Sorry, I’m just speaking colloquially. I just mean the GDP has been very high for a long time now.
My common reading is that GDP is an indicator of growth. China is currently developing, so it’s GDP is going to be higher. However, at some point they will be considered developed and there will be less reason to grow and it will be more difficult to grow. So the GDP will level off. This has been the trend in capitalist countries.
Whether or not this will apply to the Chinese economy, I don’t know. But I believe this is the framework that people are using when they make this argument.
‘Developed’ by capitalist standards. They all stopped and went backwards from about the 1970s. Since then, they started measuring growth by counting nothing as something or counting some things twice. Not to mention that capitalism is crisis.
Liberal/welfare democracies didn’t stop growing because there was no room to grow. They stopped growing because the workers stopped organising and demanding infrastructure and housing, etc. They could’ve kept on growing by developing rural areas, hospitals, schools, public transport, etc. Instead, they decided to tarmac over everything and let all the bridges fall into the water.
Communists will blow right past those concepts of development and growth. Already, China is living in a different century. We’re going to need a concept of ‘post-development’ to make sense of what comes next (where we will likely see development without the capitalist notion of infinite growth).
