Yeah, it's going to come out in the next 10 years or so, 20 at most.

The question is whether the Chinese economy will take a similar trajectory now to the Japanese one in the late eighties and through the nineties, with a period of extreme growth followed by mostly stagnation.

It could very well be that the Chinese model is good at catch-up growth so to speak, up to the level of an advanced economy.

I agree with the op that the jury is out on this and it might go different ways.

> productivity growth has dramatically outpaced peer nations over the last 40 years.

and yet, are the citizens getting their fair share of said productivity growth? Or has it been obsorbed by the CCP, in which the wealth is then allocated to something that said citizen would not have chosen to allocate to?

Given that hundreds of millions of people living in it had to go outside to shit in an outhouse four decades ago, but are now living first-world and nearly first-world lifestyles, you tell me if any of that wealth made it to them.

People tolerate the CCP because of the clear material gains they have seen in their lives. If some strongman authoritarian stood with a megaphone on Main Street and credibly promised Americans one tenth of that gain in prosperity, they'd elect him dictator for life.

The same basic rags-to-richest pattern was true for most US citizens a century ago, and no we're now objectively some of the richest people in the world. But despite this progress, US politics does not indicate that the US populace is deeply satisfied. Which leads to the real question: will the CCP still be as popular when material progress plateaus?

> will the CCP still be as popular when material progress plateaus?

they know they won't be - people's demand continues to grow, and not just material wants, but "spiritual" wants (aka, they want more representation in the political system to make decisions). Of course, this only manifests after some material wealth threshold has been reached.

It's also why i conspiratorially believe that the CCP is deliberately ensuring chinese yuan is continuously debased, and kept artificially low. It ensures that the people's wealth in general is not high enough to reach that threshold i mentioned above.

I mean, the USA has enjoyed more than 40 years of prosperity, so if that's the cutoff, the winner is already decided for some time.

I wanted to give China a chance, but if you don't... :)