europe for their lack of strict budget controls and U.S. politicians wrestle to cut the deficit.

This is because of one main difference: 95% of Japan’s debt is Japanese-owned. Compare this to Greece, which owns 29% of its debt. The Japanese have been happy to fund their government at incredibly low bond rates, currently around 1.1% for a 10-year bond. Why don’t the Japanese invest elsewhere for higher returns? For one, Japan likes to keep its yen in the country. This is due to a natural bias to favor one’s domestic investments (home bias), the strength of the yen, and domestic institutions’ required participation in bond auctions. Also, it’s difficult to find domestic positive returns. The Nikkei, since Japan’s trouble in the early 1990s, has lost about half its value

December 7, 2011

Reason.TV: How Pearl Harbour made America a global power

Filed under: History, Japan, Military, Pacific, USA, WW2 — Tags: — Nicholas @ 13:05

A minor quibble: though Craig Shirley asserts that the only way Americans could fight overseas before Pearl Harbour was with the Chinese air force, at least 16,000 Americans were serving in the Canadian Army, the Royal Canadian Navy, or the Royal Canadian Air Force:

Long before Pearl Harbor, a steady stream of Americans had started moving northward across the border to join the Canadian armed forces. By the beginning of 1941 some 1,200 Americans comprised about 10 percent of RCAF officer strength and 3 percent of the other ranks. A U.S. influx totaling about 10 percent of RCAF recruitment continued until, at the time of Pearl Harbor, over 6,000 U.S. citizens were serving in the RCAF, of whom 600 were instructors in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. By the same time nearly 10,000 Americans were serving in the Canadian Army. After Pearl Harbor a reverse movement resulted in the absorption of over 26,000 Canadians into the U.S. armed forces during World War II.

From Military Relations Between the U.S. & Canada by Stanley W. Dzuiban.

November 24, 2011

US to be crushed by Oriental economic juggernaut, film at 11

Filed under: China, Economics, Japan, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:27

Do any of these statements sound familiar?

  • “I don’t mean to be an alarmist, but I get the uneasy feeling that America is history”
  • “The power behind the [. . .] juggernaut is much greater than most Americans suspect, and the juggernaut cannot stop of its own volition, for [it] has created a kind of automatic wealth machine, perhaps the first since King Midas.”

This kind of statement can be found in all the prestigious newspapers, opinion journals, and magazines . . . in the late 1970s through the late 1980s. The economic juggernaut of the day was Japan. It was poised to crush the feeble remnants of American capitalism with the all-powerful keiretsu, Japan’s corporate conglomerate organizations. The strong would smash the weak, leaving America (and the rest of the Anglosphere) in the dust. Just in case you didn’t follow economic history, it didn’t happen.

Today, the economic bogeyman is China:

“We are getting our clock cleaned by Chinese state capitalism,” wrote Robert Kuttner, now editor of The American Prospect, earlier this year at The Huffington Post. Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Simon Johnson piled on at the annual conference of the American Economic Association, declaring, “The age of American predominance is over. The [Chinese] Yuan will be the world’s reserve currency within two decades.” The conservative Citizens Against Government Waste even aired a television commercial featuring a Beijing economics class in 2030 in which a professor explains how America became indebted to China. The professor concludes, “So now they work for us.” The class chuckles knowingly.

This gloomy message of American decline relative to China appears to be seeping into popular consciousness. An April 2011 poll by Xavier University found that “a stunning 63 percent believe that the Chinese economy is more powerful than the US economy.”

“The U.S. could lose its status as the world’s biggest economic power within five years,” reported The Daily Mail in April. The Mail article was based on calculations released by the International Monetary Fund projecting that total Chinese GDP, adjusted for purchasing power, will surpass U.S. GDP by 2016.

Can that be? Let’s do the math: China’s total GDP is around $6 trillion today. Assuming 10 percent GDP growth for the next 20 years, China’s GDP would rise to $40 trillion. If the U.S. economy grew at, say, 3 percent a year, total GDP would be $27 trillion. Back in 2007, before the financial crisis, the investment bank Goldman Sachs issued a report projecting that Chinese GDP would be $26 trillion in 2030, compared to $23 trillion for the U.S. It bears noting that current Chinese purchasing power per capita is about $6,000, compared to $46,000 for Americans.

That’s not to say that it’s impossible — the longer the US government struggles to avoid cutting back, the more likely it is that the US will enter a long economic decline — but China has economic problems a-plenty.

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