The Stats Behind China’s Emergence as a World Economic Leader
China is a major engine for world economic growth with a GDP that grew 6.7% last year (The US grew 2.9%). It is now the 2nd largest economy. China is the largest merchandise exporter and 2nd largest merchandise importer. By 2020 China is projected to have a middle class of 600 million people (United States will have less than 167 million in the middle class). China is now taking environmental and energy consumption problems serious enough that energy consumption per unit of GDP is now dropping (in the US too—except things might be changing here). Major efforts are under way in China to cope with climate change, reducing resources consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, and protecting the environment. It’s foreign policy has shifted to the concept of a global human community with a shared destiny. It’s foreign investment activities have more than doubled since 2012. China claims to be immune now to over capitalistic tendencies which lead countries like the U.S. to have stagnant wages and widening income inequality. It now (under current leadership), claims to select its national leaders based on merit and performance. On average, each party secretary has administered a population of at least 100 million before being promoted to the current position in Beijing. China’s population of 1.3 billion is now covered by national medical insurance and pension plans. China claims no need to yield to the demands of various vested interests, as does the U.S. to the power of capitalism. They claim the 100 richest Chinese have no influence on their Central Committee. China believes it can stay clear of American syndrome of over-capitalism or the Greek syndrome of the excessive welfare state. In the past five years more than 60 million people have been lifted out of poverty resulting in the poverty ratio dropping from 10.2% to less than 4 percent., while the middle income group has been expanding.
In 2013 China launched a project to modernize the infrastructure along the ‘Silk Road’ which connects Europe with Asia. This will be funded through the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. The importance of this is: of the 15 countries with the world’s largest oil reserves, 8 are along this route, as are 8 of the 15 countries with the most gas reserves. And this route would also make transporting goods between Asia and Europe more economical. American anger at Pakistan (deserved) has resulted in a reduction in financial aid to Pakistan. But China stepped in and made direct investments in Pakistan totaling $837 million compared to the $42.6 million given by the United States over the same time period.
In the electric car business the American Telsa manufacturer says it will build 260,000/yr starting shortly. China has already sold 700,000 electric cars in 1017. China has offered subsidies to buyers to the tune of $15,000 per vehicle and has threatened to block automakers that don’t make electric vehicles from selling traditional cars. Recently China halted production of more than 500 models of heavily polluting cars. It is projected that by 2020 China will be producing 4.5 million electric vehicles while Tesla is projected to produce about 1 million. Right now China has become the world’s largest automotive market. The Chinese city of Shenzhen now has 16,359 all-electric buses. The United States has 300.
China is now seeking to reduce rural poverty by developing production systems, relocation, ecological compensation, education and social security initiatives. In one province this reduced the numbers of impoverished residents by 25%. Current goals are to lift more than 1 million out of poverty per year (Does the US even have goals here?). A modern rural cooperative gives 30% of profits to the village to cover public spending, 30% goes to the rural cooperative to expand production, and the remaining 40 percent is shared by the farmers (Since 2013, America's farmers and ranchers have weathered a 45 percent drop in net farm income, the largest three-year drop since the start of the Great Depression).
. Recently the brain drain from China to Silicon Valley has been reversed as more and more Chinese return to China where they feel the high tech innovations back in China gives them a better chance to work on grander problems, and a better chance to become fabulously wealthy.
In spotting cyberthreats China currently is 20 days ahead of the United States in spotting cyberthreats. This is based on 17,940 vulnerabilities added to both data bases over the past two years.
China has mobilized 60,000 troops to plant trees in an area roughly the size of Ireland by 2018.
China has indicated plans to boost the output of artificial intelligence (AI) at a cost which will equal more than a tenth of China’s 2016 gross domestic product.
In 2011 85% of Chinese consumers preferred foreign brands. In 2017 the preference for foreign brands dropped to 40%.
The Chinese former policy of allowing only 1 child per couple worked so well that the policy now permits two children, but most couples are selecting to stick with just one. Chinese women get 161 days of paid maternity leave. And some areas of China now offer new fathers one month paid leave.
China is now the biggest foreign holder of American T-bills.
China has strict control over internet ‘news’. What the government considers fake news rarely gets through to viewers. Both Google and Apple struggle with being able to freely operate in China. Hard to know what to think of this considering the rampant use of ‘false facts’ fed to a relatively uneducated American public. Not that China won’t create it’s own ‘false facts’. Hard to know how best to handle false facts. This would make an interesting musing: how to deal with false facts dispersed quickly and to thousands of people daily via cyberspace communications.
China is using regulations, not interest rates, to force companies to lower debt.
Right here is enough data to draw some logical conclusions. It is understood that not all stats are to be taken at face value. But in great enough numbers a picture, however hazy, emerges. Americans still place budgetary priorities on our military industrial complex, even though all these bombs and weapons of mass destruction provided little assistance on winning our invasion goals of countries we invaded. After we wipe out the infrastructure of whatever country we invade as ‘peace keepers’ and in the absence of having soldiers in military uniforms to attack, we declare ‘victory’ and leave the conquered country to thugs and terrorists to control their communities. Spending so much money on the military industrial complex (which in order to thrive must have continuous military actions somewhere), there is little money to actually compete with a country like China who is focused on the matters listed above. In fact all the more advanced industrialized countries have a far greater percent of their budgets to spend on domestic matters than the United States. Who wins with our current priorities? Certainly not the poor or the less fortunate in our own country, or the same classes in those countries we invade. Lincoln had it right: “A house divided against itself cannot stand”. Today, in America, this means that if the three large ethnic groups—white, black, hispanic----none of whom now have a clear majority——cannot bring themselves to respect each other, support each other, with each group working with the other groups to help them solve problems unique to each group, then the toxic domestic environment will surely bring on the flames of violence and hate that will bring an economic and violent implosion, the likes of which we can not possibly fully envision. There is a lot at stake. Every ethnic group is screaming that “our lives matter”. This is only a noble expression when it is changed to: “Our lives matter too”.
Our democratic form of government has not been able to change it’s structure in ways which allow domestic policies to get the needed attention. The argument as to whether Obama or Trump is the ‘devil’ here is misplaced. Obama got modest health care reform through when he had a democratic Congress early in his administration, but after that nothing that he proposed domestically could get through Congress or even be voted on by Congress. Congress has become little more than a platform for vitriolic attacks on other people/groups. The classless vitriolic personal assassination in Congress is matched now by the Presidency. This, more than anything else led to large groups of ‘common folk’, whose economic status was getting worse every year—and has been for decades now, to revolt and vote for the candidate who was just as angry as them. The real issues are so complicated these days that we have uneducated voters deciding matters like climate change based on their feelings, not any real understanding of the issues.
China’s revised political structure, given the current leadership, can implement policies unilaterally. Right now China’s leadership is focused on economic matters at home and abroad. To the extent it remains that way, they will actually do most of the things ‘liberals’ or ‘progressives’ in this country support. China is now focused on the plight of the poor, while the US is focused on greasing the wheels of the government for the 2-5% who own 90% of our wealth. China has already led on population control while non dictatorships have little ability to even discuss this issue and survive politically. China is now actively altering the economic structure of their rural ghettoes to ensure they are better educated, have good health care, and improved wages. China is now hell bent on addressing climate control. China is hell bent now on a foreign aid policy which enables the third world countries to get a fairer share of benefits for economic agreements. In essence, China has made remarkable strides in fostering a capitalism that has strict regulations and strict limits. The Chinese dictatorship government will decide matters of fairness in deals with others, domestically or globally, and place limits of just how much of their national wealth can be accumulated by their very wealthy.
The United States cannot do these things in the above paragraph and this is, right now, our Achilles Heel. We still lead, in most areas of military hardware, invasions of other countries, an economic system in which 3 citizens (Gates, Bezos, Buffett) can have as much wealth as half the United States citizens combined, and human rights, but more and more Americans are starting to emotionally feel “fuck human rights, I need a pay raise, a livable wage, a dependable and decent pension, to work less hours per week, to have a job opportunity (at a decent wage), to have good health care, to live in a safe neighborhood (an American teenager is 48 times more likely to be killed than in any other modern industrialized society), while young people living in our poorer communities, rural or urban, need good schools and good teachers. The political status in this country (we’re not the only one) is toxic, stagnant, and stalemated with both political parties able to stonewall the policies of any elected President. In this environment, with almost total neglect of our lower class, it will be domestic terrorism which will grow at the most exponential rate, and already is.
This is about as short a treatise that can be written on this topic of China, Korea, and future world leadership. How to change the situation is not all that clear. On evolutionary time, there is no need to think progress is ending. On human time, the near future is certainly of concern for most of global humanity. What is glaringly new in the evolutionary process is a species (our own) with so much more ‘intelligence’ creating activities that are going to influence the evolutionary process in ways which heretofore were not in the mix. The result? It probably is a waste of time to even hazard any guess as what the result will be. The future generations will find out.
I personally feel gratitude that my days of being ‘in the mix’ are over and have been for 21 years now. My hermit hood life has achieved the level necessary to ride out and be apart from the reality of those now in their formative and productive years. I do what I can for the ‘most unfortunate’ plus the environment, through my FANAFI Fund, and go gently down the stream to oblivion, minus any angst over death as the certain finale. So much luck, genes, environment, and crucial help from others has come my way, independent of any earned right to any of these benefits, that it would be hard for me to generate any logical basis to complain. Perhaps when my dying process starts it’s final descent, I will lose sight of gratitude and squeal like a pig—and end up grasping at every straw to live a few more months. Time will tell. Except for endless musings, nature, Abraham Lincoln, Victoria Woodhull, the Louvin Brothers, Duke Snider, Obama, Barry Goldwater, Alan Iverson, my pets, and of course the more recent Terrell Owens, my acquired sense of when ‘enough is enough’ of most anything, has contributed greatly to my sense of contentment in my terminational years. Being unimportant never has felt more therapeutically acceptable. Fate has been kind to me, but I have always been saddened by the fate of so many in life for whom so many unpleasant realities existed. The best I could do was to never be the cause of someone else’s bad fate. To the extent I succeeded there, my life has been judicially a positive force. I never got to ‘miss’ the billions of years before my birth and I will never get to miss the infinite years of the future after my extinguishment. Fair enough, but still, extinguishment is a hard word to swallow. On the other hand, is it really a blessing to be the last one standing? There goes the last hope for a large funeral. At that point, what are we standing for?
