US Politics |OT|

[Machiavellian]

Bofferbrauer2 said:

the-pi-guy said:

The rise of China based on what?

If we look at GDP, it basically tripled under Bush, and then doubled again under Obama.  It definitely wasn't due to left leaning politicians, it was happening regardless.

From what I understand a lot of China's growth is kind of manufactured. It was going to happen because of China's influences, not America's.  

I think the big difference is that right wingers complain about China, while having absolutely no real solutions to fix any of it. And left leaning politicians try to make it less of a deal, because they probably don't have any real solutions in this particular case either.

China's growth mostly comes from cheap labor attracting international companies in the nineties and noughties (and getting their hand on the tech of those companies). Since the financial crisis however Chinese labor has become too expensive compared to most southeast Asian countries, so foreign companies are slowly leaving China, leaving production more and more only to state-owned companies where pay is often below minimum wage and work on a 996 schedule. To continue boost GDP numbers, China has then embarked in massive construction projects like the three gorges dam, the high-speed rail network and stamping entire new cities of the ground, of which we see the consequences now.

I would also say that China faces the same problem as India and of course what the US already gone through.  Once your society gets to a certain level, low wages for the work they do becomes an issue.  Being able to sustain a highly educated society with lower wages become more and more of an issue as these people start to demand higher wages.  As you stated, what then happens is those companies that relied on those workforce start to look at other countries that can supple the same type of low cost workers who can be trained to do the job at a lower cost.  Now Mexico, Africa and other such places start to look more attractive.