Not many. It’s almost impossible to get full chinese citizenship so it’s pretty pointless to start that ball rolling.
I’m not sure what though. The value of a well-known “brand” and a language that’s widely-spoken?
I love the US, but I would certainly recommend a number of countries over it to any citizen of Dirtpoorland. Countries where if you start with nothing, your chances of living the american dream are ironically far higher than in america.
No, I don’t think China is going to supercede anyone as the world superpower, seeing as it’s government is a morally bankrupt regime with a reputation for abusing human rights. Evil like that can’t succeed. The fact that the US has the moral high ground and the better human rights record is why I think it has lasted so long as a superpower. I’m not sure who is going to become the next super superpower, but here are a few guesses. 1. Australia 2. Russia 3. Israel 4. A possibly independent Scotland
I think the odds of any of the countries on your list becoming a superpower go from remote to ‘not a snow balls chance in hell’. China is in a much better position than any of them to become a world superpower since, well, they already are a regional superpower.
I doubt anyone (including the US) will be the ‘next US’, since the conditions that lead to US dominance were pretty narrow and improbable. My guess is that instead of a new hyperpower and unipolar world we’ll get a number of competing superpowers of roughly similar economic, cultural and military power in the future. I doubt any on your list will make that group either.
The gender ration at birth is 117::100 male::female. There’s a disparity but its not 3::2 Its closer to 7::6
First of all China will never be the World’s biggest military power, due to the fact that even if the US halved its military spending and China added another hundred billion to its military spending, still it would be the second biggest. Not mentioning the fact that the US army has participated in many wars and prolonged operations, although China has not.
As for economically, China has a very high growth rate and this rate cannot be sustained for a very long time, similarly to a bubble, which has been inflated for a long time regularly, and after it reaches it’s peak volume, it explodes.
Moreover, like other repressive elitist states, Chinese people mostly live in bad conditions, and a significant portion of the population live near or under poverty while the state (authorities) flourish.
Furthermore, China is the World’s most capitalist state hiding under the title of “Communism”, but the fact is that the Communist Party is only in charge because it’s a one-party State and it’s name is Communist because it’s a way of paying respects to Mao Zedong, the communist revolutionary and the founding father of China.
I wonder about that second one, because the written and spoken languages in China differ. Many people cannot speak Mandarin but can read standard Chinese.
This gives some idea of the situation:
Sounds right.
I think the bigger demographic problem is that they have gotten to a European-type sub-replacement fertility prior to getting European-type wealth. As a result, they are going to have to deal with a relatively small number of young people supporting a quite large number of retirees without the cushioning effect of first world wealth. And as a result of that, they may not have the money needed to fully modernize the PLA.
Going by demographics, I’d say the country with the best shot at being the next U.S. is India. This may sound crazy now, but is not insane looking at a longer horizon.
Another possibility, though, is that all other countries that might be seen as possible replacements, for the U.S., as a relative economic and military hegemon, have bigger barriers to getting to such a status than the U.S. has with keeping it.
Numbers 1, 3, and 4 have too few people.
Number 2 is declining not just economically, and in population, but also in life expectancy. This is dangerous because Putin may go on military adventures thinking his presidency is the last chance Russia will have to win a war for quite a while. However, I’m not enough of a leftist to say that what makes you the next U.S. is to be a declining power fighting to regain a lost empire. So nyet on Russia as well.
:smack:
I think this is the answer. People might feel we have been in decline but compared to the rest of the world as a whole, we have at least been treading water.
A new RAND Corp. report on serious shortcomings in the Chinese military: http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/13/asia/china-military-shortcomings/?iid=ob_article_organicsidebar_expansion&iref=obnetwork
If democracy did become a strong force in China, the results COULD be negative for the outside world, too.
In a truly democratic China, I’d expect the leading political parties to be highly nationalistic. If so, a democratically elected Chinese government might REALLY invade and try to conquer Taiwan, instead of just making occasional noises about it (as the current technocrats of the Chicom party do).
Being a democracy won’t magically give the Chinese military the ability to do this, and I seriously doubt that a majority of Chinese care enough about Taiwan to risk what would surely be an extremely bloody and costly war (even leaving aside international censure AND US direct involvement) all to bring one island back into the fold. That’s a Chinese communist thing with Taiwan and I think even they are mostly going through the motions at this point…they certainly aren’t spending the money on the things they would have to to make it a reality, anyway.
Having lived in Taiwan for over a decade and been to China a few times, I get exactly the opposite impression: I think the Chinese are fully willing to throw away economic growth, stability and all that for the sake of not letting Taiwan get independence, should push come to shove. It’s one of the few things that the nation of China seems to be fully in absolute agreement on; that Taiwan must never be allowed to get away with declaring formal independence.
If opinion polls were run, anonymously, in China on the topic, I wouldn’t be surprised to see 90%, 95% or 97% of Chinese people voting in favor of “Yes, I would favor all-out war in the event that Taiwan declares independence.”
Territory is something the Chinese are extremely sensitive about, owing to Japanese and other foreign invasions of their land in the past (i.e., World War II, and the Boxer Rebellion was also an anti-foreigners-on-Chinese-soil movement.)
Do you have any polls or the like backing that up? I know that for the Communist party in China it would be a disaster, and it’s one of the few trip wires that would spark a war (i.e. if Taiwan declared independence). But my take (granted, this is based on trips to Hong Kong, not the mainland) is that most Chinese don’t really care all that much, especially the younger generation. I’d be interested to see any polling data that shows otherwise.
Regardless, I think the rest of what I was saying is true. China doesn’t have the capability to invade Taiwan, and they don’t seem to be really going out of their way to build it up either, and being a democracy wouldn’t give them that capability, at least not until they DID build it up. Even taking the US out of the equation, and assuming the Chinese want to actually take Taiwan intact, instead of as a glassed over nuclear smear (and have several of their cities glassed in return and leaving aside what this would do for trade in the region and with them to the rest of the world), there is just no way they could do it regardless of how many losses they were willing to take.
I admittedly have no polling data, and even if there were polls, I’d be highly suspicious of the authenticity of the respondents’ responses (in a country like China, I doubt people would ever feel that they could truly and freely answer a survey the way they felt or wanted to, even if the survey claimed to be “anonymous.”)
That being said, I have never once gotten the sense that China would not go to all-out war in the event of a formal declaration of independence by Taiwan. Everything points to war if such independence is declared, period, no questions asked, no protests within China over such a move - to the contrary, I think there’d be huge, enthusiastic support for a war. I get the same vibe from Chinese online posters; war is the only answer if Taiwan declares independence. Again, this is nothing but the vibes I get, but I would tremendously surprised if the Chinese Communist Party* didn’t *go to all-out war immediately. It would be an enormous domestic PR catastrophe for them if they didn’t.
As for whether China could capture Taiwan, I would say, yes if they blockade, no if they try to invade. Islands are very easy to blockade but exceptionally difficult to invade.
There’s just that one teensy problem of overcoming the US Navy…
I find it very doubtful that the United States would intervene. There simply is much more at stake for China than there is for America, and America will probably still be war-averse for quite a few more years due to the Iraq/Afghanistan experience.
In a game of chicken between China and the US, the US would probably blink first.
I strongly suspect this drive appears when you become the top dog. The USA weren’t exactly interventionist before it became a super power, at the contrary, it was isolationist. All top dogs I can think of tried to control as much of the world as they could.
So, I have the strong suspicion that China, once on the top, will become much more interventionist thabn it is now. And also, it naturally becomes more important when you’re in this position (for instance to protect your trade interests, and China now has interests in many countries over the world, in Africa, Central Asia, South America, etc…). China is currently developing a blue water navy that she didn’t feel the need to have previously, for instance.
What might prevent her to become “the next USA” from this point of view, is that I expect the world to be much more multipolar. Countries like India or Brazil, for instance, will keep progressing and the USA won’t fall into oblivion, so there will be more countries able to throw their weight around, instead of just one.
Things change. Who says that in 20, 30, 40 years anybody will be willing to risk a war with China over the independance of Taiwan (or simply even to give any support to Taiwan)? Look at Russia and Ukraine.