More than likely the Nation State will continue on it's path. In roads have already been setup to turn on the entire African Continent into the next PRODUCTIVE CONSUMER MARKET. Mining rights, internent services, power infrastructure and etc. waiting to see progress in unified African Currency or digital. The Continental has fallen behind. Massmart is only a retail foothold. Akuma Aku
Almost 10 yrs later to my post in this thread ... The Chinese have gotten even better and dominant at their game ..huh?
- mediatic attacks against companies like Huawei, ByteDance, Tencent appear to be synchronized with other countries (this becomes apparent studying timelines), - imports from China (coronavirus non-withstanding) have suffered, more importantly production is more and more moved elsewhere, - the covid is sometimes used to try and galvanize defiance towards China. If we combine those actions with the housing prices bubble (some people have been saying it's a bubble for 20 years, meanwhile Shanghai has become as expensive as New York, The price-to-rent ratio is 81 for Shanghai). So more than ever it is worth asking will China fall behind, indeed. The ghost of Japan comes to mind. But I think more likely to see minor averted crises, but China taking the lead on more and more fields, simply because it has the budget that others don't.
I guess you guys on this forum didn’t go out much. I have been doing business with them since Asia financial crisis in 1997. The circumstances were changing but their ambitions are not. Think about People’s Republic is another dynasty, they are recovering and stabilizing from the fall of last dynasty Qing. The average unified dynasty lasts about 250-300 years, challenges aside, PRC is still young by historical standard. We are dealing with a 4000 years old civilization, falling behind argument is as convincing as inflation is transitory, compared with whom?