The damage caused by Donald Trump to the United States’ reputation is creating opportunities for China, particularly with regards to Taiwan, according to a retired senior colonel from China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
Speaking to the Guardian in Beijing, Zhou Bo said that Trump was damaging the US’s reputation “more than all of his predecessors combined”.
“By the end of his second term, I believe America’s global image will simply become more tarnished, its international standing will just go down further,” Zhou said. The people of Taiwan “know that America is going down”, which “might affect their mentality” with regards to China.
The farther term limits are in the past the harder it will be.
I’d say it’s quite the opposite. Based on conversations with people who grew up in the one-child system and considering that one of the key elements of raising quality of life was reduction of births and spending more resources on these fewer kids, that are often traditionally raised by grandparents in their early years while parents are being economically productive. So people would have to compromise their present comfort to some extent to boost births. I’ve not seen a single nation in the world that succeeded in persistently raising births through pronatalist policy.
I’m not saying that this will be China’s end, but realistically they have to either lower quality of life for the populace and/or really switch away from cheap manual labor as their primary model towards more automation etc.
I totally agree with this part.
I’m not convinced that shrinking population is at all an issue for a developed country that can replace workers with technology. China is already one if the most automated countries in the world and currently running the biggest infrastructure investments ever. I think if anyone can handle population reduction it’s probably China.