Have we crippled China for good?
At its height, the Tang and Song Dynasty was estimated to account for ~85% of global economic activity (over twice the global nominal GDP share of the British Empire and three times the global nominal GDP share of the Roman Empire at their respective peaks). Never before has the Han Chinese people lived in a dynasty that accounted for under 1/3 of global GDP.
Nowadays, China has been struggling against our backwater former colony who barely gained independence because countless other empires were bankrupting themselves to cut off our stranglehold on the New World, (who themselves account for a mere 5% of the world's population) for around a century.
Has China finally lost its economic might for good?
Even if they were in decline, it would be horribly naive to discount a 1.4 billion person, nuclear armed $14Tn economy as "crippled." The US had 40% of the world's GDP in 1960 but only something like 15% today, yet nobody would say the US is "crippled." As much as I am against the CCP, they have an advantage in long term planning that the US will never have.
If you want to look at a country that actually is truly a shell of its former self, look at Russia. Absolutely irrelevant economy other than O&G and that will decrease as the EU moves to alternative sources (France in particular gets 70% of its energy from domestic nuclear plants). Even then, everybody is freaked out about what could happen in the event Russia invades Ukraine.
LOL not really OP. China at its peak might briefly be over 2/3 of the world GDP, but most of the time, China and the rest of the word were equal. Every great Chinese dynasty had a equal counterpart in Europe or Middle East, be it the Romans, Persians, or Arabs.
That said, once the Chinese figured out how to navigate through agriculture about 2000 years ago, the population had always been the advantage, which as a result brought in economic activities, technology development, territory expansions, etc.
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