Is China Imploding?

Meanwhile, back in the USA, the news media has been regaling us with talk about how China is imploding. Wishful thinking, one dares to say. When you are afraid you cannot compete you imagine that your competitor is going to implode.

In truth, one Gordon Chang has been predicting the demise of the Chinese regime for some two decades now. For having been consistently wrong, he is now considered to be an expert. Isn’t America a great country, where being wrong makes you an expert. 

Anyway, our go-to authority on China is named David Goldman. In the midst of China’s problems with its property sector-- and they are apparently serious problems-- the China implosion crew is out in force, predicting gloom and doom for the Middle Kingdom.

On which Goldman sheds the light of reason:

These are self-consoling illusions of a lazy elite that has allowed America’s manufacturing, technological and education advantages to erode over the past 20 years – an elite that has nothing to say about reversing the decline.

China has a nasty financial problem in an over-leveraged real estate sector, but countries with large current surpluses and huge saving rates don’t have crises. They have reorganizations. And China does have a demographic problem, not nearly as serious as in Japan, South Korea or Taiwan, and only slightly more serious than America’s.

What the punditeska thinks is light at the end of the tunnel is, rather, the headlamp of the oncoming express, namely the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The people who have been in charge of America, and that have allowed it to lose its competitive advantage, are now wishing, hoping and praying that its leading competitor will self-deconstruct.

Goldman takes the long view:

A generation from now, the Chinese won’t remember the misery of Ant Financial, or the failure of property giant Evergrande, or this year’s power shortage, or any number of minor interruptions of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. They will remember automated warehouses, smart ports running on 5G networks, mines operated by remote control, factories run by self-programming robots and driverless taxis.

All of this is happening now in China, and at scale. The linked videos on Youtube provide more information than anything you will read in the Western media. China’s artificial intelligence (AI) applications look like science fiction, but they are real as rain, and happening before our eyes.

The application of big data and AI to flexible manufacturing, smart logistics, health care and other fields promises to transform economic life as profoundly as the Second Industrial Revolution changed the United States and Germany.

While America’s ports are clogged by inefficiency, China’s ports are being run by robots:

All of China’s major ports are at or close to full automation. Industrial automation, although impressive, is still in pilot phase: Huawei says that it has 16,000 private 5G networks under development for factory automation, a small fraction of the country’s 2.8 million factories (as of 2015), but more than enough for proof of concept. And the Chinese telecom giant has installed 5G networks in 1,800 of the country’s 34,000 hospitals.

China turned a population of subsistence farmers into industrial workers, moving 600 million people from countryside to city in less than 40 years, increasing per capita income tenfold in the process.

I refer you to the text if you would like the details about the fourth industrial revolution. Nothing is more dismaying for America than the simple fact that while China moves ahead America is mired in a useless and fruitless debate about diversity, equity and inclusion. By the by, it is doing everything in its power to dumb down education, the better to make underachieving children have higher self-esteem:

China is serious, focused and disciplined in its campaign to lead the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The US at best gives lip service to the concept, and at worst ignores the problem, the better to focus on “diversity” and “equity.”

Which country is really imploding?