I read an informative and fascinating post by John Ross at Key Trends in the World Economy comparing how China and the US handled the 2008 global financial crises.
Ross has an impressive resume and knows what he is talking about.
It appears that Ross was one of the few voices that predicted China would recover faster than the US.
Most conservative Western economists kept predicting the US would recover faster than China. As it turned out, this was a wishful fantasy.
Three years later, the results show that Ross was correct. Between 2008 to 2010, China’s GDP grew more than 30% while US results were dismal.
While Ross provides much graphic evidence to support why this happened, it is his conclusion that sums up America’s failure to compete and grow its GDP that points out possible flaws in Western economic freewheeling theories that base too much trust in the private sector with little government control.
Ross says that the strengthening of political trends in the US led by such as the ‘Tea Party’ and the consolidation of right-wing Republican control of the House of Representatives may mean the US economy will continue to be hobbled in comparison to China’s GDP growth.
Ross feels that only if the US were to turn to a program of direct state intervention to boost new investment would the US benefit, which is what happened in China.
Instead of learning from the past, stubborn US conservatives appear to be repeating the same mistakes that caused the 2008 global financial crises.
Learn more at Building Things and Going Places
______________
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
iLook China 
Yeah, but we can’t do what China does. That’s socialism! *sarcasm*
True, “socialism” is an evil word to the Tea Party, American capitalists, evangelical Christians, neo-conservatives and nation builders.
But China is not a pure socialist state. China is mixing capitalism with socialism. Will it continue to work?
I think it’s more like they’re mixing corporatism with socialism.
Unless they start working towards a more equitable distribution of wealth, their success will be short lived.
I agree, but the US is about 100% corporatism with a battle raging on the right to destroy and sink any socialism that exists in the US no matter how long it takes until the US has returned to the era of Corporate Barons and serfs.
The US started out as a republic, and then became a democracy in the early 20th century. From there, special interests (political and corporate) influenced the mob the Founding Fathers warned us of and subverted the democracy so today it is controlled by global conglomerates through bribes and highly paid lobbyists and the “real” Western conservative media machine. There are now about six major media empires in the US—mostly foreign owned. I believe only one is owned by an American.
For example, Murdock’s NewsCorp and his FOX network pushes the agenda of neoconservatives, which has been influenced by Nietzschean superman philosophy.
The pressure on China to become a democracy is so these same interests can gain control of the media in China. As long as China’s centeral government controls the media, global media corporations cannot control what the people in China hear and see.
As for China working toward a more equitable distribution of the wealth, we will have to wait and see while in the US the gap between the wealthy and the poor grows wider daily.