There are a lot of comments on Sam's post earlier about China and India, but Gerald Hibbs has some cold water to splash on the Chinese' problem, that I thought I'd move up to post level:

Right, every inch of China is covered with them growing something. Terraced hillsides are standard. As we whisk by on the train you can see them farming the way their grandparents did. Often you see the cliff dotted with caves. What are those? They live there. It is fascinating to watch and incredibly sad.

Meanwhile, government officials talk about how they are lifting a million people a year out of poverty. A million people a year! That is staggering. Even more so when you realize that they are over 1000 years away from lifting everyone in China out of poverty at that rate.

Kids on the farm on making their way to the city and finding it a hard row to hoe -- especially since it is technically illegal to move like that without permission. We watched a documentary that followed one kid. Someone else in the village had gone to the city for a year and came home with enough money to get married and buy a house for his new wife. Off this young man -- an only son -- went where he worked illegally on a high rise construction project and slept in a worker's dorm with no heat. He eventually went home because he couldn't take the bitter winter cold.

We already hear of riots everywhere in China. Well, some details and statistics/conjecture leak out from foreign websites. Chinese government officals admitted to about 74,000 in 2004. Many rural people have television and they watch it filled with commercials for stuff they can't afford (like pretty much everything as the average peasant makes about $150 a year) and modern TV soaps showing spoiled rich young people fighting over the prettiest girl. At the same time there is such a disparity between boy/girl births -- especially in rural areas reaching sometimes 120 boys to 80 girls -- that a poor (and heaven forbid stupid or ugly) village boy has little chance of marriage. It is made even worse by the fact that women are now getting into college and excelling. Why worse? Well, those boys are even more out in the cold then they were before. The women in China are going to experience a power shift in this generation like no other in history. I hope they live through it. I've seen any number of stories about girls kidnapped and sold as "wives." My own wife was almost kidnapped off the street when she was younger.

How much longer can the condition continue? Especially when the people see the endless corruption. Guanxi, or relationships, are everything. I know one guy whose group paid a $10,000 bribe to be allowed to exploit an oil well his group owned. Someone else paid more, and had better relationship, and they were forced to sell for almost for pennies on the dollar. Now the people with more money and guanxi are running the oil well and getting richer. He lost much of his family's life savings in that debacle.

I want to be optimistic but the situation is so inherently unstable. Imagine the gleaming cities of 20 years from now with hundreds upon hundreds of millions of peasants knowing they and their children are shut out. Or even worse know that they will know the shame of being a "branchless tree" (Chinese description of a man without a family.) Interesting times indeed. If anyone can give me a reasonable explanation of how this can end well short of a singularity -- and molecular manufacturing to instantly provide economic parity -- I'd love to hear it.

Fortunately, some kind of singularity-like event is likely to bail them (and the rest of us) out. Unfortunately, given the history of technological solutions, it will bring new problems of its own. The future is likely to be (in the words of the ancient Chinese curse) interesting times.

And add this:

Poisoned Nation

Can you be serious, Rand? Singularity-like event?

In the Chinese usage of kanji, isn't the symbol for opportunity and trouble the same? Or is that just a stupid Occidental myth?

In the Chinese usage of kanji...

If I'm right that kanji is Japanese then the Chinese usage would include curses.

Kanji is used by both the Chinese and the Japanese - though slightly differently.

The kanji for crisis is a combination of the kanji for danger and oportunity - I believe that is the one you were looking for...

Can I go back to waiting for the regular Rapture? the thought of spending an eternity as a piece of software has lost its luster...

The "interesting times" quote was actually coined by Robert Kennedy. But yes, a massive civil war will likely make things interesting.

Another chinese proverb is "It's better to be a dog in a peaceful time than be a man in a chaotic period".

Can I go back to waiting for the regular Rapture? the thought of spending an eternity as a piece of software has lost its luster...

Heh. There's an intellectual somewhere who dubbed the Singularity "Rapture for geeks".

My doctor told me about his trip to China last year. He was amazed to see construction cranes everywhere as new buildings were built. However, he said that it seemed no one was buying the recently finished buildings. So, to cover the construction loans for the empty buildings, Chinese banks gave new loans that were also used to continue construction. All of this is counted in China's booming GDP figures.

If his assessment is correct, then it sounds like the Chinese banking industry is financing a house of cards. The inevitable correction will be devastating to the Chinese economy and the effects will be felt worldwide.

Bah! A systemic banking crisis is nothing a trillion dollars of US treasuries can't fix. Another problem is that Chinese banks seem to have also been buying subprime mortgage backed securities. Lots of them.

If China uses its massive productive capacity to build something other than buildings, I wonder what it will be.

bchan:

That of course depends on what your religion is, if any, and how strong your faith is in it.

I remember reading a little story (probably fictional) about a couple of Russian generals in the 1990s reminiscing about their days in WWII, during which one said "Tovarisch, it is a bad thing, getting old." To which the other replied, "It beats not doing so."

Eternity as a piece of software is a damn sight better than nonexistence.