As other comments have noted, this isn't just a national story. China has a large scale plan to push recent low skill migrants away from big cities toward medium sized cities (medium sized for China anyway) in an effort to help boost consumption. China also faces an enormous housing glut that is at least partially powered by middle and upper class folks using real estate as way to save and invest for retirement. Anyone under the age of 35 and/or without a family history of home ownership in a major American city can tell you that this sounds very familiar.
And though the economies in both the US and China are purportedly chugging along, wealth inequality seems to be pulling at the seams everywhere, dragging on growth and exaggerating the tensions between established urban families and those who serve them. How the differences in scale, complexity, and political culture will shape the political responses... well, I'd be inclined to put my money on Xi before the Orange one.
That said, the US will get to juice those spend-happy retiring baby boomers who will be spending their kids inheritance for the next couple of decades, and if the grad students powering the biotech, materials, and data improvements don't jump ship, there's a chance the west could actually keep pace. But the dynamics of market driven social and mass media don't inspire so much confidence of late.
The largest political challenge in both countries may be in reconciling the demands of the moralising progressive youth and the reactionary would-be capitalists, the entrenched liberal urban bureaucracies and the knee-jerk conservative know-bettering from the peanut gallery. While the Chinese impulse for social order will enjoy the advantages of increasing surveillance and sheer scale, the west will be waiting on the decaying but stubbornly persistent tradition of liberal education to surface some y'know, actual leadership.
And though the economies in both the US and China are purportedly chugging along, wealth inequality seems to be pulling at the seams everywhere, dragging on growth and exaggerating the tensions between established urban families and those who serve them. How the differences in scale, complexity, and political culture will shape the political responses... well, I'd be inclined to put my money on Xi before the Orange one.
That said, the US will get to juice those spend-happy retiring baby boomers who will be spending their kids inheritance for the next couple of decades, and if the grad students powering the biotech, materials, and data improvements don't jump ship, there's a chance the west could actually keep pace. But the dynamics of market driven social and mass media don't inspire so much confidence of late.
The largest political challenge in both countries may be in reconciling the demands of the moralising progressive youth and the reactionary would-be capitalists, the entrenched liberal urban bureaucracies and the knee-jerk conservative know-bettering from the peanut gallery. While the Chinese impulse for social order will enjoy the advantages of increasing surveillance and sheer scale, the west will be waiting on the decaying but stubbornly persistent tradition of liberal education to surface some y'know, actual leadership.