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Foreign Policy reports, “China’s teetering on the verge of its own lost decade, and a meltdown in Beijing would make Japan’s economic malaise look like child’s play:”
As pleasurable as it must be for China’s leaders to have beaten Japan at its own game, the joke might soon be on them. In fact, they would do well to veer off of Japan’s development path promptly. Sure, Japan’s export boom funded stellar growth for four decades. But its undervalued currency eventually helped blow one of the largest bubbles in history, the bursting of which still hobbles Japan today. Japan’s famously dismal demographics didn’t help, but China’s aren’t much better. Beijing’s one-child policy, introduced in 1979, has worked its way up the population pyramid such that China’s supply of rural workers ages 20 to 29 will halve by 2030. Worse yet, China is much larger than Japan — which means that the global consequences of a crash would be far greater.
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Nobody tell Thomas Friedman.
(H/T: Linkiest.)
Jim Chanos is famously trying to go short China. Other hedge funds are following suit. Betting that if China goes down, Japan will feel the effects first (Japanese dependence on China, both in semi-finished materials and industrial exports, are considerable).
Of course, on the “bright side” the usual fix for demographic implosion and economic collapse is aggressive wars of territorial conquest and imperialism.