Originally published at: Animated graph shows incredible difference between China and India's GDP over the last 60 years | Boing Boing
…
4 Likes
Yowza! On a related note, here is a chart that looks at the US/China trade deficit over several years.
1 Like
9 Likes
We’ll see what the future holds. As financial institutions like to say in their disclaimers, “past performance is no guarantee of future results.”
Personally I expect that China’s upside-down demographics that were created by the one-child policy will cause serious hardships as more people try to retire and there just aren’t enough younger workers to take care of them and also keep the economy humming.
5 Likes
The ‘reasons’ seem like they are out of a propaganda textbook rather than looking at actual data. No mention of how China built a bunch of good infrastructure so it doesn’t take 30 days from factory to port. Or how China used government repression to make sure factory workers didn’t strike or ask for stuff and were a ‘reliable’ labor force.
5 Likes
So . . . communism?
/s
1 Like
But how much bogus GDP does China have? They’re obsessed about maintaining the economic growth rate even though that’s only been possible due to playing catch-up, the growth rate inherently will slow as they approach parity.
However, we have things like the ghost cities. They’re building things to keep the economy going even though there isn’t the need for the things that are being built. I’m sure there’s a lot more other such non-productive GDP.
2 Likes
…Although the continual rescaling used here may be a better visualization. It allows you to see both the difference in earlier years AND the effects of logarithmic growth over time.
What surprises me is the amount of growth during the Cultural Revolution. I suppose the Great Leap Forward created enough relatively easy to fix problems that even the chaos of the Cultural Revolution was unable to destroy the economy further.
2 Likes
IIRC the military-industrial complex was mostly shielded from disruption during the Cultural Revolution.
It’s clear that China has been manipulating numbers for awhile.
They also have strict controls over the value of the Yuan which I know allows them to manipulate their economy internally too. I know they have a lot of projects where they end up making something but it doesn’t ever get used like buildings. This sort of thing props up the economy, but is there a limit? And i have seen people warning that China might eventually have a severe collapse. But also, money is made up and maybe it won’t. They have said the same thing about US debt.
But they also are a manufacturing powerhouse, and average income has increased and poverty levels have dropped. They are extremely good and copying innovation and there even have been cases where new products coming out get their designs pirated and put out on market first! I guess we will see!
1 Like
There is not such thing as unmanipulated numbers, though. Like, the whole of capitalism is resting on corporate and governmental manipulation. Because that’s how capitalism (and yes, China is indeed part of the capitalist system now) functions.
3 Likes
Somewhat less so now than in the past, but it is true that the rapid rise you see in this graph corresponds to a period when the yuan was indeed held in an artifically low strict trading band.
4 Likes
Because scam call-centers are not sustainable.
1 Like
In many ways, China has acheived what Mussolini dreamed about 100 years ago.
Hmm… maybe so.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
