Right now 3 out of 4 of the world's super cranes are in China, constructing new office towers. The Chinese are holding something like a trillion dollars that we've traded them for TVs and such. The Chinese military is building a deep-water navy, and China keeps making no-so-subtle threats against Taiwan. In addition, the Chinese have a tendency to build up a lot of nationalistic anger whenever they feel threatened, whether the threat is real or imagined.
Now the kicker is exactly as you describe: they cannot scale. Their system is rotten and broken, and the only reason it's still working is that they "sold out" to capitalism, effectively creating an oligarchy just like in the bad old days.
But how would an implosion occur? There's good money that says that the worse things get, the more China is going to be looking for somebody else to get into a tangle with -- what better way to keep people's attention elsewhere. The blame has to go somewhere, and it can't be the leadership. There's an easy case to be made that China could blame it's impeding implosion on lack of cheap resources, favored-trading status of Taiwan, Japanese hegemony, United States imperialism -- pick your bad guy. In a pressure cooker the steam has to go somewhere.
The best thing that could happen to us if they end up like Japan. Japan was buying everything in sight, then there banking system collapsed from all of the bad loans (worse then our housing market I suppose) and they have yet to recover. I know China is making bad loans, we can only hope they collapse because they are eating our lunch right now, in fact we are giving them our lunch they don't even have to take it.
Right now 3 out of 4 of the world's super cranes are in China, constructing new office towers. The Chinese are holding something like a trillion dollars that we've traded them for TVs and such. The Chinese military is building a deep-water navy, and China keeps making no-so-subtle threats against Taiwan. In addition, the Chinese have a tendency to build up a lot of nationalistic anger whenever they feel threatened, whether the threat is real or imagined.
Now the kicker is exactly as you describe: they cannot scale. Their system is rotten and broken, and the only reason it's still working is that they "sold out" to capitalism, effectively creating an oligarchy just like in the bad old days.
But how would an implosion occur? There's good money that says that the worse things get, the more China is going to be looking for somebody else to get into a tangle with -- what better way to keep people's attention elsewhere. The blame has to go somewhere, and it can't be the leadership. There's an easy case to be made that China could blame it's impeding implosion on lack of cheap resources, favored-trading status of Taiwan, Japanese hegemony, United States imperialism -- pick your bad guy. In a pressure cooker the steam has to go somewhere.
That's the worry.