How the Western economies should effectively respond to the Chinese economic powerhouse

Chinese wall (Photo credit: rvw)

Below is a response from John Gelmini to yesterday’s re-blog of an Economist article entitled:

Americans can stop worrying about China’s plans to take over their country – Schumpeter: The Economist

I accept the broad thrust of John Gemini’s response below, especially that the Western economies need to seriously raise their game in the following key areas:

Improving export competitiveness and massively raising export levels; and
Dealing effectively with the large number of unproductive people resulting from ineffective austerity and social policies.

How the Western economies respond to the above challenges needs to be addressed should receive priority attention by the West’s policy-makers, especially UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the two US Presidential candidates, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

What do you think? Do you agree or disagree with John Gelmini’s viewpoint? Why don’t you share your view by posting a comment below?

RESPONSE FROM JOHN GELMINI

Mitt Romney (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The phrase “The meek shall inherit the earth” actually means, in old Hebrew, the MANY shall inherit the earth.

At the moment, the Chinese have very few global brands which translate into Western markets but it will not stay that way as many more Chinese are studying at western universities and are soon to start a programme of living with Western families with the first tranche going to the Northeast of England, probably Jesmond, a genteel part of Newcastle, courtesy of the local authority.

This is to be followed by other tranches in other Western countries to enable the students to learn the cultures and eventually thought processes of their Western hosts.

What the Americans and we need to worry about is the fact that they are “Swarming Out” and creating businesses in the West and that their Sovereign Wealth Funds, either directly or indirectly, are buying up land and strategic businesses such as ports, utilities, mining companies and land which produces food at unprecedented speed.

Secondly, their productivity is rising and they work much harder than we do rendering us uncompetitive and unable to pay for public services because we have too few exports and too many useless and unproductive people.

If we continue to outsource, rather than train and develop our own people, we will end up with a huge and feral underclass even bigger than the one we have now, and America will become “hollowed out” economically along with Europe and ourselves.

As this happens, China will have more money for military spending and if provoked, will be able to retaliate with impunity whereas what the world needs is a balance of power.

At the moment, they also hold huge amounts of US debt and effectively control much of the Far East beyond their own borders as well as most of the wealth of Africa.

In every field of endeavour, ranging from athletics to business, to space exploration to winning the outsourcing crown from India, who hold 60% of the global marketplace, the Chinese mean to be first.

Only Olympic Gold medal winners get a message of congratulation from the Chinese Government and as our population thinks about yet another holiday they work, plan, produce and out-think us.

The UK Government and the Americans thought it would take China 20 years to catch up technologically, yet they did it in 4 and built the largest airforce in the world.

What we should be doing is raising our game, improving our education system and sitting down with them to explore where our creativity and their industry can be fused for mutual benefit as happens with the i-Pod and other Apple products and the Trevor Baylis wind up radio rather than our present approach of megaphone diplomacy and the racist rantings of an American swimming coach against a 16-year-old Chinese swimmer.