of their recent achievements is only a part of the picture. A wider view makes clear that China has many also-yuuge, entrenched problems, which are mostly far larger and less solvable than ours.
Right now people are talking a lot about China's overwhelming debt, slowing economy and currency problems, but how about little clues to bigger underlying realities -- like the fact that China has 20% of the world's population (which is aging big time and another yuuge economic problem) but only 7% of its fresh water? Much of that water is as unsafe to drink as city air is to breathe because of rapid industrialization.
Of course the centralized government has been key to China's miracles. But distrust of increasing totalitarianism is also the reason many among the billion people all over that giant nation are becoming newly fearful. Express-train growth and change have destabilized whole regions and threatened obliteration of whole cultures, resulting in widespread unrest and rebellion. Civil disturbances are common. Wealthier people are transferring vast amounts of China's wealth overseas for safekeeping.
Rural millions forced by destitution to migrate to (unaffordable) cities are typically despised due to not just the enormous cultural and education differences but the burdens they pose. City women typically won't have anything to do with a couple hundred million impoverished young migrant men...a ticking time bomb. Here they elected Trump. There, they are almost as many as the entire U.S. population and, unlike the hundreds of millions of increasingly impoverished people left behind in increasingly unsustainable rural areas, are concentrated in cities.
And as debt balloons they've apparently overbuilt about as many "ghost" cities as they are going to to keep idle hours filled and money flowing to live on.
Btw, if we were China, sure we'd want out from under the power of the U.S., but how'd we like to have hyperaggressive Russia and crazy NK as replacement "BFFs"? We're not talking the Tres Amigos of the U.S., Canada and Mexico here.
On and on and on and on.
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