China Becomes #1 Car Market and #1 Export Nation
Cars, cars, cars
China in 2009 overtook the United States as the world’s biggest car market (thanks, King!). It’s huge. Never in history has any country surpassed the American car market. This is great news for China, horrible news for the environment, and maybe even worse news for the world’s limited supply of fossil fuels. I’m reading a book called Green Metropolis right now, and the stat they use is that America currently uses 25% of the world’s fossil fuels. 25%! And we’re only a country of 300 million. What is going to happen when a country of 1.3 BILLION suddenly adopts American lifestyles? As a planet, we’d better find a way to stop this dependence on liquid energy. I don’t know if this is good news for us. Do they buy our cars?
In other China business news, China has just surpassed Germany to become the world’s top exporter. Again, great news for China, not so great news for…us? When are we going to start jumping onto the export market? Outside of cutting spending, there’s only one way to cut a deficit, and it’s to sell stuff to other people. What are we going to sell? Cars? I’ve got a feeling that our cars aren’t cheap enough to sell to the Chinese, and we don’t make a lot of luxury brands (although in Japan, Miller beer was supposed to be high end…go figure…). It also says in the article that China is poised to surpass Japan this year as the world’s second biggest economy.
One of the researchers seems to think it’s mostly a matter of population:
“Eventually, though I don’t expect this for another 20 years or so, the [Chinese] economy will be bigger than that of the United States,” Kroeber said. “People are just going to have to get used to these facts — and to remember that most of these facts are simply reflections of China’s enormous population, and do not in any way indicate leadership in technology, innovation or productivity.”
I don’t know about that. Sure, that statement may reflect the status quo, but our “leaders” in technology still have freedom to travel back to China, and they do.
Economically, we’re in for some interesting times…
