[anon8418]

> Nevertheless, most institutions that have existed through human history no longer exist.

Interesting that you say that. I believe the China is the longest surviving political entity. It's been around for two thousand years...

>There's no realistic world where China rises smoothly with no setbacks along the way. It's all but mathematically impossible by the nature of complex systems. It is reasonable to be concerned that their rise up to this point has also been unrealistically smooth. Communism has a track record of producing this apparent growth curve, after all.

Very true. My point is simply that growth is now in Asia. This is merely a bump in the road. The economic tide has changed in favor of the east. As an American its sad to state this, but its the truth.

Just look at tech. China has caught up in many many ways and starting to out innovate even the US. And they're just getting started.

[jerf]

"I believe the China is the longest surviving political entity."

By my standards, what we today call China dates to the 1949 Communist revolution. For China to be able to claim continuity, the other side would have had to have won. "Polities located vaguely in the Chinese landmass area" is not an institution.

"China has caught up in many many ways and starting to out innovate even the US. And they're just getting started."

I'm not seeing a lot of evidence of innovation. What I see is a Communist country doing what Communist countries do, living off of the innovation of others while pouring a lot of effort into PR that confuses credulous Westerners who really want to believe. I believe the Chinese people are capable of innovating, but until they structure their society differently, it isn't going to happen. It is an interesting question as to whether the Chinese people could tolerate and/or adjust to a truly high-innovation culture, but that's a PhD-thesis-sized topic.

[codyb]

Correct me if I'm wrong, and not to downplay China's incredible advances in the last few decades or so but hasn't a lot of China's "tech advancement" been copying, sending their citizens abroad to learn and hoping they come back, and in many instances down right espionage?

To be fair, whenever I try to learn something new, I generally have to do a decent amount of "copying" in a sense to get started before I can improve and make my own contributions to whatever it is that I'm doing and learning so I suppose that's to be expected and is even a sensical approach at a societal level. Why invent a touch screen when several implementations exist? Reverse engineer or find research papers and build the same one. From there you can have the experience to tweak and make your own contributions to the touch screen world, etc, etc, etc ad nauseum until you're making contributions all over the place.

[meagain20000]

Don't worry, Americans will make sure to get a piece of the pie. Either that or we will find a way to screw the country unti they will let us have a piece of the pie.