China a rising giant or..

no they will fill up the palm tree islands with millionaires. loadsa disposable income

I don't agree about service economies by the way. It's not about servicing just your own economy. The film industry art music theatre could all make loadsamoney abroad, the city and banking of course, shipping, education, design.... you don't have to actually make something to make money

the arts aren't going to support a nations economy forks....

well you aren't going to sell many chinese guitars without the arts

fortunatly my company isn't propping up the british economy

fortunately my art isn't either

We hit a peak in the last century and we're never gonna get there again. We simply don't have enough land to compete with countries like China.

China could pretty much be left alone and survive on there own product. Britain relies upon alot of countries to supply us with what we need.

Like Joe said, the next 50 years will see China become the world super power. It's quite a scary thought that the world we know will be run by a country that isn't in the west. Who knows what will happen!

My Dad works in China and he's an engineer. So they're oviously drafting in Brits to help with there taking over the world.

china will never win they don't even have a keyboard for a computer, because they don't have an alphabet!!! they have some kind of predictive text type system which is so slow and inferior to our method, it will set them back thousands of years!!!

Is that true? haha. Id never thought about that. A Chinese keyboard would be canny confusing like

thank god were all right. I thought for a bit that China might take over. I hadn't counted on the keyboard problem.

Yeah they do, have you not seen james bond?? The chinese operative uses a red laptop with a keyboard!!

typing in chinese is beyond difficult:

http://www.slate.com/id/2136726/

read that windy, its a predictive text type keyboard as i said!!!

and when writing code for computers they use the alphabet because its easier and saves time.

I haven't a clue why they don't change to an alphabet, its lots less hassle.

Can you imagine trying to send a text? it would take weeks if you were pissed.

I beg to differ on that, we're all assuming there will be one or two "super powers" and basing this model on precedence since ancient Egypt and beyond.

Globalisation, mobilisation and spatial decentralisation of economies and workforces has never in these past 3000 years allowed us the opportunities that advances in technology have given us in what is less than 20 years. It's impossible to predict what changes will occur in our lifetime but we are experiencing a rate of technological development unseen since the industrial revolution so I think it's too tight to call, but I see an even more globalised economy as opposed to now, and an ever techno hungry east experiencing rapid labour cost increases.

Interestingly though, on the point of China propping up the West, a significant percentage of the US national debt is owed to the Chinese.

what gave you that impression?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4983780.stm

this government is making itself more immune from prosecution by the day..

Most nations of any size tend to have this - it's hardly a distinguishable merit..

Not much use when the white 'English first' speaking population of America will be a minority in twenty years time.. Continental Europeans are far more flexible and diverse culturally in terms of adapting to new languages, this puts us behind our neighbours..

Are you suggesting that Mandarin will become the dominant internet language? or that the USA will adopt Spanish as a first language?
Or that if either of those things came to pass that no effort would be made in the UK to teach Spanish or Mandarin?
as the world moves so will we (I hope)
How many Mandarin speakers are there in europe? more than here ? I doubt it.

The rate at which we advance could also be the thing that fucks us up. The silicone chip can only be made so small before it becomes unable to carry an electrical current. Unless we find a new material or a new way of making microchips then technology will come to a halt.

I remember reading that in Victorian times someone had forecast that cities would grind to a halt in the 20th century because the increasing amounts of horse shit in the streets would stop people moving goods about.

After the whole Esperanto debacle, I shall be leaving it until the last possible minute to learn Mandarin.