China remains a country with critical domestic needs and wide swaths of poverty in the interior provinces. It's GDP PPP is around 90th in the world, or basically about average, even including wealthier coastal cities. Nascent superpowers don't have 70,000 people die in an earthquake or take this loss of life in flooding. The ability to project imperial power requires a degree of domestic stability and dispersed wealth that China will never have. As the U.S. declines, China will not be able to take its place - it will remain a regional land power.
We are living through the collapse of the post World War 2 US dominated capitalist order and there is nothing to replace it and no government or political organization poised to. Expect the world's regional powers to prop up the U.S far longer than would be supposed possible, because elites rarely do well when there is a political breakdown. They most definitely know this.
---
1'Severe Flooding Hits Northeast China' - New York Times; Barboza
No comments:
Post a Comment