It is therefore no surprise that ever since Washington launched an all-out war, short of a violent one, with China, candidates for Chang have sprung up like mushrooms after a spring shower.
At the most ironic level, when there is a market for something, there are always suppliers. And to be honest, “China is going to die” can be a pretty good gag for American talkers without any special expertise or expertise.
However, even the most cynical people act with biases and assumptions specific to their class and society. These in turn shape their perception of the world. That’s why, if you know where to look and how to look, these Chinese destroyers can actually share their own experiences and the billions of dollars they’ve lost, from dot com to Bitcoin. You can quickly see that valuable wealth and businesses come and go, projecting the experience of your own country, which can collapse or disappear. In the thin air right in front of me. But they’re not the only ones. Entire real estate, banking, and insurance sectors could similarly collapse, as we witnessed during the collapse of the US national real estate market that triggered the global financial crisis in 2007-2008.
Looking at the bigger picture, we need to examine the increasingly frequent fluctuations and instability of the US-led global financial system since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s, but this is beyond our scope. exceeds.
Simply put, all China doomists believe that the United States is good and superior, and China is evil and inferior. If these bad things happen so often in the United States, they must be worse in China. In other words, whole countries, not just individual companies or sectors, must one day simply collapse. Of course, that chance is very low. No responsible Western economist or sinologist would make such comprehensive predictions.
But these Chinese destroyers are hacks. And instead of understanding, they are what psychologists call projecting. How do I know?
With even a rudimentary knowledge of China’s economy and its history, such claims that the sky is falling in China are useless. However, it seems that such people lack even such basic understanding.
Let’s first consider the economic history of communist China, and then consider the overall picture of the economy that current data shows.
economic history
Modern China had a period under communist rule, which is often thought to have been marked by social collapse and economic disaster. That is the image typically presented by Western historians, political analysts, and ideologues of the Great Leap Forward, the Great Hunger, and the Cultural Revolution.
But economists and econometricians say the actual economic data shows a more complicated picture.
“Be careful, we’re playing with money”: Is China uninvestable or invaluable?
“Be careful, we’re playing with money”: Is China uninvestable or invaluable?
Depending on the large study consulted, China’s GDP growth rate from 1952 to 1966 averaged between 8 percent and 11 percent. This was despite the rapid downturn of the Great Leap Forward and the Great Hunger, sometimes referred to as the worst man – to cause this kind of disaster.
Throughout the entire period of the Cultural Revolution, GDP growth continued to average more than 5% per year.
In a sense, this was a repeat of the Soviet experience. Stalin’s brutal collectivization and industrialization from the 1930s has been understood, perhaps not inaccurately, to be an unprecedented disaster at the human level. But these actually paved the way for the rise of Russia’s industrial power after World War II, rivaling the Soviet Union’s, at least until the mid-1970s.
The Great Leap Forward built infrastructure and heavy machinery, and improved general literacy and health care, including lower infant mortality rates, paving the way for Deng Xiaoping’s economic opening.
Seen from this perspective, Deng Xiaoping was not a definitive break from Mao Zedong, but a continuation. Here we may be reminded once again that what has often been perceived in history as ruptures or revolutions are actually continuities.
However, if China can survive and even grow economically in the midst of a major national disaster, its economy would be the world’s largest, barring unmitigated disasters such as a cross-strait war with Taiwan. We can reasonably assume that he is likely to come in second place. To survive unscathed, if not thrive.
economic data
Every successful modern economy is a highly complex organic whole. No single scientific model, no matter how sophisticated, can capture all the complexity and interconnectedness of a person, let alone a popular person on TV or YouTube.
This leads to charlatans telling plausible stories, presenting colorful narratives, and offering several plausible reasons to explain why a country or an entire economy will rise or fall within a given period of time. It should be obvious if we weren’t so easily convinced or distracted. That’s why truly informed people and real experts almost always prefer conditional statements and statements about probabilities and expected outcomes to more dramatic and seemingly definitive statements. It may not satisfy our desire for certainty and indubitability, but it is usually the best that intellectually honest people can offer.
So when someone says, “China as a political entity will die within 10 to 20 years, and as an economic entity within 10 years,” what can you do but roll your eyes? (You should actually listen to the tone this guy said! I wonder if even Albert Einstein was that sure about his theory of relativity when he first proposed it. )
Those who want to understand specific economics may want to try out the very informative graphical interface.
By collating more than a quarter of a century of economic data from nearly every country in the world, this atlas helps people understand the relationship between industrial capacity and technological know-how, the impact on growth prospects, and the diversity and complexity of existing capabilities. How does it affect growth outcomes?
The squares and triangles in the grid proportionally represent all industries and economic sectors of the economy, providing a visual representation of the economy’s complexity and diversity and its relationship to other economic sectors.
Based on the data, the atlas also provides a ranking of countries by complexity index.
For example, in 1995, the United States ranked 9th in the world, while China ranked 46th. In 2021, China rose to her 18th place while the US dropped to her 14th place.
India had a wild rise from 60th place in 1995 to 43rd place in just five years, then fell to 54th place at the end of the 2010s, only to return to 42nd place in 2021.
According to the Atlas, China is expected to grow by 5.82% annually until 2031, and the United States is expected to grow by 2.48%.
If I were to bet on the next great success story of this century, it would not be democratic India, as many do today, but communist India, which soared from 107th to 61st place between 1995 and 2021. I would choose Vietnam, which is an orthodox country.
Of course, as engineers and complexity theorists have known for years, the trade-off between system complexity and robustness is very complex.
However, a highly diversified and complex economy like China, which is constantly moving up the value-added production chain, is unlikely to disappear from the face of the earth anytime soon.
Whatever the limitations, I’d rather rely on Harvard’s Economic Data Atlas than YouTube celebrities.