Why China will never be a superpower

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Not only that but China is also a sick population thanks to pollution.

BEIJING — Outdoor air pollution contributed to 1.2 million premature deaths in China in 2010, nearly 40 percent of the global total, according to a new summary of data from a scientific study on leading causes of death worldwide.

Figured another way, the researchers said, China’s toll from pollution was the loss of 25 million healthy years of life from the population.

The data on which the analysis is based was first presented in the ambitious 2010 Global Burden of Disease Study, which was published in December in The Lancet, a British medical journal. The authors decided to break out numbers for specific countries and present the findings at international conferences. The China statistics were offered at a forum in Beijing on Sunday.

“We have been rolling out the India- and China-specific numbers, as they speak more directly to national leaders than regional numbers,” said Robert O’Keefe, the vice president of the Health Effects Institute, a research organization that is helping to present the study. The organization is partly financed by the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the global motor vehicle industry.

What the researchers called “ambient particulate matter pollution” was the fourth-leading risk factor for deaths in China in 2010, behind dietary risks, high blood pressure and smoking. Air pollution ranked seventh on the worldwide list of risk factors, contributing to 3.2 million deaths in 2010.

By comparison with China, India, which also has densely populated cities grappling with similar levels of pollution, had 620,000 premature deaths in 2010 because of outdoor air pollution, the study found. That was deemed to be the sixth most common killer in South Asia.

The study was led by an institute at the University of Washington and several partner universities and institutions, including the World Health Organization.

Calculations of premature deaths because of outdoor air pollution are politically threatening in the eyes of some Chinese officials. According to news reports, Chinese officials cut out sections of a 2007 report called “Cost of Pollution in China” that discussed premature deaths. The report’s authors had concluded that 350,000 to 400,000 people die prematurely in China each year because of outdoor air pollution. The study was done by the World Bank in cooperation with the Chinese State Environmental Protection Administration, the precursor to the Ministry of Environmental Protection.

There have been other estimates of premature deaths because of air pollution. In 2011, the World Health Organization estimated that there were 1.3 million premature deaths in cities worldwide because of outdoor air pollution.

Last month, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, based in Paris, warned that “urban air pollution is set to become the top environmental cause of mortality worldwide by 2050, ahead of dirty water and lack of sanitation.” It estimated that up to 3.6 million people could end up dying prematurely from air pollution each year, mostly in China and India.

There has been growing outrage in Chinese cities over what many say are untenable levels of air pollution. Cities across the north hit record levels in January, and official Chinese newspapers ran front-page articles on the surge — what some foreigners call the “airpocalypse” — despite earlier limits on such discussion by propaganda officials.

A study released on Thursday said the growth rate of disclosure of pollution information in 113 Chinese cities had slowed. The groups doing the study, the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, based in Beijing, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, based in Washington, said that “faced with the current situation of severe air, water and soil pollution, we must make changes to pollution source information disclosure so that information is no longer patchy, out of date and difficult to obtain.”

Chinese officials have made some progress in disclosing crucial air pollution statistics. Official news reports have said 74 cities are now required to release data on levels of particulate matter 2.5 micrometers in diameter or smaller, which penetrate the body’s tissues most deeply. For years, Chinese officials had been collecting the data but refusing to release it, until they came under pressure from Chinese who saw that the United States Embassy in Beijing was measuring the levels hourly and posting the data in a Twitter feed, @BeijingAir.

Last week, an official Chinese news report said the cost of environmental degradation in China was about $230 billion in 2010, or 3.5 percent of the gross domestic product. The estimate, said to be partial, came from a research institute under the Ministry of Environmental Protection, and was three times the amount in 2004, in local currency terms. It was unclear to what extent those numbers took into account the costs of health care and premature deaths because of pollution.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/world/asia/air-pollution-linked-to-1-2-million-deaths-in-china.html?_r=0

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No flue gas cleaning on many big power plants then!India has just been cracking down on Greenpeace for advertising their pollution problems.Hopw the UK are not sending overseas aid to India!

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Um... Yes?

Anywho. What a lot of chicom supporters that live in the west(usually young chinese) fail to realize is that what is happening in china is unsustainable. They also fail to realize is that the west is using the chinese people for slave labor. The chinese that are getting rich are party members and their allies. Once the west has tired of chinese slave labor they are only going to go somewhere else.

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You might be right but there are several hundred billionaires and thousands of millionaires in China with numbers increasing year on year. So where will the West move their production to?

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Vietnam or Africa. Vietnam hates china and is being really friendly with the US and wants a "friend" relationship with us. There's a lot of other 3rd world
countries the west can exploit and those countries leaders would be happy to have wester companies come in.

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There is already some production in those areas and other parts of the East but little investment. The decisions will be taken by the multinationals not Governments at the end of the day. If they believe they can obtain the skills, resources, investment support and stability they need they will move into other regions, if not they won't.

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You might be right but there are several hundred billionaires and thousands of millionaires in China with numbers increasing year on year. So where will the West move their production to?

when china starts to implode all those rich chinese will be coming to the US or Europe. China is living on borrowed time.

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when china starts to implode all those rich chinese will be coming to the US or Europe. China is living on borrowed time.

The problem is, much of the West is living on Chinese borrowed money.

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Hi All,
While I can see from the points above raised may make it difficult for Chinas economy I still think they are a super power they have the military might to back it up and are not afraid to use it as with their land reclamation at the moment. I am sure they would not willingly just as Russia would willingly start a war but never the less we should never under estimate their reach in the Asia/Pacific region they have already cocked a snoop to the US and are always seeing off any US recognisance that happens to wander around any disputed area, they are always upgrading the technical ability along with their weapons unless just as Russia is doing at the moment rattling the sabre because it looks good on the tv screens ? Do not be sure they will not be a super power they look well on the way to me but hey! what do I know it's just my opinion....;)

Geoff.

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Hi All,
While I can see from the points above raised may make it difficult for Chinas economy I still think they are a super power they have the military might to back it up and are not afraid to use it as with their land reclamation at the moment. I am sure they would not willingly just as Russia would willingly start a war but never the less we should never under estimate their reach in the Asia/Pacific region they have already cocked a snoop to the US and are always seeing off any US recognisance that happens to wander around any disputed area, they are always upgrading the technical ability along with their weapons unless just as Russia is doing at the moment rattling the sabre because it looks good on the tv screens ? Do not be sure they will not be a super power they look well on the way to me but hey! what do I know it's just my opinion....;)

Geoff.

Nothing wrong with having an opinion. But think of it this way... china is still having trouble making a reliable fighter engine. There so called "indigenous" engine is still a copy
of the russian one. Their Flankers are a russian copy which are notoriously known for being hanger queens, can you imagine a copy of a hangar queen?

Their military tech is nowhere near the US and any shooting conflict with china over the SCS is going to turn into a turkey shoot. china hasn't been at war since their conflict with Vietnam and that war was a draw. The question of the US is, how far do they go when it comes to hurting china. US will not want to get in a situation where it is just decimating china's navy and air force to the point the PLA threatens the use of nukes. You can't back down when you are threaten with nukes or everyone with nukes will do
the same. So the US will have to at some point stop the conflict before it gets to that threat.

This is DOD's fantasy. This is what they went to Naval and Air Force academy. To defend the nation and allies against a nation with a big and sorta"modern" military.
They are tired of sand and cave dwelling jihadis.

China is dying and the rest of the west knows it. That is why they have started to slowly replace china. I don't know if you've seen the movie Soylent Green? It is very likely that china can and will become like that movie. They are literally dying from pollution of our (west) making.

Even the desert is creeping east slowly swallowing Beijing.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/12/2012126123056457256.html

China will never be a superpower of any kind. Its navy is not even considered a blue water navy and it won't even last in a conflict with Nippons Navy.

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With that much land, that many people...China is and will remain a superpower. Even if their wealth is reduced, they're still powerful and large.

After all, who's going to stop them? Not the EU, Japan, Russia or the US? And fewer than 180 F-22s isn't enough to turn the tide if war does break out.
Obama sure doesn't want a war, deep inside he'd be happy to see the "imperialist Americans" taken down a notch or two in the world's eyes. Many Americans (liberals and conservatives) would be happy for the nation to quit being the world's policeman.
If the Pacific rim is threatened, let New Zealand defend itself with it's mighty air force of trainers and C-130s. Luckily, Japan and the good ol' Aussies still take defense seriously.
Don't worry, I'm sure China will still let Peter Jackson make his troll films....

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With that much land, that many people...China is and will remain a superpower. Even if their wealth is reduced, they're still powerful and large.

Just because you're large/big, it doesn't make you powerful. China is not a superpower it still depends on foreign weapons for its military. And what they can't buy they copy
which makes that weapon a downgraded weapon.

As for the land.... it's turning into a desert.
http://www.newsecuritybeat.org/2013/06/at-deserts-edge-glimpse-chinas-massive-desertification-challenge/

And "that many people" is what kills countries. You don't have an idea of cause an effect, huh?

After all, who's going to stop them? Not the EU, Japan, Russia or the US?

Um... yeah. We can basically end china tomorrow if we decided to close shop and go with the PC-16 for slave labor. That is all that china is to the west.
What if we decide not to pay our debt?

China to United States: Don’t Default, For Our Sake:
-One day after Republican House Speaker John Boehner promised to “stand and fight” over the budget, Chinese officials have pleaded with America’s deadlocked Congressmen to stand down. “The clock is ticking,” Chinese Vice Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao warned on Monday. “We ask that the United States earnestly takes steps to resolve in a timely way the political issues around the debt ceiling.”

And what if the clock runs out? Then China, the U.S.’s biggest creditor, will be left holding the bag. Its government holds $1.3 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds and a whopping $3.5 trillion in dollar-denominated assets. It has racked up these holdings through an export-oriented trade policy, by which China sells goods and services to the U.S. and gets dollars in return. China then plows those dollars into the world’s safest investment, the U.S. Treasury bond.

That suited everyone just fine until the Treasury began ringing the alarm bell about a possible default on October 17th. A default could wreak havoc on the value of China’s dollar-backed assets. A huge portion of China’s wealth depends on the U.S.’s ability to pay down its loans.

“Once this concept is subverted,” opined a columnist for China Business News, “It will undoubtedly cause a disaster and hit the global economy hard.” And as far as that columnist was concerned, the fallout would land squarely in his own backyard. “Who would be most impacted? The U.S. government’s largest overseas creditor, China.”

Ma Guangyuan, an economist in Beijing, echoed the sentiment that the battle in Washington really wasn’t about Washington. “The fight between the two parties in America won’t necessarily hurt them,” he said, holding out hope for a political breakthrough, with or without Congress. “I believe this time, America will increase the debt ceiling again,” he said. “If they don’t, they will have to figure out a way to break the contract. For example, they may print more currency.”

The larger concern for China, he pointed out, extended well beyond the current impasse to the U.S.’s long-term debt burden. “I never understand how they are going to pay it back,” he said. “I don’t think they can pay it back.” But with $1.3 trillion on the line, he argues that China must cling to its faith that the U.S. will eventually pay back its loans. “Every creditor believes that they can,” he said. “They believe that even more than Americans do, because they have no choice. If the creditors don’t believe America can pay them back, then the global economy would collapse.”

Only a cataclysmic event like a default could shake China’s self-preserving faith in the Treasury bond. “We hope that the U.S. can draw lessons from history,” said Chinese Vice Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao. Really, the world doesn’t have a choice.
http://world.time.com/2013/10/09/china-to-united-states-dont-default-for-our-sake/

Will we (US) hurt? Of course. But the US has the natural resources to get out of trouble. US dollar would still be the global currency. We already produce more
oil than russia and Saudi. That is real global power we (US) have. We can take down big countries without firing a shot. Look how bad russia's economy is
doing do to US punishing russia for Ukraine. And we're not even trying. If we decided to really hurt russia economically, it would be a disaster for putin.

And fewer than 180 F-22s isn't enough to turn the tide if war does break out.

What ever "war" the US has with china it is going to be Naval/Air. And a couple of squadrons of F-22s mix with F-15s with AESA and F-18Es with AESA creates the ultimate
SA that china doesn't even come close to. PLAAF will stop sending its fighters after many of them start getting shot down by ghost (F-22)

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Just because you're large/big, it doesn't make you powerful.
As for the land.... it's turning into a desert.
And "that many people" is what kills countries. You don't have an idea of cause an effect, huh?

Yes, I get cause & effect. :confused:
The people and land/food issue is what makes China dangerous.
Faced with those issues and a "west" that is asleep to them and many countries unwilling to spend much on defense (look at the number of countries where their armed farces are just token efforts, even in America the only thing keeping defense spending high are the recent wars, the current administration has put any effort to curb government spending solely on the back of the Defense Department while other bloated agencies still spend freely)...will lead China into a 1930s-Japan like quandary.

China is not some third world military wannabe like North Korea...it can (more or less) feed itself and it had a decent industrial base that's getting smarter/richer and more capable daily .
Luckily, unlike NK, its leaders aren't about to start something they can't finish.

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Yes, I get cause & effect. :confused:
The people and land/food issue is what makes China dangerous.

What? How does that make them dangerous? The majority of their population are peasants with a lot of them sick do to pollution. china's population is quickly
aging and they are running out of girls. I feel like you're not getting something here.

Faced with those issues and a "west" that is asleep to them and many countries unwilling to spend much on defense (look at the number of countries where their armed farces are just token efforts, even in America the only thing keeping defense spending high are the recent wars, the current administration has put any effort to curb government spending solely on the back of the Defense Department while other bloated agencies still spend freely)...will lead China into a 1930s-Japan like quandary.

Nippon only spends 1% of their GDP on defense and their Navy is second only to US. Nippon's navy can take on and defeat a chinese navy. Imagine if Japan gets spooked and
decides to spend 3% of their GDP on defense? Any conflict with china is highly likely going to be a naval/air conflict which china doesn't stand a chance.

China is not some third world military wannabe like North Korea...it can (more or less) feed itself and it had a decent industrial base that's getting smarter/richer and more capable daily .
Luckily, unlike NK, its leaders aren't about to start something they can't finish.

LOl. Could you at least do some research before you post a claim that can be easily shot down?
http://qz.com/140994/china-imports-4-of-the-worlds-grain-and-thats-still-not-enough/

China's industrial base is in part thanks to the west... which we can easily kill by not buying their products and going to other third world
countries to make our stuff. china has one need that it depends on to keep chugging along... foreign oil! In a conflict good luck trying to import it
when US naval forces block any tankers from reaching china. China soon is going to be the largest old age home. The countdown to its demise has already
started and the west is preparing for it.

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china has one need that it depends on to keep chugging along... foreign oil! In a conflict good luck trying to import it
when US naval forces block any tankers from reaching china. China soon is going to be the largest old age home. The countdown to its demise has already
started and the west is preparing for it.

I don't think you've studied 1930s Asian history....to put it simply, why Japan started its war of Asian aggression. Too many people, not enough food or oil.
As I said, that's when countries get dangerous.
And any country that large can cause trouble...especially to a western world that has been complacent for the past 70 years. With an army that large, they don't need high tech weapons to take over neighbors, just a ground army and a few Toyotas. :) Ask Tibet.

Because you haven't told us where you're from (and you general rudeness), I'm beginning to think you're Chinese and sent here to reassure us that your nation's is peace loving and too weak to cause any trouble. :)

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He's one of your lot John ! You can tell by his expertise with spelling, grammar and syntax.

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He's one of your lot John ! You can tell by his expertise with spelling, grammar and syntax.

I wont claim him. :)
I thought his comments read like English was his second/third language...besides I've never met an American who would call Japan "Nippon". He sounds like the Chinese roommate I had for a semester in university.

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I don't think you've studied 1930s Asian history....to put it simply, why Japan started its war of Asian aggression. Too many people, not enough food or oil.
As I said, that's when countries get dangerous.
And any country that large can cause trouble...especially to a western world that has been complacent for the past 70 years. With an army that large, they don't need high tech weapons to take over neighbors, just a ground army and a few Toyotas. :) Ask Tibet.

Because you haven't told us where you're from (and you general rudeness), I'm beginning to think you're Chinese and sent here to reassure us that your nation's is peace loving and too weak to cause any trouble. :)

Engrish is my second language. I was raised in Germany and my parents are Americans.

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He's one of your lot John ! You can tell by his expertise with spelling, grammar and syntax.

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Guilty to both of those !

Stick with the forum old chap. Your education will improve.

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Returning to the OP's postulation China already is. At least by this generally accepted definition:

" A superpower is a state with a dominant position in international relations and is characterised by its unparalleled ability to exert influence or project power on a global scale. This is done through the means of both military and economic strength, as well as diplomatic and soft power influence."

Whether or not it retains that position is a different question and one which be answered in the next two or three decades.