Will China be the number one superpower in the future?

It's constantly in the news. There are many signs. What have you heard on this subject. Do you agree with the media?

"It's constantly in the news. " So is Lindsay Lohan, OP.
I hope not.
anon
between 2020 and 2025.
None of you will be happy.
No. Too internally unstable, AIDS epidemic, H1N1 fears, exponential wealth disparity and too much bureaucracy, particularly crushing corruption. Muslim insurgency issues, too.
It'll be a multipolar world, OP - the E.U., Brazil, Russia, China, India, and the U.S..
in 20 years China will be borrowing money from the US
you wish, r7.
Wal%20Mart
Define "superpower." Will its economy be larger? Definitely. It's got four times the population.
its possible, but probably not until long after we have all died. In which case, who give a fuck?
They need to balance exporting with manufacturing for in-country use. If the U.S. is hit with a deep recession or depression then it will hit China very hard. The U.S. sneezes and China will catch a cold. The other thing than can prevent economic growth are rising wages. If Chineese workers demand, or even through inflation start to receive, higher wages it could impact exports. Higher wages = higher prices for goods. Lastly... Oil prices. If we have another oil shock, then it again could impact prices making it cheaper to move manufacturing out of China.
If South Africa manages to get its shit together and get rid of corruption (tall order) it could be a serious superpower contender.
FUCK THE GOOKS
[quote]The other thing than can prevent economic growth are rising wages. If Chineese workers demand, or even through inflation start to receive, higher wages it could impact exports. Higher wages = higher prices for goods. I thought that issue was cancelled out in China by the numbers of rural workers moving to larger cities. Areas farther from Bejing also have a lot of local corruption, limiting employment. I assumed that a lot of the "ghost cities" in China were evidence of this, since the rising middle class they were built for never materialized.
A superpower? Yes. Number one? No, at least not within the next 50 years.
R14 it's just an "if" at the moment but it is something that can play out 10 years from now.
R13 is a racist eldergay.
Most of China's weapon systems are made in China, so almost guaranteed to break on the battlefield. You can't be a superpower if you can't make weapons which don't break.
No fucking way. China is the Gretchen Mol of countries, all hype.
Corruption is the only real government in China.
The U.S. will go down in flames insisting it is the sheriff for the entire globe. You're already past bankrupt and you're still being the bully of the planet. Not to mention, you're enthralled by guns which are ruining your country. Enjoy it while it lasts....
buh%20bye
You are forgetting Peak Oil. Oil will be too scarce and expensive.Too many hands wanting a limited resource. Kinda like wanting one of the few hot stud muffins on a Saturday night. There are only so many to go around. When they are gone, they are gone and he didn't go home with you. Same with oil. We are in a time of contraction of resources, and are not going to be entering a time of plenty. Alternative energy sources are actually dependent on petroleum for their development and use. Oil sands and fracking will not solve this. There will be no techno-future. Yes, China will have its day in the sun as a superpower. However, that day will be brief, very brief. China is smart in securing contracts for resources around the globe. That will not save them. Again, those finite resources are limited, and will be used up. Then, no more. I feel Peak Oil will affect them much harder than us. Those ghost cities are ridiculous. Suburbia in the USA was a very big misallocation of resources,at least in retrospect.However, the building of cities that will never be inhabited is probably worse. At least suburbia USA was inhabited. They may not be in the future, but they were at least inhabited. We are in the beginning of Peak Oil now.The financial crisis is related.In 50 years, 30 years, 20 years it will be much worse. This is when China is predicted to be the next "superpower". I say nope, it isn't going to happen. The material resources won't exist to allow for the type of development needed for them to be a GLOBAL superpower. Regional superpower, sure. Global? No. So, our time will be over, but everyone's time will be over. Enjoy the ride, China, because it will be a very short trip. Peak oil will see to that.
[quote]You are forgetting Peak Oil. That's not going to happen for at least 100 years.
1. The USA will sooner or later default on the debt, of which most is owned by China. It is not an "if" but a "when". 2. China has already depleted its natural resources, like Japan, China is increasingly dependent on imports, which can be shut off for political reasons. No superpower ever existed without an abundance of natural resources, including England, France, Spain and the Dutch who stole them from the world. 3. China is the most heavily polluted place on the planet and it is getting worse - fast. Rumor has it pollution is deadly. Billions of people do not guarantee world power (see India)
r23, we are in Peak Oil now. This is the start. USA peaked in the late 1960s, early 1970s. The influx of Alaskan and North Sea oil in the 1980s is why we had a boom time. Remember 10 per barrel oil? @hat r24 says regarding resources in 2. helps to explain this. One of Wikileaks documents found that the Saudis have been lying about Gwahar. It is acutally in depletion.
The only thing keeping China on top is wealth disparity. If it ever develops a sizable middle class the entire house of cards will collapse.
For those of you in denial, you should do some serious reading. China will be the largest economy within the next 4-5 years. It also is playing this all very wisely. I speak from experience: i work in a resource industry in which the Chinese have been managing their acquisitions expertly over the last decade.
No matter how diligently China or anyone else prepares, we will all face Peak Oil.
r27, what industry or resource are you referring to?
China is securing for itself many raw materials from Africa.
China is still far, far behind the US in terms of technology and innovation. It has a vast population but has yet to figure out how to make this work for it - other than providing cheap labour to manufacture the world's goods. Until the Chinese begin coming up with good ideas - inventing the iPhone instead of merely manufacturing it - they will simply be a large economy that everyone wants to be near. And [12] erm, no, sadly. South Africa has a tiny population - less than 50m people, and an even smaller educated class. Nigeria, if it got its act together, could be a contender. Ek se maar net.
China's entire economy is based on the massive theft of intellectual property - industrial design, software, etc. This can't continue.
If you think that all Chinese are uneducated, backwards and unable to innovate, you're totally wrong. I work with so many of them, highly educated, US-or insert other "western democracy"-trained, e.g. Canada, Australia, European, (in the school system and in industries) and know first hand what they're capable of. R28 I am talking about various resource industries: oil&gas, forestry, potash, copper and technology for renewable energy. If you think they stupidly believe that somehow oil will exist into perpetuity, then you're just wrong. If you think they're not already preparing and leading in cleantech energies, wrong again.
Oops, I meant R29
R27
Especially, r32, since along with outsourcing all US manufacturing, companies no longer invest in R&D. Soon, China won't have anything new to build. Most cell phone technology is more than a decade old. All that has changed is packaging, and continuing to shrink some components. Basically, the Chinese kids are learning the same as American kids -- what software package to use to analyze integrating off the shelf units into a package. They aren't designing, and they certainly aren't analyzing -- the computer is doing that for them now. So they don't really have a feel for what goes into creating a system. They can only tell you what that system will do.
Innovation comes from all over the map these days. Skype and denmark, etc. etc. where one argument has always been (and failed) that high tax rates, blah blah will stifle innovation. So, let's not make grand conclusions about China having zero ability to innovate. Have you been to a university in Beijing lately?
The Chinese can't originate ideas. They can only copy others ideas and that is their limitation.
In the past, yes. Now, no. There are a billion of them. You think that none of them can create a new idea? Fine, believe that and see where it gets you.
Last year I worked with Chinese engineers and they were the most mediocre professionals I've ever seen
1 Billion robots does not creativity make
Did none of you watch Looper?
[quote]let's not make grand conclusions about China having zero ability to innovate. Have you been to a university in Beijing lately? I didn't mean that the Chinese are inherently incapable of innovation, I am saying corporate business procedures and practices limit it. Back in the olden days, craftsmen owned their tools. With industrialization, the company took control of the tools and the workers became cogs. The same thing has happened in engineering -- the company now owns the design and analysis software, which are pretty simple to operate. Once upon a time, an analyst had to sit down and grind out (for example) the mass, inertia, shear, moment, slope, deflection, stress, and strain of a beam under force (after first figuring out what sort of force that beam would see. Now, you can just click on a CAD screen and get all the beams properties, then load these properties into a FEM program and get all of that data (and the natural frequencies to infinite roots -- once about four or five hours of grinding to no where near the detail available from the software) in about two milliseconds. If you can just click away to get what you want, you aren't going to think too deeply about what you are doing. So the better beam is far rarer since most of the current engineers are trained to crave the better beam, only the boss's approval.
But what you describe applies equally well to north american firms also. And other industries and sectors. So why is it that you claim that Chinese firms are the only ones stifling imaginative work? The flip side to what you describe, when applied to sectors that aren't engineering based, is that freeing up the mechanics permits more time for creativity. Even in an industry I once worked in (specialized consulting sector) when we used to have to crank through our own numbers, we had far less time to dream up innovative solutions to our clients' problems.
"since most of the current engineers are trained to crave" = "since most of the current engineers are NOT trained to crave"
All the talk about China is an attempt to restart the Industrial war complex. Previously it was the USSR that drove this competition, today and tomorrow it will be China.
[quote]what you describe applies equally well to north american firms also. And other industries and sectors. So why is it that you claim that Chinese firms are the only ones stifling imaginative work? Much of the stifling was enabled by the thousands and thousands of Chinese engineers who came to work in the US. I see them every day, at their workstations, grunting and clicking, grunting and clicking, pausing only to check their stocks before returning to the same twenty year old designs of others that they grunted and clicked on the day before.
r33, the resources you mention are all finite, no matter where on the globe they exist. Oil will not be around to allow for such distant exploitation. Green and high tech industries are predicated on oil. Peak oil takes ALL of us down.
[quote]All the talk about China is an attempt to restart the Industrial war complex. Restart? Have you been asleep these past two decades? It never stopped.
To paraphrase one of their sayings, if a billion people say a wrong thing, it is still a wrong thing. And BTW, r17, I was wondering how long it would take someone like you to "respond"--hysterical yet oddly tedious and pedantic.
anonymous
Memorizing a German written and translated to Mandarin manual on mechanical engineering, does not make you a good engineer. However you will get high grades in all Chinese universities for doing this.
Oh please come down off your high horse. I'm a professor, and memorizing and repeating and lack of creativity is the order of the day for all sorts of students, American, Chinese, whatever. In all sorts of universities. Globalization is quickly taking care of that, standardizing requirements and curricula.
R51, I'm curious. What is the solution to lack of creativity among college students? I am genuinely interested in an answer and don't mean this as a sassy response to your post.
Is China developing waxy breasts? Now China will never be President...
R52. Well, it has to go back to pre-college days to instill creativity and thinking outside the box into students when they're younger! But I guess that's a tall order, so... There would have to be a redesign of how these students are evaluated, and what the goals are for university education, for starters. Many programs are merely now feeders into professional designations of all sorts. The designation has requirements. The college curriculum must meet them. There is little scope in their for work, and teaching style, that is breakthrough, innovative, etc.
China! China! China! Ree Nuhmma Waaaahn! Ree Nuhmma Waaaahn!
It already is the Number One superpower if its economy is measured by purchasing power parity.
Don't other Asian countries have a stake in keeping China from getting to powerful?
Japan maybe, China not yet
R58 is posting from 1980