I was a China bear and an India bull for a decade. I took every bearish article on China at face value, and they're mostly bearish articles. And I was pretty bullish on the rest of the BRIC countries. Then I took a closer look at their historical numbers - the kind of look journalists probably don't have the background or the inclination to engage in. I also examined closely the kinds of things that each government is doing. I concluded that Brazil and Russia are non-Muslim versions of Saudi Arabia, meaning they are commodity producers dependent on commodity price cycles and India is like an insect trapped in amber, lacking the natural resources of the first two, but possessing, like the first two, the closest thing there is to a command economy without adopting full blown Marxism-Leninism.
Whereas China has essentially adopted 19th century American capitalism, without the shackles of either a welfare or a regulatory state. The country, which is slightly larger than the US, also has tremendous unexploited natural resources and 1.2b people whose entrepreneurial knack has seen its diaspora from decades or centuries ago become elite minorities wherever they land. At the recipient of 20% of China's exports, we might induce a economic contraction there with an outright embargo, but their growth would resume in short order, albeit on a lower base, unless the regime decides to bring back the command economy, where government planners used to decide what to produce and how much of it to produce. The point here is that capitalism works everywhere it is implemented, and trade is merely the icing on the cake, but not actually essential for economic growth.
amen.....
Most important, China is