Is China today the Japan from the 80s?

For all of you who are old enough to remember all the scares that the Japanese were taking over the electronic and automobile industries…were buying land all over the country…picked up a majority of the US debt (they still are the number 1 holder of our debt, with China second). You might remember the old slogan “Buy American – the job you may save may be your own” and movies like Gung Ho. Is our fear of China taking over the US just more of the same as our fears of Japan taking over back in the 80s?

I’m neither an economist nor especially knowledgeable about the far east, but I don’t know that China will ever take Japan’s place as the world’s second largest economy, let alone the United States’ place as the most dominant. China, it seems to me, has tremendous potential, and has certainly come a long way in the last three or four decades. Having said that, I think this growth will be tempered by the following:
China’s population is almost incomprehensibly huge- nearly one and a half billion if memory serves me right. And although Shanghai and Beijing are the country’s “showcase” cities, much of the interior remains quite poor by comparison. Also, I believe that the cost of living in China is increasing at an alarming rate, particularly in the aforementioned two cities. The people who are presently working for low wages in order to produce goods sold in the west will, I would think, eventually insist on higher salaries and better working conditions.

Chinese car crash test failure

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