Something that comes instantly will disappear quickly.
Nature
The latest projection by BNP Paribas for when China will have a larger economy than the United States. Goldman Sachs projected 2027. The post-crisis projection is 2020. That’s just a decade away. China is going to change the world in two fundamental respects. First of all, it’s a huge developing country with a population of 1.3 billion people, which has been growing for over 30 years at around 10 percent a year.
And within a decade, it will have the largest economy in the world. Never before in the modern era has the largest economy in the world been that of a developing country, rather than a developed country. Secondly, for the first time in the modern era, the dominant country in the world — which means what China will become — will be not from the West and from very different civilizational roots.
It’s a widespread assumption in the West that as countries modernize, they also westernize. This is an illusion. It’s an assumption that modernity is a product simply of competition, markets, and technology. It is not. It is also shaped equally by history and culture. China is not like the West, and it will not become like the West.
Understanding
three building blocks for trying to understand what China is like :
– The first is this: China is not really a nation-state.
– The second is maybe more prosaic.
– The Chinese state enjoys more legitimacy and more authority amongst the Chinese than is true with any Western state.
