You guys accredit waaayyyy too much forward planning to the Chinese.
Their children, let alone their grandchildren, will struggle to live in the environmental disaster they are busy inflicting upon themselves in the eastern factory cities where 90% of them live. If they do, they'll probably all be born with two heads, four arms, spend their lives on asthma nebulizers, and have a life expectancy of about 20 years
Their population is aging super fast and the demographic
-up that is the one-child-per-family policy is already causing the working age population to be in decline by tens of millions per year.
Not enough workers to go round = massive increase in the wages they have to pay to get the staff = massive reduction in appeal to the western companies that used to build factories there = all the new investment is going to Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.
They've had a few good decades, so did the Japanese in the '50s '60s and '70s, everyone was saying the same thing about them then, they've been going pretty much nowhere on that treadmill for the last 20 years now and seem to have no real plan to get their growth going again.
The Chinese emperors all thought they had thousand-year-plans to keep their respective family dynasties in power as well, but the cultural revolution kind of put paid to that, and the social injustices of modern day China are certainly just as great if not greater than they were under the emperors. The corruption is unbelieveable. If you lot really think the communist party elite are sitting up there and benevolently planning a better China for the benefit of everyone, as opposed to thinking about how they can ensure perpetual wealth and power for their own grandchildren and the select few, then I say you're deluded. I can't see any way the situation will change in the foreseeable future, but if we are talking about lifetimes and generations and people's grandchildren, then I can say with absolute confidence that there's only one way these things tend to end, and it's with violence. Normally accompanied by economic collapse for a good few years afterwards.
I'm not saying the Chinese aren't absolute masters of the art of taking money off gullible westerners, and I'm not saying Qantas wouldn't get chewed up and spat out, it probably would. But I absolutely reckon that what we're seeing is not the result of some grand thousand-year-plan to screw the West, it's more like a bunch of gangsters who grabbed power at the right time, and they are all hell bent on making money while the sun shines and damn the consequences to their own people and their own country.