Worth reading the entire article.
One word:
“Denial”.
China is REPLACING America economically, and we’re subjected to clueless, sleepwalking bluster like this.
How completely. Absurd.
They don't have enough of a middle class to be a viable market for US products. We have no real reason to have granted them Most Favored Nation status, which should have been reserved for countries that buy from us about as much as we buy from them
Be careful, you will take away the isolationists’ biggest boogie man.
Very few people know that the even while we have been setting records for imports our exports are at record levels also.
With a reasonably valued dollar, our mfgs are going to kick ass this year internationally.
Ping
[. . .With poor air quality, acute water shortages, massive pollution in major watersheds and many other environmental problems, China needs to make enormous investments in the environment to avoid major disasters. Globally, it will be much harder to get China — and India — to make any sacrifices to address problems such as global warming.]
There are environmental horror stories coming out of China every day. The questions is if and when these issues might affect China’s economy. A totalitarian state—like the Soviets did—can ignore a genuinely poisonous environment longer than a democracy.
I think the level of interest in China's domestic market (except among the biggest multinationals* - and a few smaller but intrepid pioneers), whose reputation and brand names precede them) is overstated. I don't think there are all that many illusions about China's market size among Western marketers. Even the revised Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) numbers are, in my view, overstated. You can't buy crude oil with inflated PPP dollars, only with actual dollars you get from selling your goods overseas. Marketers are probably more likely to use nominal (foreign exchange) dollars - which measures the actual amount of money they have to buy foreign goods - in their calculations of China's market size. Besides China's allure has little to do with its domestic markets and everything to do with its potential as a one-stop production base.
* The American names in China's domestic market are P&G, McDonalds, Colgate Palmolive, Buick, KFC, Pizza Hut, American Standard, Wal Mart, WD-40 and SC Johnson. Period. As a market, China has potential, but the nominal (as opposed to PPP) incomes are too low for them to be attractive to many Western businesses.
Thanks for posting. This is a fascinating article. And the writer is correct-we should be more worried about the rest of the world lagging behind us than about China mobilizing against us. The only cure for instability is prosperity.
. . . and it's got 800 million often pissed off peasants.
We ought to be working on improving our economic ties with India.
This is a DANGEROUS misrepresentation of China... VERY dangerous, and a complete failure to understand Chinese culture and the widespread use of Tsun Tsu’s “Art of War” in Chinese culture.
You REALLY expect a LeftCoast / LeftMedia / Communist loving propaganda shill like the LA Times to tell the TRUTH about China and its threat?
http://www.nodnc.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=list_pages_categories&cid=19
Freep-mail me to get on or off my pro-life and Catholic Ping List:
Please ping me to all note-worthy Pro-Life or Catholic threads, or other threads of interest.
I think both sides are right here, to some extent.
China is a dangerous threat. They support our enemies around the world, including North Korea and Iran among others. They have inflicted a monstrous balance of payments deficit on us, which is one of the major factors weakening our economy and our country. I would say that China and militant Islam are the two most dangerous threats for the 21st century, although Putin seems determined to provide a third.
Also, they are a major economic power, building up their industrial base at an amazing rate.
But much of this Chinese economic growth is built on sand. There are huge basically defaulted loans from the central bank, probably on the order of a trillion dollars, the result of a centralized command economy run berserk. Pollution and environmental degradation are horrific, and they are at risk of losing their foreign markets as they gain a reputation for poisoning their customers. Then there are impending demographic problems from massive forced abortion, mostly of female children.
And presumably, as was the case with the old Soviet Union, their official statistics aren’t worth the ink they are printed with.
Our own government lies about the numbers on inflation and jobs, increasingly so since clinton came to power. The Chinese government lies a lot worse, because Communists lie reflexively and there are no checks and balances and no transparency.
Will their economy implode like Japan’s did? Most likely it will be much worse. But who knows when? It’s very hard to know what is really going on. I imagine the World Bank is doing the best it can to dig up numbers behind the official statistics, but it’s not easy.
I thought this was a pretty significant story too when I posted the initial announcement. FR disagreed with me, there were 11 replies.
China’s economy smaller in new measure, still number two: study
AFP ^ | Dec. 17, 2007 | staff
Posted on 12/17/2007 7:52:12 AM PST by tlb
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1940653/posts