The growth of a thoughtful city (Boston Globe, 08/16/2010)

Formal empire is pretty much moot. The "American empire" has largely been economic and cultural. A Chinese one would as well.

In practice it will mean that China has a lot of economic and perhaps (due to increasing Chinese settlement abroad) political leverage over countries in which it's significantly invested. And Beijing has almost no motivation to encourage things like parliamentary democracy and human rights in its new satellites.
 
Have you been to China recently? Building standards are loooowwwww. If you see something good, it's usually because Europeans and American's designed and engineered it. There's a lot of crap in China.
 
China's wealth is built on a massive credit bubble and cheap labor. Both those things are unsustainable. China can't get rich and continue to make all its money off of cheap labor. Eventually all the factory workers are going to demand a raise which will end the world's use of them as a cheap manufacturing center. Without that massive foreign capital their credit bubble will burst. Which will pretty much wreck a huge segment of the global economy. It will then get really ugly in China thanks to the government's nature and likely heavy handed reaction to civil disorder. Whatever is left after that will likely be ready to develop into a real super power in a few decades.

In the meantime, as all of this is occurring in China, everyone will be wondering how India became the next superpower without anyone really noticing.
 
Lurker said:
China's wealth is built on a massive credit bubble and cheap labor. Both those things are unsustainable. China can't get rich and continue to make all its money off of cheap labor. Eventually all the factory workers are going to demand a raise which will end the world's use of them as a cheap manufacturing center. Without that massive foreign capital their credit bubble will burst. Which will pretty much wreck a huge segment of the global economy. It will then get really ugly in China thanks to the government's nature and likely heavy handed reaction to civil disorder. Whatever is left after that will likely be ready to develop into a real super power in a few decades.

In the meantime, as all of this is occurring in China, everyone will be wondering how India became the next superpower without anyone really noticing.
Click to expand...

Already happened.
 
I see China as postwar West Germany/Japan after the upcoming revolution following the bursting of their current economic bubble. India will probably continue on a smoother curve without the intermediate jolt on the way to superpower status.
 
Only time will tell. But, people have been predicting the downfall of China's capitalist economy for the last 30 years, and they have been wrong every time. What makes you think that would change now?
 
Lurker, I think India is the Italy of future superpowers. It will become an economic powerhouse, but it will never really live up to its full potential because its endemic corruption and disorganization will probably never be rooted out completely.
 
State-based empires, like states themselves, will come to be seen as fictions - if perhaps necessary fictions. The global upturn will be characterized by a new era of truly global empires built by unconstrained global corporations (maybe American, Chinese, or Indian origin etc, but multicultural and multinational in outlook), the great institutions behind the global capital markets, and the world cities that house them. Consider a global version of the medieval northern European city states nestled amongst the backwards principalities.
 
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