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0 pointsorwin2y ago0 comments

China demographics are plainly bad. Also, they managed to degrade their topsoil faster than the US. Agriculturally, the huge contributor is their fishing fleet, but relying on that means they have to keep the US happy to guarantee a relative stability accross the oceans.

Maybe India could be a relative threat, but I don't think so. They're at the end of their demographic transition and they wasted a big part of it (from 2010 until covid) (basically, a country is most productive during a demographic transition, for multiple reasons). The issue is that they didn't build enough infrastructure. It's okay in immigration-positive country like the US (immigration is basically a demographic cheat code that bail you out of your mistakes). In India, where there is a lot of skilled emigration, it's a big disadvantage.

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NickC252y ago· 2 in thread

I don't disagree that China's got some serious issues - food security, skewed demographics, insane cost-of-living issues (that blow the USA's out of the water), a ticking time bomb of a real estate bubble, etc. I have studied this for a long time, and worked with Chinese nationals for several years.

However, their government has the absolute trust of the populace at large, and the one benefit of a dictatorship is that things get done in government, rather than endless partisan bickering where the only real beneficiary is the stock market which relies on government's inability to do anything besides say words.

choko2y ago

Trust and fear aren't remotely the same.

jfengel2y ago

That's right. And in China's case, it really is mostly trust, not fear.

Compared to the US, where the US government is not at all trusted, and feared by many. Minority groups fear it as a tool of oppression; one of the two major political parties regularly claims that the government steals elections from it.

There is good reason to fear the Chinese government, and some Chinese do. It is not a democracy and does not pretend to be. But it's not the "Big Brother" situation it's often portrayed as. Most Chinese genuinely believe that the government is a benevolent dictatorship that is working well for them.

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