China Passes Japan as Second-Largest Economy

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/business/global/16yuan.html?_r=1&hp

by danhak • 16 years ago

88 72 16 years ago

Read to the second page, especially this:

Global companies like Caterpillar, General Electric, General Motors and Siemens — as well as scores of others — are making a more aggressive push into China, in some cases moving research and development centers here.

I am, personally, familiar with the movement of R&D to China. This, alone, makes me believe that this is not a flash-in-the-pan, but a genuine long term trend.

Also, as I recall the original estimate for when China would become #1 auto consumer was 2012. They beat that by 3 years. So, I would hazard a guess that it won't take them all the way to 2030 to become economy #1. What will be really interesting about that, though, is that due to population size alone, they will still have a far, far smaller per-capita income than the U.S.

nostromo• 16 years ago

It's hard for me to envision it being too much earlier than that -- take a look at this chart: http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&ctype=l&s... -- it's not like the US isn't a moving target.

Especially if the US and EU get serious about alleged currency manipulation -- it's funny to see a graph of US to Yuan stay virtually flat for many years dispite their economic growth: http://www.google.com/finance/chart?q=CURRENCY:CNYUSD&tk... -- compare that to organic exchange rates: http://www.google.com/finance/chart?q=CURRENCY:CNYEUR&tk... and http://www.google.com/finance/chart?q=CURRENCY:GBPUSD&tk...

Btw, it seems China is the world's largest auto market by units sold, not by dollars/yuan sold -- which is an odd way to think about it. Cars are significantly cheaper in China.

eru7• 16 years ago

"GDP in current U.S. dollars. Not adjusted for inflation."

It would be nice to see the inflation adjusted figures.

niekmaas• 16 years ago

It's also interesting to note that China's economy is not just about low-tech anymore but gradually become more and more higher-tech. Where Chinese cities welcomed all the cheap toy factories a couple of yours ago, I remember reading a Washington Post China article about the fact that certain areas in China ban these kind of factories now. These areas only want higher (not high) tech factories to reach out to different employees and investors. The low tech (toy) companies now move to Vietnam/Laos etc.

c1sc0• 16 years ago

Remember that article a while ago that China was setting up more sequencing capacity in a single building than the whole US combined? For now they're still buying US-made Illumina machines, but I'd expect them to come up with their own technology soon.

mkr-hn• 16 years ago

Over a billion people with increasing incomes and opportunity is going to create a lot of amazing things if they can manage the growth properly.

amichail• 16 years ago

Is there any danger to English as a universal language for the internet, business, education, and research?

Will we need to learn Chinese in a decade or two?

patio112• 16 years ago

There are much more compelling reasons for Chinese people to learn English than there are for foreigners to learn Chinese, though it certainly won't hurt your job prospects. For one, if you learn to speak Chinese you get improved job prospects vis-a-vis two countries. (Yeah, I went there, PRC.) A Chinese person who learns English gets instant access to the US, Anglosphere, Japan (well, cough, theoretically speaking), Western Europe, etc etc.

(Same for Japanese, too. I get "You should have studied Chinese!" all the time, as if these islands had sunken into the ocean after the bubble burst and do not still outrank every European country in trade with the US.)

pvg3• 16 years ago

Not that I think we'll be all be buckling down to master Mandarin in our lifetimes but the lingua franca does sometimes change as the expression itself suggests.

as if these islands had sunken into the ocean after the bubble burst and do not still outrank every European country in trade with the US

By that measure, we should all study Canadian and Mexican as well!

http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/top/dst/current/balance....

boyter• 16 years ago

No. The Chinese realize their language is a pain in the butt to learn and that the writing system is terrible in comparison to any alphabet system. Consequently they are all learning English so they can work with foreign companies.

You need to keep in mind, China has few natural resources so they are reliant on everyone else. Because of this they will be forced to learn English. Chinese will still be the main language of China, but it won't become the world language the way English has.

DanielN• 16 years ago

More to the point, mandarine will not become the language of international business for the same reason French WAS the language of international business up to the early 1900s; the french were involved with business everywhere even though the british and germans had most of the consumer population.

Furthermore, English education is already an integrated part of the chinese (and asian) education systems.

yuan3• 16 years ago

No. The Chinese realize their language is a pain in the butt to learn and that the writing system is terrible in comparison to any alphabet system.

As a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese, I think you are full of shit. No native Chinese speaker I know thinks English is easier to learn than Chinese. And I prefer the Chinese writing system myself if I have a choice.

It's true that many people are learning English, because today Chinese are producing and selling. When the day comes when Chinese become buyers and the rest of the world are trying to get sales from Chinese, they will start learning Chinese.

othello• 16 years ago

the writing system is terrible in comparison to any alphabet system

This is a common misconception (which I shared until I studied Japanese).

Writing a sentence may be more of a hassle than with an alphabet based system - and even that would remain to be seen - but reading it is much more efficient due to the more condensed form factor: a page of kanji would take much more space written in romaji.

The fact that Japan and China stuck to an ideogram-based writing system did not stem from a lack of alternative. Japanese actually has had not only one but two syllabic alphabets for more than a millenia (1). Yet kanji were kept, notably because of the numerous homophones in the Japanese language.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana#History

alinajaf• 16 years ago

> No. The Chinese realize their language is a pain in the butt to learn and that the writing system is terrible in comparison to any alphabet system...

I used to think this, but you can learn to recognize thousands in less than a year with the right methods, and learning to read after that is comparable in difficulty to learning any new vocab in a European language.

philwelch• 16 years ago

Most of us realize that network effects are generally very powerful. The English language is probably one of the single most entrenched network effects in the world. Americans know it, Europeans know it, the entire former British empire knows it, and anyone on their way up--China and Japan included--has to learn it to make their way up.

How is the rest of the world going to learn Chinese? I don't expect them to be as enthusiastic about imperialism as the British were, and even if they were, it would take a century for it to matter.

ww5202• 16 years ago

It would be interesting to create a Chinese-based programming language. Its concise wording would help the expressive department.

bfung• 16 years ago

Yes it would be interesting. I would not want to be the person tasked with writing the parser. ;)

varjag3• 16 years ago

There's APL already.

ximeng• 16 years ago

Chinese Python

http://www.chinesepython.org/cgi_bin/cgb.cgi/english/english...

Keyword translations

http://www.chinesepython.org/cgi_bin/cgb.cgi/doc/doc.html

bbuffone• 16 years ago

Not unless they someone invents a way that can fit all 2000+ chinese characters easily qwerty keyboard.

eru7• 16 years ago

Chinese people do write SMS on their mobile phones?

younata• 16 years ago

I love how it's talking about china being #2, with a $1.33 trillion gdp, then it drops US's $14 trillion gdp, as if it's an easy to achieve milestone.

I have no fears that china will outpace the US, for a number of reasons.

ryanlchan• 16 years ago

Perhaps not, but it certainly says something about the fragility of the US monopole mentality. Even if they get to just half of the US GDP, it would be a major coup for China.

ovi256• 16 years ago

>Even if they get to just half of the US GDP

They almost did, $1.33 trillions is quarterly GDP, they need 20% more. They'll get that in a few years.

Resource exhaustion will become a soft limit pretty fast. I don't believe in Malthusian hard limits, but extraction and distribution systems may grow more slowly than demand even without hard resource limits.

borisk2• 16 years ago

$1.33 trillion is China quarter GDP, $14 trillion is US yearly GDP. And the second includes many trillions of financial "product".

http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=ny_gdp_mk...

sqrt17• 16 years ago

The EU has $16 trillion yearly GDP. Wouldn't that make China #3? (The Eurozone alone has ~$10 trillion yearly).

Don't come with the argument of, "oh they have all different governments and all different languages". State governments in the US hold a great fraction of legislative power (to the point where you're not a US lawyer, but a WA, TX or CL lawyer), and provinces in China have local languages (yes, languages - there's a point to using an ideographic writing system because you can use it for languages other than Mandarin) and not everyone speaks Mandarin.

keyle• 16 years ago

Well, well, this reminded me why they speak Chinese in Firefly.

WildUtah• 16 years ago

But it doesn't explain why there are no actual Chinese people on Firefly.

This does explain it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNmzegQUtFA

vorg2• 16 years ago

But bet it doesn't explain why you can't access that website and video from within China's borders!!!

nopassrecover2• 16 years ago

I find it pretty amazing that Japan was second for so long given the country's relatively small size and its 19th and 20th century history.

fgf2• 16 years ago

I don't.. It's population is as big as russias and bigger than any other nation with a comparable average national IQ (besides the US) and some kind of capitalism. I can't think of a single example of this combination not leading to convergence with the highest gdp capita countries.

nopassrecover2• 16 years ago

I guess this is the key. Still the nation went from a level of pre-industrialization and through the devastation of the second world war to be the second largest economy in te world. If I understand correctly the economy has been relatively stagnant for sometime too and has still held its position.

artpop• 16 years ago

This and discovering water on Mars are my two all time déjà vu news articles.

known2• 16 years ago

I think management team and shareholders should also go and live in China if they're sending jobs there.

known2• 16 years ago

And the weird thing is China ranks 89 and Pakistan 85 in http://www.doingbusiness.org/economyrankings/

uuoc• 16 years ago

Please do not post links to the NYTimes paywall.

wslh• 16 years ago

It's interesting to follow China ranking not just in the GDP but in PPP (GDP per capita) and other indicators.There are 1.3billion people there and they are currently cheap. In the PPP they have a lot of room to grow.

Beyond typical economic indicators it's interesting to analyze what are their current asymptotes limiting China (economically) in the future: creativity? democracy? social unrest? bureaucracy?

China Passes Japan as Second-Largest Economy

Related Stories