Kat Tsun
eeeeeeeeeeeeeee
- Joined
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It's been declining since the 1980s from 15-20% GDP/year to now 4-5%. It's likely they can maintain this for another half decade though and that will allow them to break through to reusable rockets. They're really not some great big moat. They'll probably have a Falcon 9 in regular operation before 2030.
China's issues will come into play in the latter half of the next decade (2035+) but if they play their cards right, like they have been for the past 40 years, they'll be able to keep negotiating down GDP targets from 4-5% to 3-4% and then 2-3% while automatizing stuff and reducing reliance on young workers. It's a plateau for sure, but they will likely sit higher up than the U.S. at the end of it, if only because they already sitting higher than the U.S. economy and that translates to a higher future end goal.
The jury is out on whether or not they'll ever be able to solve the rural-urban investment divide, so they'll be incredibly advanced in highly concentrated economic zones (unless automatizing opens up new growth disconnected from labor [it almost certainly won't] it will consume the margin with maintenance like it does in Europe and America today), and end up basically half a century behind in random villages or whatever.
This isn't a big issue if you don't care about rural poor places and most people don't tbh because that won't impact solar panel outputs.
There simply won't be superpowers in the future.
There will be several regional powers with spheres of influence. The European Union, Russia, America, China, maybe a couple others, and their respective vassals. China also won't be a financial superpower and it knows this. I suspect it will try to lean heavily on Europe for this task if it can get them on their side but that again implies China has anything Europe wants.
It's the 19th century age of empires all over again with all the chaos and uncertainty that entails.
This is partially an American projection and I think that is feeding into Chinese planning in particular (mainly it's accelerating certain programs like J-20/J-35 and the SSNs), but yeah. There's no way to prove the Chinese shipbuilding program is an actual attempt to militarily retake Taiwan next year, until it happens, and it could actually just be a massive subsidy/jobs program intended to keep employment rates up.
Given the structure of the PRC, and the social compacts the CPC has made with the population, it's 55/45 in favor of a jobs program IMO.
That's essentially what is being done, at least from the outside looking in, but it's possible the USIC has some hidden information.
China still spends less as a percentage of its GDP than the United States. It's actually on a downwards trend lately. It was closer to 2% a decade ago and now it's similar to Japan in the 2000s. It's simply a massive economy and it has a lot of labor and industrial capacity that needs subsidy. Supercarriers and such are necessary to force the U.S. out of Asia, but there's also the domestic component of not reducing the labor force, even as the commercial shipbuilding industry picked back up.
When the 2008 crash happened the PRC shifted gears from commercial shipbuilding to military shipbuilding. Now, they're doing both, but perhaps they don't actually want to conquer Taiwan militarily, and just want to keep their shipyard workers employed? Yes, their shipbuilding plan looks very much like a military build up, but only because that's the only shipbuilding plan that makes sense in the context of a regional war with the United States, and the only people making noise about a military invasion are the United States and Taiwan.
China could literally be perfectly content to wait out Taiwan while building a navy prepared for WW3. That's what the U.S. and USSR both did in the Cold War: neither side had any offensive designs on the other but assumed the opposite of the enemy. That's simply what an arms race is.
The U.S. might sleep walk its way into WW3 because it will get so paranoid over 2027, that it will cause it to happen by sending the U.S. Marines to Taiwan or building an embassy or giving them F-35 or something, and I'm not entirely unconvinced that isn't the plan for a preemptive war that's on the table somewhere. Provoke China into action and strike them hard before they can react on the pretext of "defending Taiwan" or something.
It's just about the only way America can defuse this issue before the USN reaches its actual relative force nadir after 2036 (and at this rate, with DDG(X) being delayed, the force structure won't recover until the latter 2040s at least rather than the early 2040s). Otherwise, it's pushing hard into Starshield and some sort of ABM system, and relying on the U.S. nuclear weapons as a first strike to cripple the Chinese war economy before it can get started. That might not work if the PRC is able to beat the reusable rocket moat and they likely will at some point because their constellation size will go from ~300 to probably ~30,000 (enough to defeat a U.S. nuclear attack) very quickly.
If America were smart and had some sort of centralized censorship regime, it would act aloof about China's military buildup rather than running endless NYT and NPR news articles, which makes it look weak. The problem is that America, in addition to looking weak due to its own political self-denigration, is actually weak from the perspective of a protracted industrial war. So, while there's a time crunch involved but it's on the Americans' end to not get 1898'ed out of Asia rather than on China to race to capture Taiwan.
The prime mover here is not that China wants to militarily take Taiwan though, or thinks it has to, because it knows it can afford to wait. The problem is the U.S. is posturing itself to suggest that, not only will it be unlikely to do anything, it's also increasingly incapable of doing anything regardless. This is without any actual plan of what happens when that "trap" is sprung and America finds itself watching Chinese Marines in Super Frelons orbit over the Presidential Office Building in Taipei or something.
This is why some people talked about "sleep walking into WW3" a few years ago in the Atlantic or whatever: America is causing China to act a bit more aggressively by presenting itself as openly declining. Unfortunately, this is merely a symptom of America's free press and genuine industrial decay, rather than some masterful chess gambit.
It's a hard sell on the aloof bit because even if America plays the cool cucumber, like it should, it's actually in the position of being unable to do anything. It should ideally be talking about cutting Taiwan loose and establishing deep defense-industrial ties with Korea and Japan in particular. Building American ordered Burkes in Korean or Taiwanese yards would let it at least utilize its financial muscles to get tangible returns, and having an actual plan for what happens if Taiwan gets taken (if it happens) means the Pacific allies won't feel left out in the cold or can steel themselves emotionally for it.
Expecting basic things like this from the past few U.S. admins is a bit futile though. America is quite bad at managing decline, so I suspect within a decade or so it will be pushed back to Guam (or leave Guam of its own volition) and return to the Western Hemisphere, with the rest of Asia (really, Korea/Japan/Australia/Philippines) will be in a loose military alliance to counteract a Chinese regional hegemony.
That seems to be the trend line unless something major happens, like the Jones Act gets amended to allow for warships to be purchased overseas if American shipyards are unable to meet the demands, or something. That's something that should have been changed 5-10 years ago with the Pacific Pivot. We'd probably have another half dozen or so Burkes in the water if we could buy them from Japanese and Korean yards, and an actually useful FREMM derivative, in addition to our present yard capacities given Jones Act waivers outside of wartime.
Sadly, that won't be until we end up in a major war with the PRC, and that might be over before the yards can spin up.
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