Dateline: October 17 2048
It’s official, India is now the second-largest global economy. Having joined the club of economic giants in 2025 in third spot, India had a long way to go to catch China, which had four times the GDP. But India’s rise in the economic ranks has been nothing short of meteoric.
A combination of liberal democratic reforms, slashing red tape, and awakening India’s natural bent for entrepreneurship has seen the country soar like its space agency ISRO. With the internet’s biggest English-speaking community and the world’s largest workforce, India was perfectly poised to dominate the global services economy birthed by the “information age” and capitalise on the demand for virtual workers.
But it was China’s rivalry with the US that really fuelled India’s growth spurt. As the US decoupled from China, they found Indian suppliers more than willing to provide anything from car parts to custom electronics — at Asian prices. A longtime ally of America, India benefited from technology transfers and free trade agreements.
For its part, China floundered as India flourished. The triple whammy of population decline, consumer retreat and the US trade war turned the rampant growth of previous decades into economic stagnation. Faced with a declining birth rate and ageing workforce, China’s leaders desperately tried to rebalance their economy. But the heavy hand of state planning didn’t sit well with the new world order, and getting closer to Russia and Iran has not brought China much benefit other than cheap oil.
Now India has surpassed China in purchasing parity terms, according to the IMF, and the US remains the world’s largest economy since 1871.
- First published on Mindbullets October 19 2023
The Great Fall of China
China’s ghost cities stay empty as the artificial bubble bursts
Dateline: August 8 2018
It was as inevitable as China’s rise to the position of the most powerful economy in the world. Now it looks as though that title will return to the US as the “bubble economy” holds China in its debilitating grasp.
It’s déjà vu for observers from Japan, who experienced the same property bubble decades earlier, and with equally destructive social consequences. Inflation, fuel shortages and the ever-ballooning urban population conspired to create the bubble; now it has burst, and China is in financial disarray.
The irony is that China fuelled its meteoric growth with planned construction of city upon city — some unique designs, others modelled on Western examples of urban design and aesthetics. All of this construction provided jobs, contributed to output, and kept demand for raw materials at an artificially inflated level.
Simultaneously, the urban influx pushed up property values in the booming industrial centres. Shanghai and Beijing topped the list, and mortgages were easy to acquire. But no-one wanted to live in a ghost city with no jobs. Apartments and shops lining the deserted streets were overpriced and unattractive, so they stayed empty and unproductive.
Without the natural balance of supply and demand, the bubble has burst, and the most sought-after city properties are unsellable at their original prices, while bank finance has dried up. Millions of construction workers and materials suppliers look on as their businesses collapse.
After the heady pressures of growth and inflation, the government now faces the awful prospect of recession and deflation. This sort of turmoil will hurt more than national pride, as people lose their homes and livelihood — and it’s bound to boil over as people take to the streets.
- First published on Mindbullets November 3 2011
• Despite appearances to the contrary, Futureworld cannot and does not predict the future. The Mindbullets scenarios are fictitious and designed purely to explore possible futures, and challenge and stimulate strategic thinking.
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