War Lord said:
They could be right about India always being strong, but that's because it's now a fairly free market economy with not as much government interference than it used to have. But I don't believe that will be the case with China.
You have to keep in mind that many of these same authors also predicted that the USSR would last forever and eventually bury the US or that Japan would overtake the US and become the largest economy in the world. USSR is gone and Japan is only starting to come out of a 15 year old recession.
I can't speak about India, but that article about China indicates that there's quite a bit of rot underneath the varnish.
Still
From "The Global Class War"
THE CHINA PRICE
The emergence of China, with its virtually unlimited supply of cheap labor and a government that is dedicated to keeping it that way is a challenge that troubles all but the most ideologically blinded free market fundamentalists. Between 1980 and 2004, China's per capita GDP rose 8.2% The US in the 19th and 20th centuries was 1.5%. In a decade China will surpass the US as the worlds largest economy.
China's captialism is notlike the US's. Like Japan, its market operates in the context of state planning, exported growth, and little pretense of a seperation between big business and government. But, the size of China's labor and potential consumer market and the ability of its government to suppress labor cost give the Chinese elite a much more powerful ecnomic weapon than the Japanese.
China is so large that it can grow along a wide range of industries, from apparel to plastic moldings and computer hardware. It is now even moving up to silicon chips and data communications switching systems. China is graduating 350,000 engineers a year who are willing to work 12 hours 7 days a week for a fraction of what they would cost in the US.
Among others, Hewlett-Packard, Verizon, Intel, and Microsoft have opened labs there. US suppliers making larger and better products are being told they have to match the "China Price".
A manager for one US furniture manufacturer showed a journalist a dresser that the Chinese were wholeselling in the US for $105, which was below the world price for the wood it was made of. Factories in China dwarf anything in the US, US productivity rose 600% and still cannot compete. When Clinton and the republicians promoted China's entry into the WTO they assured us that their transnational clients were intrested in the consumers, not the workers.
The US sold $35 billion to China. It bought $197 billion.
It's not China that's swamping the world's markets. It's Chinese labor combined with the captial of the first world transnationals who approved China into the WTO, and therefor the US market, with no protection against Chinese labor.
