most Chinese wealth is concentrated 200 miles from the coast. The next 500–1,000 miles west is a land of Han Chinese living in Third World poverty. The China that most Westerners think about is the thin strip along the coast. The fact is that China is an overwhelmingly poor country with a thin veneer of prosperity.
His main point is that Chinese leaders will be more obsesssed with internal issues than with external issues.
This just raises all kinds of questions for me.
Isn’t most of the Chinese population also concentrated within 200 miles from the coast because, like Friedman said, that’s where the rain is? I think If you took out the Sichuan-Chengquing area it’d be even starker.
What percentage of Han are living 500-1000 more miles inland?
Actually, is most American wealth not concentrated within 200 miles of our coasts?
Is there a historical correlations between wealth concentration in the littoral area and external focus?
Handle, it’s about 800 miles from Beijing to Shanghai.
So 200 miles from the coast is those rich coastal provinces, and 1000 miles is approximately the size of the rainy zone.
I can’t speak for the wealth, but the Southern coastal provinces are the only provinces in which Investments are less than (Private consumption + Exports).
In other words, that factor of 4 difference between Coastal wealth and interior wealth is by dint of massive hilarious wealth extraction, and it would almost certainly “naturally” be greater than that.
Whereas in America (which admittedly has some redistribution), Kansas is not 4x poorer than New York. And most of the SouthEast has at least some coast. Moynihan’s Law of the Canadian Border overrides the law of the coasts.