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this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
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Sorry, I'm just speaking colloquially. I just mean the GDP has been very high for a long time now.
My common reading is that GDP is an indicator of growth. China is currently developing, so it's GDP is going to be higher. However, at some point they will be considered developed and there will be less reason to grow and it will be more difficult to grow. So the GDP will level off. This has been the trend in capitalist countries.
Whether or not this will apply to the Chinese economy, I don't know. But I believe this is the framework that people are using when they make this argument.
'Developed' by capitalist standards. They all stopped and went backwards from about the 1970s. Since then, they started measuring growth by counting nothing as something or counting some things twice. Not to mention that capitalism is crisis.
Liberal/welfare democracies didn't stop growing because there was no room to grow. They stopped growing because the workers stopped organising and demanding infrastructure and housing, etc. They could've kept on growing by developing rural areas, hospitals, schools, public transport, etc. Instead, they decided to tarmac over everything and let all the bridges fall into the water.
Communists will blow right past those concepts of development and growth. Already, China is living in a different century. We're going to need a concept of 'post-development' to make sense of what comes next (where we will likely see development without the capitalist notion of infinite growth).
I think that wouldn't be needed for a long time yet, there is still a lot of room for even current development in China, later would come improvement, modernisation and developing other countries etc. I don't think, barring some worldwide catastrophe, that development will ever reach the levels of what libs always claim about socialism, stagnation. Or even what utopian socialists say about just stopping.
Gotta partially disagree with you on this one. After WWII, imperialists got a free pass to expand throughout most of the world. All the way up through the fall of the USSR, the US was privatizing and gutting the public sectors of their client states and the eastern block.
However, with the neoliberal consensus overtaking most of the world, the US didn't have any more big markets to crack open, which is why they had to turn their sights on gutting their own public sectors which they had free access to. Foucault's boomerang and such