China's+Impact+On+World+History+in+the+Next+50+Years+BSAZOV

Chinese Impact On World History in the Next 50 Years
Economic reforms have employed tens of millions in new industries, transformed villages to large cities in less than a single generation, attracted enormous inflows of foreign investment, conquered global markets in many industrial categories and elicited worldwide admiration of Chinese economic progress. But they have also been responsible for one of the world’s fastest increases of income inequality (Khan and Riskin 2001). They have brought poverty and marginalization and created a massive urban underclass of destitute migrants and unemployed city workers numbering the tens of millions (Solinger 2004) even as they created an elite enjoying obscene levels of private consumption and striving to maintain the marriage of convenience between the unchecked power of the ruling party and illicit wealth (Pei 2006; 2006a).


 * By 2025 the affluent Western nations will add some 25 million people to their 2005 total of 700 million. China will add –- according to the medium variant of the latest United Nations forecast (United Nations 2004) – about 125 million to its 2005 total of about 1,316 million. **

In order to eliminate this deficit, to produce adequate food for the additional 125 million people, and to further improve the quality of overall nutrition, China will have to expand its food output by at least 20% by 2025. This will require an incremental food supply roughly equivalent to the total current food consumption in Brazil -- yet food production will have to come from a steadily diminishing area of farmland.

In 2000 China’s nationwide mean per capita freshwater availability was about 2,000 m3/year, and around 2030 (when China’s population peaks at close to 1,450 million) this will fall to less than 1,800 m3/capita (in the northern provinces barely half of that). Massive (and costly, in both economic and environmental terms) South-North water transfer from the Yangzi to the Huanghe basin will not provide a lasting solution. The necessity to satisfy the rising urban demand and to secure water for growing industries (above all for expanding electricity generation) means that the North's already overused resources will be, even with the transfer, under more pressure during the next two decades. In addition, China is already the world’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and its most appealing nonfossil alternative has its own environmental problems: accelerated development of hydropower –- exemplified by the highly controversial Sanxia megaproject –- has already caused extensive flooding of high-yielding farmland, mass population resettlements, and rapid reservoir silting (due to deforestation and slopeland cultivation).

The most likely outcome by 2050 is a multipolar world of a growing number of (mostly nuclear) powers including USA, European Union, Russia, China, Japan, India, Brazil, Pakistan and Iran. By the mid-century people may yet recall longingly the time when the two superpowers, U.S. and China, worked their great balancing act.

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Title, Author &. "JapanFocus."JapanFocus. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Oct. 2010. .