笨狼發牢騷
發發牢騷，解解悶，消消愁
【感想】中國人口老化是個大問題。除此之外，作者鮮有新意。中國問題多、問題大，艱難，不一定都能解決，但能解解決。但如果說什麽都不會變，那是僵化的判斷。
不過，我倒是覺得2030年前中國就不應當想什麽跟美國爭老大之類的，沒戲。以後如何，到時再看。
“AMERICANS have a long history of worrying about their decline”完全是胡鄒，比比"Manifest Destiny"，那個是美國主流？
類似的說法多了，參見最近的兩篇：又來一“專家”揚言中國必步日後塵；華爾街日報評論：中國麵臨崩潰。
經濟學人雜誌：The end is not nigh
No other country is ready to challenge America’s dominant global position
Mar 7th 2015
書：Is the American Century Over? By Joseph Nye. Polity Press; 152 pages; $12.95 and £9.99.
“AMERICANS have a long history of worrying about their decline,” notes Joseph Nye. Puritans in 17th-century Massachusetts lamented a fall from earlier virtue. The Founding Fathers fretted that the republic they had created might dissipate like ancient Rome. Modern scholars are a gloomy lot, too. Michael Lind of the New America Foundation, a think-tank, has written that, with America’s foreign policy in a state of collapse, its economy ailing and its democracy broken, the American century ended last year.
Mr Nye, a veteran observer of global affairs, is more optimistic. He expects that America will still play the central role in the global balance of power in the 2040s. What, after all, is the alternative?
Europe is hardly a plausible challenger. Though its economy and population are larger than America’s, the old continent is stagnating. In 1900 a quarter of the world’s people were European; by 2060 that figure could be just 6%, and a third of them will be over 65.
By 2025 India will be the most populous nation on Earth. It has copious “soft power”—a term Mr Nye coined—in its diaspora and popular culture. But only 63% of Indians are literate, and none of its universities is in the global top 100. India could only eclipse America if it were to form an anti-American alliance with China, reckons Mr Nye, but that is unlikely: Indians are well-disposed towards Washington and highly suspicious of Beijing.
China is the likeliest contender to be the next hyperpower: its army is the world’s largest and its economy will soon be. (In purchasing-power-parity terms, it already is.) But it will be decades before China is as rich or technologically sophisticated as America; indeed, it may never be. By 2030 China will have more elderly dependants than children, which will sap its vitality. It has yet to figure out how to change governments peacefully. And its soft power is feeble for a country of its size. It has few real friends or allies, unless you count North Korea and Zimbabwe.
Hu Jintao, the previous president, tried to increase China’s soft power by setting up “Confucius Institutes” to teach its language and culture. Yet such a strategy is unlikely to win hearts in, say, Manila, when China is bullying the Philippines over islands in the South China Sea. The staging of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing was a soft-power success, but was undercut by the jailing of Liu Xiaobo, a pro-democracy activist, and the resulting empty chair at the ceremony to award him the Nobel peace prize. “Marketing experts call this ‘stepping on your own message’,” says Mr Nye.
Perhaps the greatest threats to American pre-eminence are domestic. As pundits often point out, young American workers score terribly on cross-country comparisons of numeracy, and Americans are disillusioned with their government. Yet even here, Mr Nye sees hope: 82% of Americans say America is the best place in the world to live. It remains a magnet for foreign talent, and could be an even stronger one if it sorted out its immigration policy. A “long Jeffersonian tradition” says that one “should not worry too much about the level of confidence in government”. Americans may grumble constantly about Washington, but the Internal Revenue Service detects no increase in cheating on taxes, and the proportion of Americans who bother to vote has risen since 2000.
“Leadership is not the same as domination,” says Mr Nye; influence matters more than military might. This short, well-argued book offers a powerful rebuttal to America’s premature obituarists.
