China's no superpower

[Caleb]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...072502255.html

In the West, China is known as "the factory to the world," the land of unlimited labor where millions are eager to leave the hardscrabble countryside for a chance to tighten screws in microwaves or assemble Apple's latest gizmo. If the country is going to rise to superpowerdom, says conventional wisdom, it will do so on the back of its massive workforce.

But there's a hitch: China's demographics stink. No country is aging faster than the People's Republic, which is on track to become the first nation in the world to get old before it gets rich. Because of the Communist Party's notorious one-child-per-family policy, the average number of children born to a Chinese woman has dropped from 5.8 in the 1970s to 1.8 today -- below the rate of 2.1 that would keep the population stable. Meanwhile, life expectancy has shot up, from just 35 in 1949 to more than 73 today. Economists worry that as the working-age population shrinks, labor costs will rise, significantly eroding one of China's key competitive advantages.

Worse, Chinese demographers such as Li Jianmin of Nankai University now predict a crisis in dealing with China's elderly, a group that will balloon from 100 million people older than 60 today to 334 million by 2050, including a staggering 100 million age 80 or older. How will China care for them? With pensions? Fewer than 30 percent of China's urban dwellers have them, and none of the country's 700 million farmers do. And China's state-funded pension system makes Social Security look like Fort Knox. Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographer and economist at the American Enterprise Institute, calls China's demographic time bomb "a slow-motion humanitarian tragedy in the making" that will "probably require a rewrite of the narrative of the rising China." ....

Thoughts on this? I find it interesting especially considering the SecDef's recent comments concerning shifting our focus to "irregular" warfare.

[MVS2]

Really surprising that the life expectancy was 35 in the 40's.

[The Reaper]

Originally Posted by MVS2

Really surprising that the life expectancy was 35 in the 40's.

Read your history.

What was happening in China in the '40s?

TR

[nmap]

Originally Posted by Broadsword2004

I am no expert, but from what I've read, the Chinese economy may be in a bubble. The Chinese still need to experience a market crash, and if they have a serious financial crash at some point, say like the 1980s S&L crises, that will cause problems too.

It seems that some experts agree with your views.

Here's a LINK

Purely rhetorical question - what happens when people who have been promised affluence see those dreams dissolve?