Photo provided by Ron Tammen
It is in the United States’ long-term interest to focus on China. Dr. Ron Tammen, PSU political science professor and director of the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government made this statement in no uncertain terms.
In the 1980’s USSR was the country to watch. The Soviet Union was outpacing everyone else in research and development and it looked like it would be the U.S.’ biggest economic challenger. Even then, Dr. Tammen was giving presentations on the need to look at China. The response was often an empty lecture hall. After the fall of the USSR in 1990, many began to recognize that focusing on Russia had been a strategic miscalculation.
Things look different this side of the new millennium. China currently has a population of 1.4 billion; over four times the size of the United States. At the most basic level, the Chinese workforce need be only one-quarter as productive as the US workforce to equal our GDP. Most economists believed that China’s GDP would equal that of the US by late 2015. By some measures this is already the case.
In the last ten years, the Chinese economy grew ten times faster than the US. The United States has a total work force of 155 million people, but China has a “floating” work force nearly that size. This means that China has a huge number of low-skill workers who can be shifted from place to place and industry to industry as the need arises. A movement is underway in China to move rural workers into cities. The government has already built 20 new cities and are poised to eventually have 220 cities with populations over one million. By contrast, the US has only 9 cities with populations over one million.
There are some barriers to China’s growth that may ultimately impede the country’s plan to be the world’s economic leader. The Communist Party is losing support in rural areas. The provinces could break-off in a move similar to the fall of the USSR. Due to the country’s longstanding “one-child” policy, it is expected that by 2020 there will be three retirees to every one worker. Further, because of the preference for male children one in five men will be hopelessly single. Additionally, environmental problems like pollution of air, water, and farmland, disappearance of Tibetan glaciers that provide the country’s water supply, and diseases like Bird Flu pose a threat to the country’s continued growth.
The United States faced similar foes–pollution, poverty, pandemics, race riots, religious bigotry, corruption, and gender imbalance–after the Civil War and was able to fight its way back to power. Is the US so special and industrious that it can overcome anything?
According to Dr. Tammen, it is likely that China will overtake the US by the year 2050.