Buy you Chinese! Buy! As if our economic lives depended on it!
Tuesday, July 20, 2004 at 3:24AM ìBeijing Is Able to Slow Economic Growth: Next Test for China Will Be How Easily It Can Absorb Possible Oversupply of Goods,î by Matt Pottinger, Wall Street Journal, 19 July, p. A9.
More and more indications that China has generated the much-desired ìsoft landingî for its economy if . . . and hereís the kicker for the formerly centrally-planned economy . . . if the Chinese consumer base can absorb all the goods that will be generated by the investment boom of the past few years.
Already, China is moving into the rarefied territory that defines the United Statesí real economic power: the power of its consumption as much or more than its production. More and more weíll see the global economic health defined not just in terms of what America is willing to buy, but what China is willing to buy.
China will be a near-peer in diplomacy faster than we think, and a near-peer in economic faster than we think. The one thing it wonít be any time soon is our military near-peer. Thinking of Chinaís ìthreatî solely within the context of war is a mistake, because its real source of competition with the United States will come in the everything else.
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