How can people think that China's is the world's next superpower?
In China, the age at which men retire is 60. It's five or ten years earlier for women. This might have worked well in the past, but with China's low fertility rates for decades and decades, their population is now becoming dramatically top-heavy.
By 2050, China is projected to have 43% of it's adult population over the age of 60, outside of the working age.
With this trajectory, it seems like China's workforce growth will expire in a decade or so, and then start plummeting by around 8M per year. What then? How will they deal with a population that is primarily elderly people? Won't the loss in productivity and the consumption from the elderly make a serious dent in the leftover wealth that would pay for having children?
I don't see how they can possibly get out of this hole that they've dug themselves into and become a world power, even if they do have huge gold supplies.
Low fertility rates ? I workedin China for 2 years and despite a one child policy they mutilply like rabbits ..they use loopholes in system to register their other children ...
They will rise retirement age to 65-70 years, like everyone else is dying. They will be the next superpower because they are keeping an homogeneous population, value hard work and hate welfare, and do not care about being democratic or humanistic.
I think the word 'superpower' is tossed around too lightly and doesn't quite mean what we want it to mean. China's attitude towards the rest of the world is very, very different from the US'. It's not like it will replace the US if the US collapses.
That said, the global landscape is shifting quickly as the concept of the 'west' is fragmenting and new deals replace the old ones. I don't know what's coming next. Maybe China as a superpower (whatever that means), even if it can't sustain itself without mass immigration.
@CountScrofula A global superpower is just a nation that has a very clear economic/strategic dominance. The US is a superpower because its wealth and GDP are an order of magnitude (or several) beyond that of almost all other nations.
@Invisible Well yeah, I get that. But the economic/strategic dominance takes on other forms according to the character of the power, and those forms may be very different than what we speculate.
This also implies that there MUST be a power with a GDP an order of magnitude above everyone else. That may not be the case.
Your point about the workforce is a valid one regardless though.
@CountScrofula [quote]This also implies that there MUST be a power with a GDP an order of magnitude above everyone else. That may not be the case. [/quote]
I never said they had to be superior to [i]everyone[/i]. A century ago we had several comparable superpowers, and there was certainly no denying that they were all superpowers compared to nearly almost every other nation.
@SW-User Why would they not care?? This is a very serious issue, and the government at least says that they take it very seriously. They're attempting to take action by raising the working age, but they're slow and the population provides a lot of resistance.
See that big hump in the 60s? Those people are going to be retiring in the next decade.
