Agreed. In China, the government controls the flow of money. Sadly, there's a saying among us Chinese netizens: "China is now powerful/rich enough, that no one can actually save us from it."
China is a giant corporation-like kleptocracy, the product of which is the labour of Chinese people. Now that the population that output cheap labour wanes as the demographic data deteriorates. Situations will change.
Unlikely. Even now China has a surplus of 300 to 400 million people that work as subsistence farmers. There's nothing else for them to do. China's manufacturing is no longer expanding meaningfully. They have a truly massive supply of inexpensive labor still accordingly; however those people working as impoverished farmers have nowhere to go, and are held in place by the government, with no rights to property ownership of the farming land (which is also why China's farming productivity is so horrendous, it's intentional).
They have hundreds of millions of people living on less than $5 per day still. It's one of the greatest supplies of available cheap labor on the planet, and it's not disappearing any time soon.
Now that China has built up immense wealth domestically (along with the productivity, economic capability and infrastructure linked to that step-up), which is very tightly contained within its borders by law, the Communist Party's position is cemented. They have unlimited reach within their borders, they can use any of their industrial might for anything they want at any time, and they can seize any assets they want to at any time. That wealth isn't going away, and their ability to use/abuse it at will is also not going away. Their eventual population decline will do nothing more than than raise the median standard of living.
Perhaps one of the more accurate analysis of China, but I disagree with Communist party's position is cemented. Just like the US is having a Coasts vs Hinterland clash, China is having that clash on steroids. The whole silk road program is basically trying to move some of the coastal wealth to interior to placate the populations etc. Their wealth is certainly not going away, but it will contained in Coastal, added to that a trade war with USA is brewing and a real war in Korean peninsula, will certainly shock their system.
Exactly, everyone who says China is doomed due to demographics overlooks the huge pool of under-utilized labor. People are looking at percentages when they should be looking at raw numbers.
With a shrinking demography, one problem is that the size of pool of elite is also shrinking. Physics professors in top universities of China has complained on social media that the younger generation lacked both dedication and intuition, that he had to lower the bar for his final exam to extremely easy.
China has a bench of hundreds of millions of people they can call on. With their track record, I don't think Chinese leadership needs to take advice on how to develop a country from anyone.
You really can't imagine how hard working were the older generation of China. It was even kinda brutal from young people's points now. Srsly, an Asian's "lazy" (remember an A- is a F there)?
Pretty sure the "extremely easy" exam will fail 90% of the class if moved to US
I can't believe there are so many people starting to use Pascal/Delphi around 14.
I started at that age too. It was around 2002. I was told that a good way to start on computers was to attend in local IOI competitions, and that's what I did.
During the competitions, our team chose Pascal for its clarity. The official IDE they gave us was Turbo Pascal, which was really a decent environment (though I hardly realized this until I tried out other dev tools later). The friendliness in Pascal/Delphi towards developers can really date back to those days, and is laying deep in the language's genes.
Unfortunately, the previous "graphical" programs I wrote, before I got a hold on Pascal, was some simple Logo drawing dots and lines. And I had a terribly wrong impression that building GUIs are boring. So I skipped the chance of digging into the Delphi world, until I was in college. But then the Pascal/Delphi ecosystem was already decaying. I still feel bad for missing the golden era.
