This question is more suited for Sup Forums, but Sup Forums's userbase is more intelligent so I thought it would be better to post here. It would also be nice to get an international perspective.
Will China surpass the U.S. in nominal GDP in the near future? This is a subject that has been debated for a while, with some estimating that China will surpass the US by as early as 2020. Others contend that social instability and market bubbles will soon doom China.
>Sup Forums's userbase is more intelligent Is Sup Forums that retarded?
Easton Barnes
Have you been there?
Hudson Sullivan
dumb country needs to fix their pollution problems and quit treating their people like robots before they can start actually being better than usa rather than just pretending
Daniel Davis
Not as long as it's a grossly overpopulated dictatorship it ain't.
Benjamin Stewart
maybe
depends on what we will both do in the later years.
but on this track, the fact that most jobs are moving out of America due to outsourcing (with one of the places being outsource being China), the fact their population outnumbers us 3:1, and new industries not really being generated, means China will quickly overtake us
however their censorship and the chaotic nature of the said 3 billion could cause problems, not to mention the corruption. All America and China needs is a leader to make/break them in the balance.
Carson Jenkins
>early 2020 no, not even possible, even at 7% growth which they are slightly under they'll be 5-6 trillion below >eventually yes, its almost inevitable given that their human capital is rising towards western levels and they are ramping up trade and capital accumulation. ending TPP pretty much gave china free-reign to control asian markets as well so they might even overcome its current slowdown.
USA at the end of the day is 4.5x smaller in population, despite having enormous technological and innovative-sector leads it will not match manpower in terms of contributing to the GDP.
Isaac Myers
china's pretty much the biggest buyer of automation tech and machinery these days, and tonnes of manufacturing jobs are moving from china back to the USA, but being automated.
the new age isn't going to be about pure labour ability, its going to be how much and how well countries are automated.
china has a pretty big advantage because their government is able to direct and command its economy to start automating/purchasing automation while americans have to wait around until industry does it on its own.
Dylan Cooper
People have been saying China's going to collapse for the last 30, pretty much approaching 40 years. I wouldn't count it. That saying, it's not a bad thing that China is eclipsing us in nominal GDP considering they have 4x more people than us. It's just common sense
Cameron Price
they said the same about japan in the 90's , yet it didn't happen. the same will happen to china
Aaron Torres
it was the early 80s, by the 90s the fad to study japan had already tapered off among economists and at the same time japan's asset bubble had already bursted. and people only speculated how japan would become a world's major player, which it did and kind of still is
Hudson Nelson
>china has a pretty big advantage because their government is able to direct and command its economy Yes, because the Soviet Union demonstrated how efficient that command economies are.
Jackson Roberts
>People have been saying China's going to collapse for the last 30, pretty much approaching 40 years. I wouldn't count it
Dictatorships have a built-in expiration date.
Gabriel Diaz
soviets managed their economy though directly, china has capitalist management but can force them to take certain actions pretty easily.
the CCP has very strong authority within china, they jail their CEOs for example. japan already reached equivalent GDP per capita with the west in the 90s and hasn't declined on a per capita basis.
china still has a huge gap between gdp per capita that it can fill out.
Cameron Scott
>the CCP has very strong authority within china, they jail their CEOs for example
Yeh they suppress anyone who could build up a power base independent of the CCP.
Jeremiah Wright
Actually, the CCP are increasingly struggling to justify their existence so they've fallen back on the old, tired tac of imperialistic ventures such as the South China Sea.
>China Shows ‘Appetite for Pain,’ Says Banking Analyst Who Warned on Debt Binge
>Charlene Chu, a banking analyst who made her name warning of the risks from China’s credit binge, said the country’s leaders are showing a “surprisingly high appetite for pain” with its recent crackdown on leverage in the world’s second-largest economy.
>China’s leaders have “a window of opportunity” to push through their curbs because of the strength in the real economy, Chu, a senior partner at Autonomous Research, said in an interview last week in Hong Kong. Based on Chinese statistics bureau data, Chu estimates that the country’s annual nominal gross domestic product is growing faster than 9 percent.
9% nominal GDP growth, actually.
Memesters who claim that China's is slowing are just that. In the end, the only BRICS country that is doing great is only China.
Aiden Butler
>Based on Chinese statistics bureau data
John Martin
>Dictatorships have a built-in expiration date. All forms of government have a built-in expiration date.
Read the study by Bruce Gilley, named "The Right to Rule" published by the Colombia University Press in 2009.
China is actually an overachiever in terms of political legitimacy. The national level bureaucracy and leaders enjoy very high backing among the people.
If they werent before they will now #thankstoTrump
Austin Walker
Multiple recent studies have dealt with that question of reliability of Chinese data in a study and found out that they are actually understated and too conservative.
>Some commentators have questioned whether China’s economy slowed more in 2012 than official gross domestic product figures indicate. However, the 2012 reported output and industrial production figures are consistent both with alternative Chinese indicators of the country’s economic activity, such as electricity production, and trade volume measures reported by non-Chinese sources. These alternative domestic and foreign sources provide no evidence that China’s economic growth was slower than official data indicate.
William Taylor
>Based on Chinese statistics bureau data, Chu estimates that the country’s annual nominal gross domestic product is growing faster than 9 percent Yeah OK Helmut and I have some swampland in Florida to sell you
Cameron Garcia
Soviet stats said they'd have a higher GDP than the US by 1980...
Kayden Watson
It is actually realistic. Wages rise sharply in China, so is consumption. There is an endemic lack of workforce in the Southern manufacturing centres and the industrial profits have risen 14% this year as well.
I know it is a tall order to speak against a crowd here who are ideologically and racially oppossed to China, but you gotta wake up one day to smell the coffee.
Matthew Lewis
And the Soviets with their isolated and highly planned economy are the best comparisson with China, right?
Oliver Davis
LOLno. China is still very much a command economy with all major development and infrastructure being done via top-down directives of the CCP, market factors don't come into play very much. Private enterprise is only allowed with a good deal of restrictions and is never free from being suppressed/confiscated by the state.
Chase Davis
>Confiscation by the state
I don't think you quite understand this fully. They aren't able to confiscate and fuck up the stocks of their powerful/elites, they are able to direct them and function like post war 20th century Keynesian economies.
They are very much capitalist in everything else , except they are more similar to 1950s/1960s capitalist america. Literally no direct comparison between the two. Way way different systems, China is closer to US capitalism right now than soviet communism.
Jace Young
There is no rule that a country reaches a certan GDP per capita. Japan became stagnant because they borrowed to much and propped up a bunch of zombie businesses instead of letting them fail. The same thing that happened in Japan is happening in China but at least China is highly authoritarian so they can make adjustments to prevent it or minimize it.
Ayden Wood
>China is often wrongly cited as proof of free-market principles, but with the exception of Hong Kong, China is actually a Keynesian paradise. Within China, the Communist party maintains a very strong presence in the market place. Although the party has ceded many elements of central planning, its stance remains far from free-market oriented. The Chinese government owns almost all of the countries’ largest corporations, three of which are the largest in the world. For example; The Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, when measured using revenue, market evaluations, and assets, is considered to be the largest corporation on earth and is completely owned by the Chinese government. The Chinese are heavily involved in major industry such as steel, oil and banking, and are currently executing a $157 billion-dollar infrastructure stimulus package to help the government achieve it’s planned growth of GDP of 7.5%. The Chinese actively manage fiscal and monetary policy to a far further extent than even the U.S. government.
Brody White
>But China’s economy is far from a free market. At least half of all economic output is in the state-owned sector, and probably much more. No one knows the real number because Chinese state-owned enterprises are officially encouraged to work through private “non-state” subsidiaries in which they retain majority ownership.
>Visitors to China are confronted with a myriad of western brand names but entire industries are state preserves, including banking and energy. Behind the familiar western shop fronts are state-owned or state-related real estate developers and infrastructure providers — plus a plethora of state officials to be bought or bribed before real entrepreneurs can get down to business.
>The universities where Chinese economists work are also closely tied to local and national governments. They are often more concerned with meeting government-mandated objectives than with producing knowledge as such. While it is easy to criticize the “ivory towers” of western academia, insulation from government allows western professors to pursue knowledge wherever it may lead.
>Most Chinese professors make very little money for their lecturing. Their main sources of income are publishing and consulting. Chinese universities literally pay professors for each publication, resulting in much waste as Chinese academics pursue publications rather than the knowledge that is supposed to underlie publications. When they are paid for consulting, they are expected to endorse government policy, not challenge it.
Kevin Jenkins
>shiny new buildings and roads in major cities >hasn't seen smaller towns and villages >everything will decay over time >countries with as much corruption as China are bad at maintaining infrastructure
That was almost 8 years ago, before Hu Jintao left office. Now you have Xi Jinping, and that's a whole different ballgame. Ever since he came to power, censorship has been tightening and his crackdown on corrupt officials (read: political opponents and rivals) risks opening fissures within the party.
Make no mistake, China is a major player with a decent shot at surpassing the U.S. economy simply due to sheer scale. But whether or not it can reach the same level of hegemony is open to question. Huge portions of the population still live in backward conditions, education is ridiculously lopsided, and it is starting to lose its competitive advantage in human capital as the population gets older. It needs to be able to attract and retain talent, which it doesn't seem to be doing very well.
Jackson Torres
rofl at all the idiots who think china will surpass us
Noah Mitchell
not as long as their domestic demands are low
Cameron Edwards
Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao basically just followed Deng Xiaoping's ideologies to the letter, which meant relatively laisse-faire economics and a passive foreign policy. The global recession in 2008 kneecapped China hard and that's why Xi has been more censor-happy and more aggressive with foreign policy.
James Sanchez
R A R E A R E
Adam Thomas
Tbh it's pretty inevitable. All a chink has to do is spend 1/4th the amount of the money an American spends and then their GDP = ours
Evan Johnson
There's a few big surprises in store for them- >Middle Income Trap- where it becomes too expensive to manufacture locally >Oligarchy- Corruption and extremely top-heavy power structure will equal chaos eventually >Old cunts- the single child policy will come back to fuck them with a huge aging population >Innovation- complete lack of social and tech innovation >Currency Manipulation- keeping the lifestyle low domestically will cause problems
I reckon the likelihood is probably mostly bullshit and optimism in equal amounts as the things going against them over weigh the pros.
John Perez
Yes they will check em. Dubs will confirm it
Juan Edwards
I personally think that China will surpass the US, but the country also contains significant domestic issues that aren't able to be addressed. Also the economic data seems untrustworthy, so it'll be difficult to pinpoint the exact moment it'll occur.
Oliver Cook
China has no population problem. The problem was rural folks are being displaced and moving fast into the coastal cities. China should focus on expand westward if it wants to maintain it's economic growth.
Isaiah Foster
I wish it was possible to show these for OSHA training. What a comedy of errors.
Juan Rodriguez
Xi Jiping's consolidation is arguably for his own sake and interests, and not because of the global recession.
Wyatt Fisher
His rivals are most Jiang Zemin's fan club, or more accurately his two sons. Jiang himself is 90 and long since retired, but is said to still be actively trying to influence politics behind the scenes. An editorial in the People's Daily a few years ago criticized (unnamed) retired party officials for continuing to involve themselves in politics.
Most of the party officials and army generals purged by Xi for corruption were allied with Jiang's sons.
Carson Scott
you should take population into consideration. china's population is 10x larger than japan's and 4x larger than america's.
Camden Miller
His rivals are most Jiang Zemin's fan club, or more accurately his two sons. Jiang himself is 90 and long since retired, but is said to still be actively trying to influence politics behind the scenes. An editorial in the People's Daily a few years ago criticized (unnamed) retired party officials for continuing to involve themselves in politics.
Most of the party officials and army generals purged by Xi for corruption were allied with Jiang's sons and opposed his accession as General Secretary. However, the global recession is also a factor as is the increasingly shaky ground on which the CCP bases its existence. As for the increased bellicosity in the South China Sea, it's been reported that they've been paying a little too much attention to the nationalistic shitposting of Internet Sup Forumstards (since the Chinese Internet is extensively monitored to gauge what the public mood at the moment is) and gotten the impression that the people want a more aggressive stance on foreign policy than had been the norm since the 80s.
Xavier Jenkins
>However, the global recession is also a factor as is the increasingly shaky ground on which the CCP bases its existence Also the Arab Spring deeply worried the Party leadership. Under Xi Jinping, censorship of the media and Internet has also tightened.
China's ultimate undoing, and what will prevent them from ever being a real superpower, is that the CCP values their own power above all else and suppress any ideas or concepts that could potentially empower the masses. Culturally, scientifically, and militarily, China will always be an also-ran so long as no real freedom of thought is allowed.
Jordan Edwards
Forget the Arab Spring, the real paranoia going through Beijing for decades has been the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Soviet breakup has been a virtual obsession of the CCP since 1992 and party officials receive extensive lessons on why it happened and how China can avoid a similar mistake. Especially brought up, the failed coup in August 1991--Xi Jinping had once told party officials "The coup failed for lack of support. When the end came for the CPSU, nobody was a big enough man to stand up and save it."
Gabriel Clark
Also another factor held in the breakup of the Soviet Union was the de-politicization of the armed forces starting in the 80s. When the coup happened, the army didn't have any interest in trying to help the hardliners regain power. Because of this, any suggestion to de-politicize the PLA has been repeatedly rejected and it remains for all intents and purposes a state army rather than a national army, its oath stating that its goal is to defend the CCP, not the nation of China.
This of course also hampers the PLA's combat effectiveness should a war ever happen, because army officers waste inordinate amounts of time studying political propaganda rather than useful military skills.
PLA is an interesting beast, coming from a military background they're quite different to how other country's function in that they swear fealty to the Party. They're actually under no obligation to defend the country, its people or borders- they ONLY carry out the directives of the Party and nothing else. Course in a lot of ways they're like a lot of developing/third world countries in that their training is garbage, logistics are absolutely rotten, most of their vehicles are also not very good, navy is inexperienced and about the only real shining light is that their small arms are generally quite good. Not to say they 'couldn't' wage a war and be an absolute shit to get rid of, but most of their function is internally focused.
Nathaniel Evans
They also have no combat experience to speak of--the last war they fought was almost 40 years ago when they lost 20,000 men to a couple of Vietnamese border guards and peasants with old guns. Their equipment is also mostly poor-quality knockoffs of 1980s Soviet equipment.
Leo Moore
China has never been good at war in their entire 3000 year history, they're not a warrior nation and never have been,
Angel Clark
They're pretty good at stealing from other sources to have some 'innovation'- mostly in aviation but they still can't make a jet turbine worth jack shit. That's not exactly a bonus in terms of engineering, it lets you make something, but it doesn't necessarily let you understand it. In terms of military experience, that will be interesting to watch over the next few years to see if they switch from an internal security doctrine towards an external threat doctrine. They've done some peace keeping over recent years, but mostly its quite laughable.
Their Vietnam expedition was probably an obvious one- got to remember when they've got 1000's of hardened Viet infantry and commanders with a very large amount of soviet technology (which was state of the art at the time) vs the PLA. The PLA was just told to go down there and take territory, but they where using old soviet doctrine from the 1950's Korean era which is essentially shit.
Thomas Hall
>got to remember when they've got 1000's of hardened Viet infantry and commanders with a very large amount of soviet technology
The thing is, they weren't because the Vietnamese army at that time was entirely in Cambodia, there were only militia and border guards to oppose the Chinese, and they managed to still inflict 20,000 casualties on them thanks to the PLA's lack of decent equipment, logistics, human wave tactics, and the lack of a rank system thanks to the Cultural Revolution.
