Comment by Workaccount2
15 days ago
China is still a developing nation. China is winning at the junior economic Olympics. The same way all the major 1st world economies dominated it when they were developing.
Come back and waive your victory banner when China has a $60k GDP per capita and has the current growth trends it does. It needs to increase its GDP 500% before that happens though...
GDP per-capita only works if you're comparing places with similar costs to live and costs to produce.
It's nearly meaningless to use it as a measure of individual quality-of-life without correlating it to the price it costs to produce/consume goods.
This is why the military spending arguments are so weird comparing the US and China. Even omitting the weird bookkeeping that keeps their defense budget supposedly low, it costs much less to produce military goods/services than here.
China is the workshop of the world what are you even talking about? Their infrastructure is more developed (and more advanced) than most places in the US.
You seemed to be confused by the fact that China hasn't financialized their economy and turned it into a giant Ponzi scheme / wealth extraction machine. That's the point: they're trying to avoid the terminal rent-seeking behavior endemic to Western economies.
>>China hasn't financialized their economy and turned it into a giant Ponzi scheme / wealth extraction machine.
OK, nevermind that China are struggling with massive real-estate and shadow banking issues that threaten collapse of their economy and serious global economic crisis. They may succeed, but it has been touch-and-go for years now.
And yes, their 'workshop of the world' initiative works when they can massively export at super-low prices, but that is ending for several reasons, in no small part due to the fact that they are an unreliable trading partner and have weaponized their trading position against partners in a variety of ways, including spying (e.g., Huawei), cutting off supplies (rare earths, etc.), and dumping goods under cost to corner markets.
You can get away with that for a while, and your numbers will look very good. But when you start to become a serious threat, you will find resistance. We are now at that point. China was supposed to have already surpassed the US as the worlds largest economy almost a decade ago. Now, it is no longer on that arc, despite having five times the population. Their BS is catching up with them.
Always a pleasure when people wail in anguish about Huawei when you consider even just the public record stuff the CIA and NSA etc have gotten away with over the years. And that's not even getting into the more tinfoil-hat shit a lot of which has mountains of circumstantial evidence to back it up.
No, I think the US is a much less reliable trading partner, even for aligned Western nations to say nothing of the rest of the world, and the pivot to China that virtually every nation on Earth is making, if it's not a functional tributary of the US (and even many of them, actually), speaks for itself.