Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people's questions, and connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
China overtaking the American economy would likely cause increased tension between the two countries, which are already at odds on issues such as trade and 5G technology.
It’s difficult to imagine China’s relative share of global power increasing dramatically except to the extent they overcome these historical limitations. By the time the technologies that enable them to do that exist, nation states in and of themselves will probably be an obsolete political model, replaced by some kind of global flux state anarchy or at least one-world Illuminati-style government.
That’s because a nation state in and of itself is a group of humans cooperating with each other against other groups of humans for sparse resources and services, and technology should eventually produce an abundance of resources and services that will eliminate the need for any such competition between groups of humans.
That is probably never going to happen.
Power doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it arises from historical circumstances. China’s circumstances now aren’t too different from what they were historically. Historically China has large amounts of land to farm a staple carbohydrate m that could feed a huge population. This resulted in semi-modern attitudes and behavior at a much earlier phase of cultural and technological development than most human societies have experienced.
One result of the Chinese agricultural boom is that illiterate warlords with maces were no longer adequate to see to the technically and politically complex tasks associated with meeting output quotas and seeing to it that the sorts of crops that were needed to feed livestock in one part of the empire made it from the opposite side of the empire. So their aristocracy (aristocracies being rooted in war and battle) became more like the British aristocracy in the early 20th century, a sort of pastoral artifact from an earlier era, just a thousand or so years earlier than in the rest of the world. In their place, you had a group of scholar-civil servants that could ostensibly come from any social class (but over time evolved into a sort of pseudo-aristocracy in their own right, with sons generally receiving the same or similar appointments as their fathers). The 5% to 10% of people who were wealthy and cultured enough to be ‘gentry’ and could afford to pay for their sons to receive civil service education up to Confucian standards shared power over Chinese society. Meanwhile the aristocracy, the peasants, and even the emperor became peripheral political influences. Occasionally a non-scholar/civil service faction could reassert itself (most often an emperor), but eventually the balance of power would shift back to the scholar/civil servants.
Essentially, China was like a corporation run by management rather than by executives. The executives existed, and had influence, but mainly as accessories to the goals and capabilities of management. The pace of Chinese society was decided mainly by scholar/civil servants.