crockett

Where do you think China will be in 50 years? Seems to be the common idea that many believe China will eventually over take the US as the worlds leading super power. I used to think this was a real possibility but I recently saw a talk, that brought up quite a few key points that showed China's economy might not last another 50 years and certainly will stop growing well before then.

Couple of the key points..

1) just like the US and our baby boomers, China in about 30 years will have a enormous elderly population to take care of with a declining amount of workers.

2) right now you are looking at a generation of men that have no woman to marry. They estimate only 1 out of 2 men can find a wife now and over the next few years it will get even worse. They claim it might soon be as much as 1 out of 6 will have a mate. They were estimating this alone would eventually reduce China population by 1/3. This in its self will lead to a lot of angry men and perhaps a unstable country.

3) despite all the factories in China and all their exports most of those exports are products for companies not with-in China. Meaning China doesn't really see much of the profits when a company like apple has a Chinese factory assemble a iPad.

4) compounding number 3, is China is not investing in producing new tech nor are their companies, this means they can't grow their economy by creating new markets, their economy only works because they are essentially low income workers for the rest of the world.. Ask Mexico how that worked for them..

5) last but not least China has a massive housing bubble that is being propped up by the govt. Eventually it's going to crash, because they have built entire cities that sit empty, because they keep building high price housing that the workers can't afford.

So do you think they will crash and burn, or make it through these issues and eventually become the leading world power?