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‘America is going down’: China can capitalise on damage caused by Trump, former PLA colonel says
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
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both of these issues are really reaching.
The only problem China would be facing is civil disobedience but as long as Chinese live slightly more comfortable year after year and don't notice the spying/firewall too much the Chinese are just too spineless to do anything.
That's why China basically has to do nothing to win geopolitica these days. Just sit back, continue spreading propaganda and see everything fall in their favor.
Spineless? Chinese people literally just protested against the authoritarian "Zero Covid" policy and that pressured the CCP to end that policy.
Lol
There might be one party looking from the outside, but on the inside there are many currents, and as soon as there's a power vacuum, those currents will infight to gain power.
Yup. and the classic paradox of authoritarian systems is that if you name and train your successor, they'll sideline (I mean kill/imprison etc) you before your time is over, and if you make sure there's no clear successor, power vacuum is guaranteed.
The farther term limits are in the past the harder it will be.
I'd say it's quite the opposite. Based on conversations with people who grew up in the one-child system and considering that one of the key elements of raising quality of life was reduction of births and spending more resources on these fewer kids, that are often traditionally raised by grandparents in their early years while parents are being economically productive. So people would have to compromise their present comfort to some extent to boost births. I've not seen a single nation in the world that succeeded in persistently raising births through pronatalist policy.
I'm not saying that this will be China's end, but realistically they have to either lower quality of life for the populace and/or really switch away from cheap manual labor as their primary model towards more automation etc.
I totally agree with this part.
I'm not convinced that shrinking population is at all an issue for a developed country that can replace workers with technology. China is already one if the most automated countries in the world and currently running the biggest infrastructure investments ever. I think if anyone can handle population reduction it's probably China.
OK, so why do other developed countries panic about shrinking and aging populations? Developed countries "solved" this issue by outsourcing low-skilled manual labor to China. But a population tree isn't only about manufacturing, it's also about caring for an aging population. Our growth-based economic systems are quite vulnerable to this.
There's no precedence for infrastructure investments to resolve loss of workers on the scale that China is facing. Infrastructure also needs to be maintained by people. There's also an unprecedented potential for a real-estate crisis, considering the devaluation of housing if more and more becomes uninhabited.
Sure, they just have to achieve like 2-3 unprecedented things that also come with unprecedented consequences, etc. These responses feel like being dismissive for sake of being dismissive. My point remains: the Western powers (and russia) are dealing with precedented, or at least predicted issues, many accelerated by aging despots. China has been winning putin's war, so time serves their purposes etc, but their hegemony isn't guaranteed either.
Nah I think it can be reduced to efficiency loss but if you replace that loss with gains through technology you can maintain the system and I think we can definitely see that. Contemporary Chinese is much more productive than what was 50 years ago and 2050? China with its current technology progression is looking very good in that regard.
On the opposite end theres Italy which doesn't have the same tech capabilities so they can only really import more people to sustain.