The new Chinese Century? Can a Green China with no Mideast Entanglements Surpass US?

[unhappycamper]

http://www.juancole.com/2015/10/century-mideast-entanglements.html

The new Chinese Century? Can a Green China with no Mideast Entanglements Surpass US?
By contributors | Oct. 19, 2015
By Neil Thompson | (Informed Comment)

In the last fifteen years the United States has spent a total of between $4 trillion and $6 trillion on its twin wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, all the while running up its national debt, and damaging its international prestige. The root cause of these foreign entanglements, and America’s costly position as Middle Eastern hegemon, stems directly from the perceived need, since the 20th century, for any great power to control oil-rich areas of the planet. Meanwhile China may be on its way to being a hybrid leader that can avoid this type of overseas adventurism as it tries to rapidly abandon fossil fuels and modernise its unstable neighbours’ economies.

Internally, despite the serious drawbacks of corruption, massive pollution and uneven social benefits, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) strategy of buying off political discontent at home with economic development has broadly worked since the first pro-market reforms were initiated back in 1978. By any reasonable measure of human timeframes it has succeeded. GDP per capita in China stood at approximately $12,000 USD per person in 2015, when adjusted by purchasing power parity. While this conceals big disparities between provinces, and China’s growth has slowed significantly recently, to ‘only’ 7.4% in 2014, the CCP is still China’s undisputed ruling party. While rates of growth may be the lowest since 1990, personal incomes in China’s nine coastal provinces and cities have now roughly caught up with developed countries.

But to achieve all this economic growth, and to satisfy the consumer demand that has come with it, the CCP has overseen a huge increase China’s energy consumption. Coal consumption from domestic and foreign sources like Mongolia used to generate electricity skyrocketed from 1500 million short tons in 2000 to 4500 million in 2014. Meanwhile oil imports for its booming transportation sector turned China into a net importer of fossil fuels by the early 1990s. In 2009 the country became the world’s second largest importer of petroleum products. It became the largest global energy consumer in 2011, and then passed the United States as the largest net importer of petroleum at the end of 2013.

The major danger for China is that as its thirst for energy grows it risks getting dragged into the same poisonous political conflicts that have dogged America since it allowed itself to be drawn into the Middle East under the Carter doctrine, and later Central Asia. Already over half of China’s total oil imports came from the Middle East and the country is finding its firms responding to the same market incentives as previous customers did before them. The huge Chinese market’s central importance to competing Middle Eastern producers will also incentivize them to maintain or expand their current export levels to the People’s Republic. China’s oil consumption growth accounted for about 43% of the world’s oil consumption growth in 2014 and was projected to account for account for more than one-fourth of the global oil consumption growth in 2015.

[DetlefK]

1. China is busy fending off an incoming economic crisis:

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/31478-china-s-communist-capitalist-ecological-apocalypse

China's economy is ever-expanding, resulting in ever-expanding hunger for ressources and ever-expanding environmental destruction. The economic collapse would be just a question of time.

-> China needs to reduce economic growth to a sustainable level. (It is already scaling back government investments bit by bit.)



Problem:
The population of China keeps growing. If the economy grows slower than the population, there will be unemployment.

-> Problem:
1. There is no unemployment in Communism. That's a central part of the doctrine.
2. The increase in wages and quality-of-life in China due to the booming economy (their middle-class is massively growing) is the bribe that China uses to keep its citizens in line and complacent. The Chinese are willing to accept the oppression in exchange for a good life.



-> China needs to reign in on its economic growth for economic reasons, but it can't afford to reduce the growth for political reasons.

China is a giant on clay feet.

[enid602]

2. Chinese

Wealthy Chinese are buying homes in the US at an accelerate pace, so they have somewhere to go once the lid blows off.

[unhappycamper]

3. Speaking of wealthy Chineese: China now has more billionaires than US

http://atimes.com/2015/10/china-now-has-more-billionaires-than-us/

China now has more billionaires than US
By Asia Unhedged on October 15, 2015

As the US presidential campaign kicks into gear, all we keep hearing about is capitalism. It’s come to such a point that Bernie Sanders, a US senator running for president and an avowed socialist, is asked point blank numerous times this week, “Are you a capitalist?”

Yes, we Americans are pretty gung-ho about our capitalism. The capitalist credo about ability to go from rags to riches is one of the key points of American exceptionalism.

So, sit down please, because this is going to be a little hard to take.

Communist China now has more billionaires than the US, according to a ranking of China’s wealthy released Thursday.

[enid602]

4. billion poor

I read they now have a larger middle class that the US, as well. But as long as they have almost a billion poor, it does not augur well for their future.