Comment by bigyabai
2 days ago
They're not mutually exclusive. Lots of terrible and mismanaged governments rely on genius short-term economic exploitation, like Syria, Iran, India, Korea, etc.
What would be incredible is China sticking the landing to a third-sector economy. Plenty of countries have industrialized over the past century, only a handful became true service economies.
You can only become a service economy by outsourcing everything to another country. It's not a sustainable model and it's related to imperialism.
China's not afraid of a little imperialism, and they'd be wise to embrace more globalism in exchange for better standards of living. If America falls and China refuses to pivot to the service sector, then they'll slide back into only being valued for cheap labor. They have to strengthen their internal financial sector or else someone else will.