I’m just curious if China is going to be able to continue this incredible growth.
First, it seems like an economy that grows at this rate is band to hit a wall at some point.
Second, isn’t there a huge imbalance in China? That’s to say that the coastal cities of Shanghai, Hong Kong, etc. are where all of the money is, while most of the people in the west are mostly poor peasents.
Third, AIDs…
I’ll let it go from there…
Doubt it. Mainly because China’s growth is dependent on cheap oil, and that’s not going to last much longer. See http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary16.html.
I’m a little reluctant to accept what looks like a Blog called “Clusterfuck Country” as a clincher reference WRT international economics.
China’s growth is dependent on cheap oil in precisely the same way that America’s continued prosperity is dependent on it. If ‘cheap oil’, whatever that means ceases to exist then we have simply lowered the bar, we haven’t in any way remedied China’s growth relative to the US.
How much longer cheap oil will continue is open to debate, but all the top independent sources say 30+ years. So even if China’s growth is dependent that gives it 30 years of growth at those rates, by which time it will have at least approached the industrialised western world in terms of development and will be no more or less vulnerable than they are.
As for the OP, I’d have to ask why you think that such growth isn’t sustainable? What is this ‘wall’ that you believe exists, and what is it made of? Bear in mind that China still hasn’t approached anything like the living standards or economic efficiency of a capitalist industrial society. So what will stop it from continuing to grow until it reaches that point at the very least?
As for the imbalance problem, sure it exists, but that is symptom of a traditional agrarian society, not an insurmountable obstacle. As a society becomes increasingly industrialised fewer people are require din agriculture and are able to adopt alternative employment, something that we have seen in the US continuously over the last 50 years. If managed at all that is a distinct advantage for growth since it represents a perpetual labour pool. It’s not a disadvantage unless it is mismanaged.
I wasn’t aware that China has a major HIV problem. It seems like China has 650,000 HIV infected people out of a population of 1.3 billion. That’s an infection rate of 0.05%. In comparison the USA has 900,000 HIV infected people out of a population of 0.3 billion. That’s an infection rate of 0.3%.
Perhaps you can explain why an HIV infection rate of 0.05% is going to curtail economic growth in China, while an infection rate almost 10 times higher is economically insignificant for the USA?
Whether you think China has an AIDS problem depends on which media outlet you’re talking to, and the spin they’ve put on it.
It’s fascinating the way that the Washington Post took the same report (as evidenced in Blake’s link) and gave it a “China Lowers Its Estimate of HIV/AIDS Cases” headline.
I don’t think that anybody is denying that China has an HIV problem, as does every country in the world. And I don’t doubt that anyone is denying that it is getting worse in China just as it is getting worse in the USA and most of the world. Those aren’t matters of ‘spin’, nor does it matter who you talk to. Everyone seems to agree on those points, they are just facts.
What I am failing to understand is why someone would suggest that a 0.05% infection rate is going to be economically crippling for china when a 0.3% infection rate is economically neglible for the USA.
I guess the WP used the healdine "China Lowers Its Estimate of HIV because that was the news story. “China has several hundred thousand HIV cases” isn’t news, it’s olds, something the WP and others have reported on before and thus not considered worthy of reprinting.
To a fair degree, that’s just what happens. As productivity rises, you need a lot fewer people on the land and a lot more in the cities. There will be ugliness and dislocation, but that’s the way of development.
I expect there will be bumps in the road, but China can grow pretty quickly for a fair while. To me, the likely difficulties are to do with the stability and soundness of the financial institutions. If the banking system is as dodgy as some suspect, a downturn could get politically ugly.
I’m not an economist, I’m just referencing what I’ve read:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/25/AR2006012500273.html
[QUOTE=Blake]
As for the imbalance problem, sure it exists, but that is symptom of a traditional agrarian society, not an insurmountable obstacle. As a society becomes increasingly industrialised fewer people are require din agriculture and are able to adopt alternative employment, something that we have seen in the US continuously over the last 50 years. If managed at all that is a distinct advantage for growth since it represents a perpetual labour pool. It’s not a disadvantage unless it is mismanaged.
[QUOTE]
What interests me though is that in such an enourmous country, the wealth is concentrated (from what I understand) on one coast. So you have a huge migration of people into cities on one side of the country and a desertion of some areas in the west. We never had that in the US during the last 50 years. We had large cities in every part of the country.
[QUOTE]
In addition to what Duck Duck Goose said, there is also an exponentially larger problem in China concerning AIDs that is that many people are too squeamish to talk about sex and STDs. That’s something that exists in the US, but not to the same extent. Add to that China’s immense population, and it could be a serious problem, perhaps, larger than the African AIDs situation.
man did I mess up that last post!
Here are the parts I wrote:
[QUOTE=gitfiddle]
What interests me though is that in such an enourmous country, the wealth is concentrated (from what I understand) on one coast. So you have a huge migration of people into cities on one side of the country and a desertion of some areas in the west. We never had that in the US during the last 50 years. We had large cities in every part of the country.
cite for the aids? ancedotal evidence suggests otherwise sensationalist news reporting aside.
you are likely confusing the hiv tainted blood with std. condoms have been the birth control method for decades. you can buy them from machines all over shanghai. in the park today i saw a vending machine with kit kats, coke & durex. also i’ve heard the sex workers are pretty hardcore about condom use.
for the other, there are big cities throughout china. the countryside can indeed be largely deserted, with only grandparents & children. people go back for chinese new year or to help at harvest/planting time.
there are between 50-200 million of these migrant workers. i personally employ 3 as nannies/housekeepers.
what western press doesn’t touch on is that not only is this pop shift unprecedented, but also for the first time in chinese history there is actual money going back to these impoverished areas.
Disclaimer: Due to a Vbcode Revolt I am going to attempt to interpret what Gitfiddle probably meant.
Those articles are referring to the potential for the Chinese economy to overheat if it keeps going at the rate sit has been for the past couple of years. This problem isn’t unique to China, it occur sin all countries all the time. That’s why most countries have central banks designed to control such growth through interest rates and so forth.
If all you meant by “continue to grow” is growth at the exact rates seen in the last couple of years then the answer of course is ‘no’. There seems to be no debate whatsoever on that point. Every nation in the world goes through phases of extremely rapid growth from time to time, and they are never sustainable. Nor do they constitute a ‘wall’ if properly managed. It is quite simple to slow down an economy in a number of ways. Exactly what options China has I am unsure of, but I can’t see why any ‘wall’ is applied as opposed to some simple tweaking.
If you are asking if it’s possible for China to continue at the rates we’ve seen over the past 10 years then sure, there’s no reason why not.
Yes, but you need to realise that the US is somewhat of an oddity, not in any way the norm. When you look at countries like Australia or Canada or even South Africa you will find they are far more like China, with most of the wealth and population concentrated on one border. Of course none of that has posed any economic problem for those countries. It’s true that the US never had a major population shift to one border in response to industrialisation but it certainly did have and still does have a massive shift from rural to urban areas. The only difference is that the US has urban areas scattered across the country, which is not the case for many, probably most, nations.
I’d be interested in hearing why you believe that having urban areas concentrated in one location poses some sort of special economic problem.
I don’t follow. What did DDG say that was of any great relevance to your position?
Can we have a reference for that claim please? I’ve worked with several Chinese students over the past 5 years and they are all very forthright about sex to the point of being embarassing for me.
Why does an immense population make for a more serious problem? Surely the problem is ability to contain spread and treat the sick, which isn’t affected by numbers at all is it? If the US has a greater rate of new infections and a greater number of existing infection relative to the population as whole and relative to the number of doctors isn’t that the issue, rather than the total numbers?
I guess what I’m asking is why the problem would be any worse if the population is located in one nation as opposed to 20.
First, I have to clarify, I live with my girlfriend who is Taiwanese, and as a result I spend a large amount of my time with Chinese students here in Paris. A lot of my knowledge of China/Asia/Taiwan, therefore, is anecdotal. I have not yet set foot there (nor, would I necessarily understand the area better simply from spending time there).
That’s, in large part, the reason why I’m asking these questions. I’m trying to straighten out fact (or at least, generally accepted theory) from personal observation
I also want to acknowledge that I realize a lot of these phenomenons (economic and societal) are present in most any country at any time. Essentially, this seems like a big turning point for the world concerning power balances, international commerce, etc., and I’m trying to understand it.
As for the AIDs quotes, I’m at my university right now, so I will look in the book in my apartment this evening. The basic idea was that people in the industrial centers of China are certainly more open about talking about sex, just as seems in any big city. I can see this even in America, there’s a certain openess in big city people that we don’t see in South Carolina.
However, outside of big cities in China, (from what the source said, which I will quote later, so take this with a grain of salt) in the more rural areas, there are still problems when it comes to speaking openly about sex. There are still a lot of traditional societal constraints.
As to why a larger population means a worse epidemic, that depends on how many in China are uneducated, which I don’t know. But I would be willing to bet that the population of Sub-saharan Africa is lower than that of lower-class, rural China, which could mean that an epidemic could effect larger amounts of people.
One interesting factor, also, is the “marriage squeeze” that results from the one-child policy:
http://www.rand.org/commentary/091405IHT.html
That said, on the other hand, the sort of tribalism that exists in many parts of Africa aren’t, from my understanding, as prevalent in China. For instance, you don’t have men going on killing sprees and raping numerous women in front of their husbands so as to exert power of the other man, do you?
As for the population shift, I was led to believe that the masses of people who are moving East were leaving ghost towns in some areas of the country, or areas where certain small numbers of maybe several hundred people were left. I perhaps was assuming too much (Blake knows I have a habit of doing that) in thinking that this would leave certain groups of several hundreds of people here and there in the west of the country who would be disconnected from the actually running of the country. That very well could be the case, but as for the effect, well, I don’t know why it’s so bad.
I’ll leave it at that for now…I have class…
has your girlfriend spent any significant time in china? if she hasn’t then likely she has a lot of stereot pes & misperceptions.
much like myself having an anglo background shouldn’t be relied on to have a real accurate picture of what the UK is actually like as i’ve never been.
going back to the original question, i don’t see why china CAN’T keep growing. we’ve already decreased the importance of the oil, because the US depends on the same oil (more or less). they’ve got people…tons of them. with out sourcing going on, and their cheap labor coupled with their ability to inflate/deflate their currency at will. that’s hard to beat, economically. provided they keep on the straight and narrow and do good things from a human rights standpoint and what not, they should come out looking pretty good.
Just so.
No. I mentioned her because she’s the reason I spend quite a bit of time with mainland Chinese people.
My girlfriend doesn’t care about politics, she is just the reason I’ve become specifically interested in China/Asia/Taiwan in the last two years. She tells me whatever she knows/heard/read. She translates for me. That’s all.
The “anecdotal” things I mention are either from mainland Chinese people or things that my girlfriend mentioned to me and I searched myself.
Here are the AIDs in China sites:
http://hrw.org/editorials/2003/china103003.htm
I present the sources from the book, because the book itself isn’t really a scholarly work, it just has a sexy title, some interesting ideas…and I got it for free from someone who works for the publisher. It’s called 50 Facts that Should Change the World by Jessica Williams. The passage actually says nothing about cultural or societal mores in China holding people back from talking about the problem. I must have completely made that up.
OK, please understand there are two seperate AIDs issues. One is from sex, the other that is affecting the majority of the people in China is from selling tainted blood, and getting infected that way. Please read your cites, here’s an exceprt:
This is Xiongqiao village in Henan province, the ground zero of arguably the world’s worst HIV/Aids epidemic, with up to a million people infected in this single province through a vast, largely **unregulated blood-selling operation. **
Regardless of whether your girlfriend cares about politics or not, she is viewing a lot of things through Taiwanese colored glasses. I lived in Taiwan for many years, which is why I bring this up. There is a Taiwanese perception versus the current China reality, and these often do not match
:eek: Chinese vampires?! With AIDS?!
But seriously – why can’t Chinese doctors get enough blood for transfusions from legitimate, regulated sources?
I did, once I got home, don’t worry. That’s why I recanted the societal pressures stuff.
I just want to be clear that neither one of us has any sort of strong bias towards any country. There are good/great and bad/horrible things about every country. One of the joys of the internet is everyone can learn that the news can be twisted and mangled in any which direction.
She and I have rarely ever talked about China, and almost all of the times we have it’s been WITH Chinese people that we have the conversation.
I just want to be clear on that.