time to learn chinese?

Listened to an analyst on the radio expressing view that towards 2010
China will be leading world economic power.

Anyway interesting was that the analyst expressed that in her view
China was keen to avoid the mistakes of the socialist welfare state as
market liberalization and prosperity grew.  She considered the burden
of a welfare state to be a large burden which would mean that
China would outstrip growth in the west.

Also she stated that she thought democracy was in decline.  When
interviewed asked about human rights, she opined that these would
improve as the market became freer.  She stated that China hopes to
bypass democracy going straight to free market.

China may be interesting in a few more decades...

Adam

At 10:45 AM -0800 2/9/98, Adam Back wrote:
>Listened to an analyst on the radio expressing view that towards 2010
>China will be leading world economic power.

Like the predictions in 1970 of Russian as the language to learn? Or the
predictions in the 1980s that Japanese was the language to learn?

China is indeed a large country, so any reasonable per capita output makes
it, ranked as a "nation," very large indeed. So?

I'm not much of a believer in nation-states as influencers of world trade.
While it is true that, for example, India is a larger economic power than
Denmark is, so?

Oh, and on the specific prediction...I have my doubts about even the per
capita numbers rising as fast as some think. It's still a Communist system,
with periodic crackdowns on anyone or any entity who is perceived to be
doing "too well."

Sort of like all the moaning and gnashing that Microsoft did research and
invested money and kept working along and didn't "let" Netscape become the
"next desktop OS." Recall that Netscape was claiming the browser would
become the OS, with applets running under the browser.

Anyway, China does not as yet have even a single reasonably state of the
art chip making plant in its entire country. Given the timescales and
learning curves involved, it seems unlikely they'll be a high tech leader
in little over 10 years.

Maybe in terms of gross output of chop sticks, rice, fertilizer, etc.


--Tim May


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Tim May <tcmay@got.net> writes:
> Oh, and on the specific prediction...I have my doubts about even the per
> capita numbers rising as fast as some think. It's still a Communist system,
> with periodic crackdowns on anyone or any entity who is perceived to be
> doing "too well."

The interesting aspect of her speculation was on the possibility of an
economic and political process of change which would result in a
transition directly from communism to a free market based political
system, by-passing democracy and socialism.  She viewed democracy and
socialism as mistakes made by the west to be learned from and avoided.

Communist regimes typically include a significant element of central
planning which introduces economic inefficiencies, yes, and loss of
freedom of choice, etc.

Socialist democracies have much in common with communist regimes in
this respect: elements of centralised control, restrictions of choices
(the nanny state, huge welfare systems, 50%+ taxation) large
government restrictions on free market operation.

Both systems suck, but currently the lesser of two evils by a large
margin is living in a socialist democracy because of the wider
freedoms as compared to the lack of freedoms in Communist countries
such as China, and because of it being worth putting up with the nanny
state and 50%+ tax rates as compared to the economic instability and
organised crime problems in Russia, and previous Russian provinces now
split off back in to small countries.

The interesting question is the how these two evolving political and
economic systems will change over time.

Her speculation was that a previously communist system evolving
towards becoming a pure market system might move towards this goal
more rapidly than a rampantly socialist democracy would move towards
the same.  She also considered the different cultural work ethic
signficant: Chinese people on the whole work harder, and re-invest
more of per capita income.

> Anyway, China does not as yet have even a single reasonably state of
> the art chip making plant in its entire country. Given the
> timescales and learning curves involved, it seems unlikely they'll
> be a high tech leader in little over 10 years.

Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan produce sizeable quantities of electronic
devices, consumer electronics items, cars, etc.  In fact I understood
them to out compete western manufacturing in many instances.

They may not always be at the leading edge of R&D, but they do produce
a lot, much of it quality equipment, and we (westerners) buy more
consumer electronics, and cars produced by such countries now.
Personally I would buy a Toyota over a Ford anyday :-)

China might be viewed as larger version of Singapore a few decades ago
perhaps.  Enterprise zones (or same rules for the whole country) with
0% taxation, unrestrictive planning rules etc should help attract
outside investment from high tech companies, if political stability
was viewed as good enough.

Probably you are right on the optimism of the time scales of the
interviewed analyst.

Adam