News to me. Cite?
I think a Western organized economic and political containment of China is definitely on the table. Influence and patronage determine hegemonic borders and China will be a global threat.
Eh? Threat to what/whom?!
How long would something like that really be possible?
Fucking for your country? That’s a lot better than a lapel pin.
Exactly as long as it takes for certain American corporate execs to get the WH on the phone and scream.
A threat to anyone who doesn’t want to live in a world dominated by an oppressive corrupt non representative government.
Now I’m just waiting for someone to say the US is already there. :o
By what conceivable scenario can China end up dominating the world?
No they weren’t. The Nazi party originally had a socialist plank in their platform, but during Hitler’s rise to power, he sought the backing of wealthy industrialists. In order to keep their backing, he purged all the socialist elements from the party. Post-purge, the Nazis were a pro-corporate party, and after Hitler’s consolidation of power, the Nazi economy was a crony-capitalist cartel system. Features that people tradtionally associate with socialism, such as labor protections and minimum wages were completely destroyed by the Nazis. Schiller, in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich characterizes this as “industrial serfdom.” The book is a suprisingly easy read and anyone who wants to have at least a basic working knowledge of the Nazis should avail themselves of it.
Aren’t the Russians going through a birth crash right now, reproducing at far less than replacement levels? That would be one non-eugenicist reason for encouraging procreation.
It’s still eugenics.
Not unless they’re artificially selecting for desired genetic qualities.
I knew my parents could have found me a better summer camp if they’d just looked a little harder.
Are you kidding? I’m not saying you have to worry about tomarrow, but 150 years ago you’d have been laughed out of every European bar if you told them America would become the sole Super Power.
They might not have agreed with you, but it would not have been an absurd proposition: the US had seemingly unlimited resources, combined with European know-how, so it was obviously going to forge ahead, and perhaps overtake Europe at some stage.
With China, the advantages are a large, relatively well-educated population, but China has serious problems with natural resources. In addition, India is moving ahead parallel with China, and the European Union and the US are well ahead of China. The European Union is looking more and more like one country, economically – compare that with 150 years ago, when neither Germany nor Italy were unified.
It was longer ago than that, that Alexis de Tocqueville predicted either America or Russia would one day rule the world.
It’s obvious now.
I simply disagree with this, but lets say you are right…Japan grew just fine with no natural resources.
India is large and comparisons can be drawn, but the bottom line is India is not economically in the same boat as China. It can’t rationally be argued the US and EU aren’t currently ahead, but China is larger than both and is growing far faster than the US and the EU put together. They are just beginning to project foreign power and one day their assets will match their ambition.
Tell that to De Tocqueville. Again I ask. What conceivable scenario?
Of course, if we imagine that China’s economy continues growing at 9% forever, it will eventually become larger than the economy of the United States. And eventually China’s economy will be millions of times larger than the economy of the United States.
But we have no good reason to imagine that China will grow at 9% forever. Of course it’s not reasonable to predict that China will crash tomorrow, but China has some severe challenges ahead. And even if China’s economy becomes larger than the United States economy, that doesn’t mean China will have the same influence that the United States does today. For one thing, China has 4 times the population, so equal economies means that China will be per capita 1/4th as wealthy. China faces tremendous pollution problems, political problems, demographic problems, corruption problems, ethnic minority problems. Transforming from a dirt-poor totalitarian socialist dictatorship into a normal country is doable. But once you’ve achieved normal country status, what then?
Of course, China as a normal country will have enormous power compared to China as an impoverished backwater. And so what? Does that mean “dominating the world?” I mean, reality check, America might have the largest economy in the world, but we certainly don’t dominate the world. And the relative strength of the United States has only shrunk since the 1950s. Not because we’ve grown weaker, but because Europe has recovered from being flattened by two world wars, with no prospect of another war imaginable, and other places have moved from subsistance farming economies not much different than that performed during the Middle Ages to economies comparable to the early modern era.
So China’s economy being larger than the United States doesn’t imply anything sinister. The European Union has an economy larger than the United States, and they aren’t “dominating the world”, are they? And expecting current growth rates for various countries to continue on for decades or centuries is ludicrous.
And on a similar note, Russia’s economy has been doing rather well in recent years. Quoting from Wikipedia: “Russia posted gross domestic product growth of 6.4% in 1999, 10% in 2000, 5.1% in 2001, 4.7% in 2002, 7.3% in 2003, 7.2% in 2004, 6.4% in 2005, 6.8% in 2006 with industrial sector posting high growth figures as well. Russia became the fastest growing economy in the G8. It is expected to grow about 7% in 2007.” And it seems to be experiencing a capital-investment boom.
Of course, this is on top of an economy that had very substantially contracted after the fall of Communism. But it does lead one to wonder which is more dangerous: a Russia maddened by loss of status and with Weimaresque economic conditions, or a Russia determined to regain its status, and with promising economic indicators. Hmm…