We’re going communist/socialist and China is going capitalist. Who’da thunk?

“Where are we going, and why are we in this hand-basket?”

Or, their over-fired economy will fizzle out leading to economic strife and civil war.

It’s not hard to grow at 100% when you’re going from 1 to 2.

They are in a much better position economically than we are. In fact, I think that they have us over a barrel since they are financing all of our debt.

What will be interesting is how their population will change (given the one child per couple policy) and how this will effect their economy.

China going capitalist, and us going socialist/communist. What a brave new world.

I didn’t include links, and I don’t think I typed any naughty words, at least not intentionally.

China is able to invest so much on infrastructure because they spend next to nothing on social programs. Take all the money we currently spend on SS and transfer payments and spend it on transportation, energy production, and tax cuts and the US would make all other world economies appear quaint.

Actually Clayton, we have them over a barrel.

They are holding excessive amounts of Dollars as a reserve currency. They have to keep holding and keep buying, otherwise the Dollar devalues and their entire reserve is devalued. If they start selling Dollars, they will lower the relative value of the Dollar and weaken their huge reserves. They’re stuck.

We get their goods and in exchange they hold our paper.

Bookslinger, my comments go into moderation at times, as well. It’s a particular word, not one particular word, but it’s some words. I’m not sure which ones.

All the five points you raised here are very true. Most important is they are optimistic even in this hard time. The mega success in Olympics has also highlighted the growth of the country. The special economy zones are thew world’s biggest one.

Thanks for this nice post.

Those 20 or so millions of “excess” males in China would make a formidable army.

My thought is that China might demand something in return for all that “paper” we sold them, like maybe Hawaii and all the minerals in Alaska.

There is a lot of military beligerant thinking on the part college-age and 20-somethings in China. It’s in their blogs. China is already miltarized, and it would not take much extra ramping up for them to invade the US. The only thing we could hope to save us is our nuke superiority.

Annegb: I’ve wondered about all the Chinese restaurants, even in tiny out of the way towns.

Hey, I’m going my part in trying to convert them.

My Walter Mitty dream is that the young married restaurant owners join the church, and raise up their kids to be missionaries back in China. Another scneario I imagine is that the parents read some stories from the BoM to their kids, telling them it’s a fairy-tale. Then the kids grow up, go to college, and somehow run into the missionaries, and it triggers a memory of being read to from the BoM, and they investigate and join.

I used to keep a spreadsheet tallying the number of books per language that I gave out, but when that hard drive crashed, I never restarted that. I’m guessing somewhere between 200 and 250 in Chinese.

There is a Chinese restaurant owner (or manager) taking the discussions in the next ward over from ours.

Devyn: It used to be speculated by some in the church that Asian peoples are descendents of Noah through Japheth. But there may also be some connection through the Jaredites or the lost tribes.

If China is the #1 national player in future world history due to the number of their population, let’s then keep in mind that India is #2, and will likely surpass China, because China will shink (it has to, due to the numbers) if it keeps the 1-child policy for another 20 years. Whereas India is currently growing faster, and will continue to do so exponentially for at least a generation (25 years) due to their current number of children, which is much greater than China’s current number of children.

Like China, India’s culture (though an amalgam itself, also like China) is also thousands of years old. The northern Indians are ethnically different than the southerners, having come to India much later. Even our western languages are called Indo-European. Southern India’s “Dravidic” or “Dravidian” languages (Tamil, Telugu, etc) are as old, or older than Hebrew, and are not part of “Indo-European”.

I attended a social event of the local India Association a couple years ago, and as I observed the people, I had something of a glimpse or feeling of their history and destiny. The people of India *are* connected to “people of the promise” in the Old Testament, we just don’t know to who or how. It may not be directly from Abraham, but the connection may be to patriarchs prior to him.

I’m open to the possibility it was just my imagination running wild, but I had mental pictures of the restored gospel being preached in that hall and many places like it, and thousands of Indian-Americans taking the gospel back to the Indian sub-continent, as retirees or young missionaries.

Can you imagine what it might have felt like if Ammon, Aaron, et al. stood on the side of a mountain overlooking the Lamanite territory they were about to enter at the start of their mission, and got a premonition, just a hint or feeling, of the momentousness of what was eventually going to happen?

I get just a teensy tiny bit of that feeling whenever I go into a Chinese restaurant (is one of their little children going to be a future Ammon to China?) but that day at the event at the India association, I got a big dose of it. What goosebumps.

I truly believe that the Book of Mormon, like the prophet said, “is the finder of the golden contact”.

Bookslinger – interesting thoughts. I think that China is likely more scary given the high number of middle/upper class people in the country – while only 30%, that is larger than the US population. I think it would be great to have early Church like baptism experiences in China/India, but I am skeptical given we are not even dealing with Christianity to start with which makes it very challenging, albeit not impossible.

Devyn: not only is China’s middle/upper class bigger than ours, so is India’s. I think each is at least 50% bigger than ours.

I think we need to be open to the possibility that China and Muslim countries might not be officially open to missionary work until the day after the 2nd coming.

However, on that day hopefully there will be many LDS Chinese, LDS Arabs and LDS Persians etc, living outside of those countries who will eventually take the gospel to those countries.

There are currently literally millions of Chinese and Indians and Arabs living outside of their country of origin. (I recently read that there are 5 million Muslims in France alone.) I know there are at least a million Indians in the US. I’m not sure on the number of Chinese (from the mainland) in the US, but the estimate for the greater Indianapolis Metro area is about 10,000 to 12,000.

Back in 1985/1986 my mission president in Ecuador told us he read that there were 50,000 ethnic Chinese in Ecuador alone. He said that the Chinese were in the process of colonizing the entire Pacific Rim.

Devyn, I travel to Hong Kong once a year, and just got back from there a few weeks ago. I have never been to the rest of China, but Hong Kong is being taken over by China slowly (the Chinese way), and many of the observations you make apply there.

In any case, I would say the most fascinating thing to think about on China is that 30 years ago they were an underdeveloped economy with massive poverty and now China is surpassing the U.S. in many areas. How did that happen so quickly? What were the things that government did and didn’t do to allow it to happen?

If you start looking into that issue, you will discover that the massive embrace of free-market economic policies was the key to China’s growth.

I hope and pray for similar political growth and I hope and pray the Church will be able to send missionaries to China soon.

From an economic perspective many of the posters here are dramatically over simplifying what is going on in China. It is absolutely true that they have had tremendous economic growth rates recently (+10%), and that they have a large “middle” class, and that they have embraced a small portion of market oriented economic methods. But one must realize that the economic growth is due more to playing catch-up than in pushing the productivity and knowledge boundaries. Within twenty years they will have a growth rate significantly less than the U.S. because they can’t duplicate the U.S. economy’s ability to innovate and invent. With respect to the “middle” class, that is relative. They are middle class compared to their neighbors, but when measuring average incomes, and average incomes by 10% ranked population groupings, China is so far behind the U.S. they are not even in the same race. And finally China is attempting to get the benefits of market economics without allowing full property rights, nor allowing the political freedoms that markets need to flourish in the long term.

In addition to those issues, China manipulates its internal monetary and fiscal policies to force people to save – the average savings rate for that middle class exceeds 50% of their income, in other words the government expects its people to produce more and more each year while it (the government) uses the majority of that production for its own projects. In every measure of consumer well being (check the CIA World Fact Book, or the U.N. reports) China is so far behind the U.S. it is laughable to even attempt to compare them.

In 20 years China will have had to deal with much more internal and external economic and military pressure as the rest of the world stops giving them a wide berth. This will be because China’s actions will start to cause serious harm to ever larger parts of the globe and the rest of the world will start pushing back.

Fifteen years ago everyone was scared that Japan was going to take over the world economically, that “threat” faded just as China will.

The U.S. has had the most amazing story from an economic and military perspective of any modern country; I see nothing on the horizon which will change that trajectory any time soon.

Some of you may want to check out recent special sections of “The Economist” magazine which featured China. Additionally Greenspan’s recent book devotes an entire section to discussing China as well – it is very informative reading.

I’ve enjoyed following along. If any one of y’all ever find yourself in the vicinity of Taipei, lunch is on me.

#31 – Brian J – your first statement made me chuckle. Seriously, the people who they have recruited are actually pretty good scientists – they have tenure track positions at Rutgers, U Pitt, Cornell. So maybe they are not top tier (which is a small list), but a second tier researcher with unlimited funds can do an awful lot and shift into first tier…

we discussed a hypothetical war between the US and China. Everyone of them said they would go back and fight against the US.

So bloodthirsty, those Asians.

The trend is definitely in that direction. Large investments in scientific research will pay off very handsomely for places like China and India. I wish the US would see the light. That’s what made us so great during the last century. I get the sense from the state of education and science funding that we’re on the way down now, at least relatively speaking.