# If China's financial industry goes in the tank like ours...

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-chinas-financial-industry-goes-in-the-tank-like-ours/466705>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [October 6, 2008, 5:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-chinas-financial-industry-goes-in-the-tank-like-ours/466705 "2008-10-06T17:45:53Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\
**Post date:** [October 8, 2008, 3:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-chinas-financial-industry-goes-in-the-tank-like-ours/466705/21 "2008-10-08T03:27:15Z")

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Fair enough. My experience is probably pretty colored by coming here directly after two years in an African village where most of neighbors owned a single set of clothes and were just beginning to afford luxury goods like plastic drinking cups and laundry soap- a place where my town of 50,000 people could support two restaurants. So even my rather backwoods Chinese city seems like a consumer orgy.

Your article seems a little suspect though. It complains about the low threshold of “middle class.” I make a little less than the lowest threshold of $3,200 (though with some perks- I get housing and health care) and I am definitely in the consuming class- I shop at the supermarket as often as at the open market, I eat at restaurants, I drink soda and beer and buy packaged snack food, I can buy home furnishings and new clothing as long as I keep things modest (I’m saving for a toaster oven), I can travel locally and I have money left for treats like DVDs or the occasional trip to KFC.

To me this is what you expect from an emerging middle class. It’s certainly a lifestyle most people in Cameroon could never expect to live- a bottle of Pepsi there costs what most people make in a day.

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**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\
**Post date:** [October 8, 2008, 6:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-chinas-financial-industry-goes-in-the-tank-like-ours/466705/22 "2008-10-08T18:39:21Z")

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> [@Throatwarbler\_Mangrove](#):
>
> America IS exporting much more. It’s just that a large portion of the exports are cancelled out by increased prices paid for imported oil.
> 
> [http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story\_id=11921655](http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11921655)

Yeppers. If we could cancel out imported oil, or at least a lot of it with new nuke plants and whatnot, we’d get in really good shape in no time!

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