Any thoughts on this one?
BTW, i think they are heading towards a big recession first, before they will become the number 1 superpower of the world, but still..chances are 99% that we will witness china's dominance within our lifetime.

First thought is, " Don't like superpowers! "

I don't even want to share my thoughts on this.

Ehm... I guessing it will be very much the same as it is now.

The rich would be too rich and the poor would be too poor.

For one the game is greed and for another it's survival.



This guy puts it pretty well :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35MoPqF_mNw

What do you think, is there much if any spice usage amongst the Chinese? Is there any part of their society that traditionally used? I understand the role of enteogens in western culture. As ancient and wise as the Chinese are as a people there must be some experience with psychedelic tryptamines somewhere in their culture, in their past?

well..tibet is right there..don't they have roots in bonpo?

I ran across a very interesting article on H+ saying how the Chinese are likely to bring about the Singularity.
http://hplusmagazine.com...s/ai/chinese-singularity

My fear is that everything we don't like about the world as it is, is gonna be increased a billion times. My hope is that the world is gonna be more stable and that there will be less warfare.

When you look at the dark side of china, it is scary to think that they will become much, much more powerfull than the USA within half a century. In china, the unequality between the rich and the pore is far worse than in the west. In china, people have no rights. A human live has no value at all for the chinese elite. There is only one thing that is of value for them, and that is power or maybe it is both money and power.

The poor are being used as slaves to speed up china's industrial growth, people who oppose any of this are being put away in concentrationcamps and when they are not famous professors or writers, they often die there or vanish from the earth forgood. There is evidence that the chinese government is involved in organ trade, wich is fueled by political prisoners.
Tibet is being ethnically cleansed in a slow but ruthless manner.
China is putting an increasing pressure on the west to shut down any form of opposition. This aplies as well to the peacefull tibetan movement as for criticism towards china in the western media.

Is it only a matter of time before our press will be silenced and tibetans will be extradited?
Will slavery increase worldwide? Will the economic shift force our own societies to do away with human rights and the environment, simply because no company will be able to compeed with factories that use slaves and dump toxic waste everywhere without having to pay for it?
Will the belief that every human life is sacred, slowly fade away from our society and make place for the idea that all that matters is economic productivity?

Or will china play an active role in peacekeeping? Will it form constructive alliances to counter all current factors of global instability?

the thing in itself...the object..god..that which stands at the end of time..whatever you wish to call it..that thing is the ultumate trickster..so all bets are off...who knows where we are going to end up..the reality of this situation might be stranger that we may think..

I have very similar toughts as this, you more or less said it for me poly.

a frightening prospect which shakes me rather profoundly to the point it troubles me to even speculate

even if they are moving towards a superpower..i doubt eventhey themselves can really anticipate the repercussions that lay ahead...dark times maybe...but what is the darkness other than the shadow of the light..when you see the shadow...keep in mind that something greater lies upon the horizon.

you never cease to amaze me sometimes, an outrageous ability to throw in a a beutiful, poignant and enchanting ( forgive my play on your name) analogy in any circumstance.

that was a blissfull comment fractal

Yes indeed.

I personally believe that this is also a chance for the world. And peticularly a chance for us here in the west.

We in the west are forced to choose now. Do we really care about human rights and the environment? Are are it just words to make us look good?


If we decide to realy care, then we will be forced to act according to our beliefs.
We will have to to form strategic alliances with other nations that share our beliefs, or that are on the edge of being true democracies.

Such allies would be countries such as argentina, south africa, brazil and india.

I personally think it would be a good idea if for instance france and the UK would give up their permanent seat in the UN security coucil for one EU seat, and give the remaining seat to india, if it in return would sign the non~proliferation treaty.

That would be a very constructive step towards more stability in the world.

Like in Sci Fi movies, we'll eat more noodles.

or...

If Oil will one day cease to be a viable source of energy, then China will loose its grip on the rest of the world as our industry and idea's turn inward to survive.

Shipping goods to and from China will not be cost effective. Also the only way for that country to become truely powerful is for a greater equality to come about amongst its people, and for that to happen prices of goods will come to stand along side the rest of the world. China's only advantage (cheaps goods and production) will be lost by its cultural growth. There's absolutely no way that country can become a superpower without a balance of equality and firm democracy.

I don't think that China will be as big a superpower. For one, 50% of their current GDP is export-driven, with most of their assets being in the form of US dollars. If the US economy sinks, China will be hit so badly it would not be able to recover for a long time. So, China will have to keep investing the dollars they have into the US economy to make sure that the US does not slump. They're doing this currently by buying trillions of dollars worth US treasury bonds.
Rather than sole dominance by China, my guess is that in fifty years, you would have 4 super-powerful economic blocs - China, US, India and EU.

I think that's a rather optimistic view. I think you can be very powerfull without equality. That's my main worry.

There's no way you can produce cheaper, more efficiently, than with the use of slaves.

With a population of 1.3 billion people, you don't need them all to get rich. If you would have just a few 100 million of them with decent incomes, you can use the rest as slaves.

The military dictatorship will keep the lucky as well as the unlucky ones in line.

perhaps... but your right, I am an optimist

This is the reason that a very deep recession is likely to happen soon in china.
They already produced way too much before the financial crisis hit here. and the government is overspending to compensate for the loss of export revenues.
But china has a greater potential to recover economically than the U.S.

In the past decade the chinese GDP has grown from around 1000 billion dollars to 5500 billion dollars, while the USA has grown from around 10.000 billion to around 14.500 billion while the EU has grown from 12.000 billion to around 17.000 billion.

The EU, the USA and canada, japan and the chinese internal market itself have enough size for china to grow a lot more. There will be a tipping point when the internal market will have grown enough for china to be less dependant on export, while it still may be only 10% of the chinese people who have decent incomes.

At the same time, the economies of the west and japan, will be less able to grow because eventually also high-skilled labour will be done cheaper in china.

Most economic models assume that if jobs vanish in the develloped world to underdevelloped countries, this creates space for new technologies and therefore new markets and new jobs to grow. I find this model naively optimistic, since it assumes A-that there always will come new technologies that can replace the place old technologies took in our economy and i don't see any new sector that could replace for instance the automotive industry soon and B- i don't see why china couldn't be creating those new jobs as well.

Why would the west always be technologically superiour?
China is already much more advanced than the west in many fields of technology.

The thing is: chinese leaders have no moral objections standing in their way and no democratic corrective measures, to organize their economy to become the largest economy in the world. Even if there still would be millions of people living in extreme poverty and slavery.

If the USA doesn't care if 20% of it's population lives in poverty, why would a regime like the chinese care if 80% of it's population would live in even worse conditions if the 20% rich chinese people would give anough economic mass to have a functioning internal market?

I hope we would have these 4 economic bloc's AND i hope that the west would firstly become more united and secondly would form alliances with countries that might devellop into decent democracies like india.

A powerfull india would be a very desireable thing: a 4-bloc's scenarion would prevent a bipolar coldwar-like world order, and it could help tame as well western as chinese imperialism. It could also help establish a new world order where things like peacekeeping are organized more efficiently.

In the past ten years though, the indian economy has grown only from around 900 billion dollars to around 1400 billion dollars. India is economically still a dwarf next to china. It would, depending on how you measure just fall ouside or inside the top ten of largest economies in the world.