GoFuckYourself.com - Adult Webmaster Forum - View Single Post - Do you think in 20 years China will be more powerful than the United States ?

jayeff · 10-03-2004, 12:30 PM

20 years is probably too short a time scale, but yes, China is at least a candidate to be more powerful than the US in the not too distant future.

Globalisation and the misplaced belief of Americans in the superiority they ascribe to themselves will ensure the continued downward slide of the US. Europe doesn't suffer from the latter and may get a temporary reprieve if there is enough drive to pull together the 450 million people who live in EU countries. But it is also a high-wage area that the pendulum is swinging away from.

The big stumbling block in China could be their political development: not because of their brand of socialism per se (and right now capitalism isn't serving the west too well), but because it is hard to see the present leadership surviving the pressures which are building up there. There is no way to know, if the lid does blow, how long it will take things to settle, or what direction they will go off in afterward.

I don't put much faith in this kind of forecast. As a teenager in the sixties, I got used to predictions that WW3 would be a nuclear conflict between the US and the USSR. That wasn't some kind of left-wing conspiracy theory: many US and European government policies were/are a result of the extent to which that forecast was given credence. We know how that all evaporated...

10-03-2004, 12:30 PM
jayeff Confirmed User Join Date: May 2001 Posts: 2,944	20 years is probably too short a time scale, but yes, China is at least a candidate to be more powerful than the US in the not too distant future. Globalisation and the misplaced belief of Americans in the superiority they ascribe to themselves will ensure the continued downward slide of the US. Europe doesn't suffer from the latter and may get a temporary reprieve if there is enough drive to pull together the 450 million people who live in EU countries. But it is also a high-wage area that the pendulum is swinging away from. The big stumbling block in China could be their political development: not because of their brand of socialism per se (and right now capitalism isn't serving the west too well), but because it is hard to see the present leadership surviving the pressures which are building up there. There is no way to know, if the lid does blow, how long it will take things to settle, or what direction they will go off in afterward. I don't put much faith in this kind of forecast. As a teenager in the sixties, I got used to predictions that WW3 would be a nuclear conflict between the US and the USSR. That wasn't some kind of left-wing conspiracy theory: many US and European government policies were/are a result of the extent to which that forecast was given credence. We know how that all evaporated...