The big advantage those countries have though is that they are tiny.  The bigger you are the harder it is to administer "one size fits all" plans. 

This is interestingly something the chinese have noticed and it's why they segregate through geography the rich areas and the poor areas and treat them differently.

Still... China has SO many issues to deal with... including how increased wealth will effect the people's will to let them be ruled.

When you look throught the world of things that had the potential to be "great" EVERYBODY remembers those who've made it... but few remember all those that didn't.

There is a LOT that can happen between now and 2050.

They can't even have highway construction in any resemblance of normalancy and you expect them to be the world leader? pffft. My city had a complete overhaul of the Interstate through the city, the only one we have, that took 3 years to complete, yet it didn't affect the overall travel of people.

China has a lot of growing up to do to become a leader of anything but slave labor.

That's actually happening, China is now the biggest market in front of the USA for the luxury brands. On the big eastern towns, there are high salaries with high consumption of imported products (cars, skin cares, perfumes, wines).

For the debate, actually, China is tend to transform for a sole manufacturer to be also a leading country in research (they trained more engineer than any other countries, they are the 3rd country to be able to put man in space by themselves, even Europe and Japan haven't do that), many big companies built R&D center in China. For this they follow the trend of the "Dragons" (South Korea, Taiwan...) that start to be solely cheap manufacturer to be now developer of goods.

Personally what's made me sad is that people in China tend to want to be and live as North American people, forgetting little by little their 5,000 years history to be as a country with no history.

the prc wont exist in 2050, so i dont think there will be any problems.

Not really because nearly all countries usually have regions within the country which take local responsibility. It's also down to cultural and ideological differences. The Scandinavian region has a highly developed democracy with high levels of peoples participation and much less susceptible to Corporate influences.

As for segregation of rich and poor areas in China....well port cities such as Shanghai will obviously be more wealthy than a city deep inland bordering the Thor desert. China has made it an official state policy to distribute the wealth much more evenly.

As for the issues China has to deal with, indeed they have huge internal issues of which the US has nothing comparable. Ethnic and religious unrest, huge poverty levels, a one party dictatorship, high corruption levels, human rights issues, significant territorial disputes etc.

The thing about China is they are making a lot of money on exports but essentially right now they are the manufacturing plant for the worlds most advanced (and not so advanced) corporations. So really all they are doing is exporting Western and East Asian (Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea) products. It's really quite misleading to call it 'Chinese' exports.The actual money made is shifting more and more to private capital and away from the global workforce as it has been doing for decades now and China opening up it's economy for cheap labour but with first rate infrastructure has helped to continue that trend.

Never!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In an ironic twist, the race to China to cut costs will almost certainly cause costs to rise dramatically over the next few years. The effect of 1bn new people wanting to consume at middle-class levels (in 20-30 years, or whenever) will push commodity prices through the roof.