this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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Yeah the big question really is "were those gains sustainable?" which in turn links with "can they adapt to this new stage of their economic growth cycle?".
I don't think things are going anywhere as well now there as they did before (it's even unclear of the country is growing at all for the many) hence why I kept making an exception for "the last decade" in the comments I've been writing here about China.
We can come up with a thousand reasons why they'll have problems and a thousand ways in which they can succeed, but those "what ifs" are just a bit of informed fantasism so I'm refraining from such futurism as it's a practice riddled with wishful thinking, selective picking of what suits one's theories and building theories based on an information sparse basis that's somewhat poluted (as in, there's way more we don't know than there is that we do know especially at a detail level, and especially here in the West what we do know tends to be mostly the things that certain political forces believe will make us think bad of China).
It's hard enough to try and form a fair and honest opinion of present day China and doing futurism based on this shitty informational basis would just be building castles in the air, which there is no point in doing.
So I'm just acknowledging their past success, with the caveat that it's been a while since that achievement and it's unclear of late if they're even still going forward and if they're even still in practice left-of-center in what they're doing.
it also doesnt help that china hasn't released bad years of economic performance, so we don't actually know how they're doing, unless they've recently started reporting those again. But regardless, that still influences the worse times so.
My two bit variable analysis on china tells me they're likely to have a substantially more volatile economy, in part due to heavier regulations and restrictions, as well as the fact that free market entities are entirely self regulated and tend to balance to equilibrium very aggressively (removing outside influence of course) where as more centrally controlled economies, tend to be more problematic in this regard. China probably has a pretty good balance between the two going on, but it's questionable what that balance even is. Generally a pretty good indicator for the general productivity of a country is their military and it's equipment, the more advanced it is, the more money they're likely to put into it, the more quantity they have, the more manufacturing they dedicate towards it. The USSR primarily known for sheer quantity output, china has also been known for quantity, but it seems they're pushing for more advanced technology recently. The US, naturally, going for extreme technological advantage, and the potential for massive manufacturing bases, as evidenced by ww2. The sheer productive ability of the US matched with it's geography and natural resources is a massive benefit to something of that caliber. Especially when we include something like NATO.