The downside of “winning” world trade for China.
How did China capture the bulk of world trade? China experienced a huge demographic bonus. What America did over 170 years, moving the bulk of our population from the farm to the city, China did in about 30 years. Suddenly, there was an overstock of available labor. At the same time, China instituted the one child policy. The population pyramid (young at the bottom, old at the top) now looks like a diamond. The demographic bonus was real. But it was also real short. After thirty years of bonus the bulk of their population is in their fifties. China has the most rapidly aging population on Earth. Changing the policy from two to three children has had zero effect. That’s because…hey, communism! Nobody can afford to have even one child now.
Second, the Chinese government has two policies. They manipulate their currency so USD can buy whatever amount of labor is required to take the industrial jobs away from the US. (Or, anywhere else, for that matter.) But doing so has created a level of “rich” poverty in China. Everyone has a cell phone and credit card debt, but the only truly rich people are CCP members. And, even they find it almost impossible to get their wealth to someplace where it won’t implode when the rest of China implodes. The other problem is, Chinese industry isn’t about profit. It’s about employment, because employed people don’t have the time to riot.
All of this mismanagement is having an impact, the end result of which has to be war. Just as Argentina attacked the Falkland’s to take the people’s mind off internal problems, China is attacking the world to create a sense of shared danger…from which only the CCP can protect the Chinese people.
All of this is going to end badly. It would have ended sooner under Trump, and more seafely for America, but even a wholly owned Biden can’t save the Chinese from a hundred years of bad management.