India has a bigger population but they haven't risen anywhere near the way China has.
China's rise was due to smart planning and investment in their people and infrastructure. The country went from peasant farmers to the manufacturing hub of the world in a generation. Now they're in the process of becoming a major hub of knowledge workers while keeping a strong manufacturing backbone.
And one thing I rarely see mentioned is that the Chinese government keeps its currency artificially devalued in order to sell their products cheaply and undercut competition. Looking at their economy purely on a GDP basis really underestimates how big their economy is. GDP by PPP is more accurate. If China ever decides to stop loosely pegging its currency and let the value naturally rise, their GDP will very likely swell, since GDP is measured in US dollars.
You completely disregarded the central thesis of the comment you responded to.
The one child policy means there are no people to do the manufacturing in China in the future. The population pyramid is inverted. You can't do manufacturing without lots and lots of people. Or at least you'll get out competed by your neighbours who have lots of labor.
India's birth rate is also massively dropping. In a few decades, India will reach their peak population.
China invested heavily in machinery and automation many decades ago. They'll be fairly fine.
I visited India a few months ago. Loved it. But I saw construction being done with donkeys hauling dirt and people shoveling the loads onto the donkey's cart with tiny hand shovels. Scaling up from that to the degree of manufacturing powerhouses like China have is not going to be easy.
China investing in machinery and automation means they are moving up the production chain into more expensive and more profitable manufacturing.
It also means they no longer do the cheap high volume manufacturing, which will go elsewhere where the cheap labor is.
This is how it goes. Manufacturing keeps migrating to cheap labor. China is running out of cheap labor and volume manufacturing will find it in East Asia and India and Africa instead, because these places will still have lots and lots of young people while those in China have aged out.
'India imports most of its energy'. So what's happened to the extremely abundant 'free energy' available from the sum in India. They have the expertise, they could make the funding available. What is missing in their thought processes or is there something wrong with the premise?
I am genuinely curious about what would happen if China allowed their currency (RMB/CNY) to float. The most obvious thing I can see that would put tremendous downward pressure on the currency would be capital flight from China to more politically predictable/safe places. Currently, normies are limited to 50K USD per year. (Of course, there is a large grey market to move more money.)
India's population pyramid is about where China's was in 2000. Their bulge of working age people is just barely hitting the workforce, so it's way too early to say what the outcome will be by 2045 when they've ridden the wave the way China did.
China's rise was due to smart planning and investment in their people and infrastructure. The country went from peasant farmers to the manufacturing hub of the world in a generation. Now they're in the process of becoming a major hub of knowledge workers while keeping a strong manufacturing backbone.
And one thing I rarely see mentioned is that the Chinese government keeps its currency artificially devalued in order to sell their products cheaply and undercut competition. Looking at their economy purely on a GDP basis really underestimates how big their economy is. GDP by PPP is more accurate. If China ever decides to stop loosely pegging its currency and let the value naturally rise, their GDP will very likely swell, since GDP is measured in US dollars.