How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

Americans need to get over their view of “Asia” as being about making shoes. When I was working in engineering in the early aughts, we mocked the Chinese as being able only to copy American technology. Today, China is competitive with or ahead of America in key technology areas, including nuclear power, AI, EVs, and batteries.

We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, but four times bigger. Is that a world where “Designed by Apple in California, Made in China” still makes sense? What will be America’s competitive edge in that scenario?

What seems most likely to me in the future is that the US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now. Dominating finance and services won’t mean anything when both the IP and the physical products are being produced somewhere else.

Be careful extrapolating based on China's current population and demographics. Too much of our armchair assessments of China's velocity is based on their meteoric rise on the backs of a historically large working-age population—a population that is now rapidly aging out of the workforce with nothing to replace it thanks to the one child policy. The US's demographics aren't stellar, but they're a lot better off than most of the developed world.

It remains to be seen how different 2010's China—with 90% of the population being under 60—is from 2050's China—with only 69% of the population being under 60.

https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2050/

It’s a little more nuanced than that. Western demographics are largely propped up by immigration, which brings with it its own sociopolitical challenges. What you gain in demographics, you might lose in social cohesion and political stability.

It's a lot more nuanced than that. China's internal diversity is much higher than Westerners typically understand, and their social cohesion and political stability are less well maintained than their external-facing image would lead you to believe.

Yeah, but that’s not the same level of diversity as an atheist Frenchman and a muslim Algerian and a Christian Ivorian.

The Sichuanese might not get along with the Cantonese, but they’re ethnically the same people with a shared culture

No, they're not. The Chinese have never been especially unified until very recently and they're internally quite diverse on all the key measures of ethnicity: their languages are mutually unintelligible, their religious belief systems span the entire breadth of world religions plus a wide spectrum of home grown ones, and their value systems are very different.

One China is a convenient fiction invented by an authoritarian regime, not a day to day reality on the ground.

Westerners buy into it through some combination of propaganda (coming from the Chinese state and our own, both of which benefit from an exaggerated sense of Chinese unity) and our inability to distinguish the various ethnic groups because we're overly fixated on skin color as the primary physical marker of ethnicity.

I can't help but feel that this can be said for any country anywhere. Compare New Englanders to Southerners in the US. They are totally different, but they are still wayyy more similar than Southerners are to Cantonese.

It's easy to track differences between people around you, in your country, and very hard to track difference between people in other countries. This creates an illusion of "We are very different, and they are all the same".