China is the enemy.
Russia will sit back and play games.
China includes NKorea IMHO when we are talking endgame.
China's in the middle of a population collapse.
They really fooked themselves with One Child:
Your opinion? Wouldn't China be better off with about half the population (or less) than it now has? I understand there is the temporary problem of a bunch of people too old to work. But the Asians aren't burdened with the feelings that westerners have about the infirm. Or are they?
No that's an old economic fallacy.
People = power.
People = soldiers
People = production
And more importantly, you need YOUNG people for all these things. China's the most rapidly aging country IN HISTORY, and they baby boomer world wide hit peak retirement rate this quarter. In the U.S. for every babyboomer retiring only one Gen Zer's entering the work force. I don't know the exact number for China, but it's probably 4x worse.
Let me express this a different way. When we look at long term GDP, in simple terms, the rate of change is the sum of two numbers; the growth rate of per worker productivity, and historically, population growth. Historically most countries has a nice even population triangle, more 20 year old's, than 30 year old's, than 40 year old's, etc.. In other words your populations concentrated in the younger working generations. Today China population structure is the opposite. So they'll have more people retired than working.
As you can see, we must adjust the above equation to growth in GDP = increase in per worker productivity + increase in work force. We've established the delta on their work force in the coming decades is negative, but what about their productivity.
One of the keys to productivity is specialization and the division of labor. The more people you have the finer you can subdivide and specialize your labor. In general, for every order of magnitude increase of the number of people in an economic system, there's a 10% increase in per person productivity. In other words, on average, the people in a city of million people are 50% more productive on a per person basis than those in a hamlet of 100 folks.
Now apply this to what's happen in China. As their work force implodes, so their their productivity. Then means both numbers, the change in population and change in productivity will be negative for the foreseeable future. This is not good for China. They're in for a very dark future.
